What's you favorite western?
By burrito88
@burrito88 (2774)
United States
October 21, 2011 12:19am CST
I tend to like sci fi movies but there seem to be few real good ones so sometimes I like to watch a good western. For the relatively new westerns, I liked Silverado which admittedly is getting a bit old now. Classic westerns are how I got to see and appreciate actors like James Stewart and Henry Fonda.
One reason I've tried to start this discussion is that one of the movies I considered a classic western is High Noon with Gary Cooper. Cooper plays the sheriff of a small town. Word comes one day that a bad guy he sent to prison is getting out and coming to gun for him. Most of the movie deals with Cooper trying to find deputies to help him against the bad guy and his gang, which consists of 3 guys who spend all their time waiting at the train station for their leader to arrive. In the end nobody comes to Cooper's aid. The few guys who volunteer to help, chicken out when they find out nobody else is volunteering. The worst case was the deputy, played by Lloyd Bridges who resigns. Even Cooper's wife (played by Grace, later Princess Grace, Kelley) is ready to desert him for defending a town that won't help him. The end of the movie comes with the big gunfight at High Noon.
I thought and still think this was a great movie and Gary Cooper won the best actor Oscar for his role. Recently I read that John Wayne felt High Noon was the worst western movie ever made. Part of his reasoning was that one of the screen writers was a former member of the communist and was black listed for not naming other members in a congressional hearing. (The writer had also left the party 10 years earlier.) By making the sheriff not have the backing of the town, he felt the writer was speaking about his own plight with many people turning their back on him. The last bit of irony though, is that Cooper, like many others involve with the film was an anti-communist. When he won the Academy Award he had an ulcer and could not attend the ceremony to accept the award. The person he asked to fill in for him was ...... John Wayne.
Well what westerns do you like and you don't have to feel that you need to go into the same detail that I did.
1 person likes this
8 responses
@ElicBxn (63643)
• United States
21 Oct 11
ya know, in some ways the worst they were, the better I liked them... nothing beat a good old Roy Rogers' movie where the good guys on horses caught the bad guys in cars - what a SCREAM!
All right, seriously... The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance... I honestly can't really remember the whole movie, but I remember liking it every time I saw it...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056217/
Honestly, I liked Back to the Future III best of all! had westerns AND science fiction (my favorite kind of SF - TIME TRAVEL!!!) in it!
1 person likes this
@burrito88 (2774)
• United States
21 Oct 11
Roy Rogers horses with cars. And Pat Brady's jeep Nellybelle. But how about the old Sky King show? That was cowboys with airplanes.
1 person likes this
@cluznar (17)
• United States
23 Oct 11
I like your choices for favorite westerns, but there are so many good ones. Some of my favorites are True Grit with John Wayne, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Maverick (1994), The Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Tombstone, Dances With Wolves, Jeremiah Johnson, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Little Big Man, Hombre, Geronimo an American Legend, 3:10 To Yuma (2007), these are all excellent westerns but my favorite might be "Wild Bill" with Jeff Bridges.
@Keola12 (823)
• United States
23 Oct 11
My favorite western movie is the original version of the movie True Grit, starring John Wayne. I love it, because it is heartfelt and powerful, and John Wayne was a magnificent actor. This was his best performance of his career. He also won an Academy Award for the role he played in this movie.
@burrito88 (2774)
• United States
23 Oct 11
John Wayne was a great actor but for the most part he fell into a kind of trap that many actors do. He basically started playing himself over and over again. The same thing could pretty much be said for Jack Nicholson today. The thing about True Grit was that it was pretty much John Wayne playing out of character. Not playing himself is what made that role worthy of an Oscar. I thought the Shootist was also pretty good. It showed Wayne as an old gunfighter who was dying. That was Wayne's last movie and I think everybody know he wouldn't be around much longer. The Shootist also paired Wayne with Jimmy Stewart, his co-star from Liberty Valance and young Ron Howard.
@thedailyclick (3017)
•
21 Oct 11
“High Noon” is undeniably a classic and a movie which has a wonderful hidden depth. To be honest I am such a fan of westerns that I like classics such as “How the West was Won” and then equally enjoy smaller westerns such as “Gunsmoke”. And it doesn’t have to be old westerns either as two of the most interesting “Seraphim Falls” and “The Proposition” are good modern westerns.
But I must admit I like westerns which have the classic western actors in such as Fonda, Stewart, Wayne, Widmark and Cooper as well as the Eastwood westerns. An interesting western which I watched recently was “The Gunfighter” with Gregory Peck as it looks at the cursed life of a notorious gunfighter, how they can never settle as someone is always trying to prove themselves better than them. If you haven’t seen it is well worth getting.
