My 10 Favorite Westerns….
On the request of Jim Coudal (whom I'd like to meet someday) and following the canonical Daring Fireball, my 10 favorite western movies are, in order…
Unforgiven, The Last Picture Show, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, High Noon, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Wild Bunch, No Country for Old Men, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Cat Ballou.
Conclusions? I like revisions of the genre rather than embodiments of it. Unforgiven is rightfully seen as the movie Eastwood only could have made in late middle age, a meditation on regret and the nightmares of a violent past. Last Picture Show asks "what if the frontier wasn't an opportunity but a dead end?" High Noon, Mrs Miller, and No Country, each more than 20 years apart from one another, all say that the town the hero normally saves deserves what it has coming. No Country for Old Men suggest "the town" might be the doomed entirety of America.
Is the Western America's herioc quest or is Acteonic tragedy? Probably both.
I came to westerns late. Don't know the famous lines, the legendary duels. I fed at the bratty trough of Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpaw instead of John Ford and Raul Walsh. The western was equal parts dated and iconic before I was born. I entered it from the back porch and will need to find my way to the parlor someday, navigating from backfield to farmhouse, from footnote to source.