@burrito88 (2774)
• United States
21 Oct 11
The Gunfighter where Gregory Peck normally the good guy takes on the role of a good guy that fate or whatever turned into a bad guy. John Wayne's The Shootist was kind of a similar movie although it looked at the gunfighter when he's old and dying.
I recently saw another classic Gregory Peck western movie The Big Country. Peck plays a sort of tenderfoot Easterner (a wealthy retired sea captain) who gets caught up in a war between two big ranchers. Early on Peck looks like a coward because he backs down from confrontations first with Chuck Connors and later with Charleton Heston. We find out later though that there's more to him than what's on the surface. The end of the movie seems a little strange for the period (late 50's) and seems to be a statement about the pointlessness of war, even a range war. In the end Peck's character seems to show that some battles are worth fighting while others aren't.
(Until I saw Big Country my only connection with the movie was from an early Yes album where they took a portion of the theme music from the movie and incorpated it into their version of Richie Havens song, "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed".)
Gunsmoke was a great TV show that gradually morphed over the years. It started by being mostly about Marshall Dillon but later started to showcase the co-stars more. Toward the latter years, the show in many cases started to revolve around the guest stars more than the shows regular cast. One note about the show, there is some talk that the show was intended to star John Wayne but he refused to do it. That may or may not be true but he did recommend James Arness to the producers and also had to convince Arness that doing the show would be a good career move. Wayne's involvement with the start of the show was evident in the first episode where he filmed an introduction for the show and spoke highly of Arness. That intro is still shown when that show is rerun on TV.
@insanealan (191)
• India
21 Oct 11
I'm a great fan of Clint Eastwood and his western movies..The movies that came first into my mind is the dollar trilogy directed by Sergio Leone-- A fistful of dollars,For a few dollars more , The good bad and ugly... The movies like Unforgiven, Dances with wolves and once upon a time in west is also my favourite..
@burrito88 (2774)
• United States
21 Oct 11
I also like Eastwood and most of his movies. The Italian westerns with Eastwood playing 'the Man with No Name' established him as a star more so than his role on Rawhide(TV) which he hated. What's interesting though is that Eastwood was not the actor they originally wanted for those movies. Actors they tried for but who turned them down were Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Steve Reeves (of the Hercules movies), Ty Hardin (TV's Bronco), and even Eric Fleming (who played the trail boss on Rawhide). Another thing about Eastwood, he was not the first choice to play Dirty Harry. It was supposed to be Frank Sinatra and then they tried for John Wayne but he thought the script was 'too violent'. It's amazing how different things could have been.
One somewhat strange movie of Eastwood's that I liked was "Space Cowboys". My reason for that is more that it paired Eastwood with James Garner. Before they got famous they were friends who used to pal around in bars waiting for their big break. Garner's came first when he was hired to play Maverick on TV. Two years after the show came on, Eastwood had a notable role as a 'bad guy' who deliberately kept mispronouncing Maverick's name as Maverike. Also, when they had a show on TV where Garner was given a lifetime achievement award, one of the people they showed smiling in the audience was Clint. I like things like that.
@hpismyantidrug (57)
• United States
23 Oct 11
I, unfortunately, haven't seen very many westerns. I know I have in my time, but none that I can really remember at this second. I did, however, recently see the remake of True Grit. I have never seen the original, although I want to now, but the remake was excellent!
The reason this post caught my eye was that you started off saying that you tend to like sci-fi movies (which are my favorite)...then you went into liking westerns. It made me think of the movie Cowboys & Aliens which was recently in the theater. I was just wondering if you had seen that, and what your thoughts were if you had?
It got a pretty bad rap with the critics. I couldn't figure out why they would be bashing it. It had some really good actors in it...Harrison Ford, Oliva Wilde, Daniel Craig... Plus, it was a completely original concept...at least as far as I am aware. Sci-fi aliens meet the cowboys and indians of the old west?! Heck yeah, I wanted to see it! I personally thought it was an excellent movie! When I found out why the aliens had come to earth, I thought it was a little over the top, and cheesy, but other than that...I really enjoyed it :)
@sassygirlanne007 (4517)
• United States
22 Oct 11
I haven't seen many western's but my favorite one would have to be Blazing Saddles, its more of a comedy western but its rather funny.
@sassygirlanne007 (4517)
• United States
22 Oct 11
I haven't seen many western's but my favorite one would have to be Blazing Saddles, its more of a comedy western but its rather funny.
