timeandtide fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Oct 20, 2008

• Stagecoach (1939). Probably the classic Western, and one of the greatest films ever made. This is one of those films that reams and reams of critical analysis can (and have) been written about, and I'll make no attempt to get into it here. Suffice it to say that this film is nearly an encyclopedia of the Western: the setting, the narrative grammar, the archetypal characters, and so on. Understand Stagecoach and you understand the studio era Western.
  
• My Darling Clementine (1946). John Ford made a lot of Westerns, and while they're all worth consideration individually they're most important, I think, collectively as they define much of the language and mythology of film---certainly of American popular film through the studio era. That said, My Darling Clementine is interesting in what Ford does differently here than elsewhere in his oeuvre. This is probably the lightest of Ford's Westerns, and manages to be the best film about the gunfight at the OK Corral and the film that seems to be the least concerned about it. I think what we're really seeing in the film is Ford's vision of a (most would argue fictional) utopian ideal embodied in the American West. Most Westerns (Ford's included) were about resourceful and hard-fisted men carving a future out for themselves (usually out of the American Indian). My Darling Clementine is less about this than the rustic ideal that they're striving for.
  
• Red River (1948). There's this story, probably apocryphal, that John Ford watched John Wayne's performance in Red River and told director Howard Hawks `I never knew he could act'. That's a great line even if not true, and I think it actually says more about Hawks' direction than Wayne's acting. This is one of the great Westerns. Like Stagecoach, it encapsulates nearly everything that can be said about a particular sort of Western film.
  
• High Noon (1952). One of the most important Westerns and, arguably, films ever made. The tropes it establishes are so familiar now that they're almost transparent to us but were inflammatory enough at the time that films were made as angry responses to the moral universe the film presents. The scandalous suggestion made by the film? That good, honest townsfolk might take expediency and safety over pure righteousness, and therefore side with a bunch of dangerous bandits over an aging sheriff. This is another Western about which much can be written, but I'll confine myself to just saying that this is one of the great films.
  
• Shane (1953). This is one of the most interestingly inflected of the classic studio Westerns. This is by no means a revisionist Western: there are literal white hats and black hats, and the invocation (if not enunciation) of Ye Olde Code of the West. But there's also a sort of ambivalence toward the heroic myth of the Western that also remains unenunciated but which is nevertheless the film's most striking feature.
  
• The Searchers (1956). One of John Ford's most problematic Westerns; made near the end of the era of the classic studio Western, this is one of the last mainstream films to portray the heroic White Man fighting tooth and nail against the bloodthirsty redskins. That said, the center of the film is a story of personal obsession, and John Wayne handles it surprisingly well. Wayne was not much of a character actor, and Ford didn't really have much use for characters' nuanced inner struggles. A standount in many ways.
  
• Django (1966). Probably the most memorable and influential of the non-Leone `spaghetti Westerns'. But where Leone transcends the genre tropes to make classic films, director Sergio Corbucci here wallows in them. This is explotation cinema at its loudy, bloody, and ludicrous best.
  
• Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966), a.k.a. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. You already said you've seen the Man With No Name films, but I'm including it anyway in case someone else sees the list and need the recommendation. One of the great films, with the iconic score by Morricone and some of Leone's most striking direction. Contains the best gunslingin' showdown ever set on film.
  
• Se Sei Vivo Spara (1967) (1967), a.k.a. Djago Kill... If You Live, Shoot!. My favourite of the Django films, and a strong contender for the best Western title ever. This is another Italian `spaghetti Western' full of stylistic and dramatic excesses.
  
• C'era una volta il West (1968), a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West. Less well-known than Leone's Man With No Name films, this is the most consciously revisionist of Leone's Westerns and some think his best.
  
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Another iconic Western. Like so most of the Westerns of the period, this was really a revisionist Western, although not revisionist in the sense that Leone's or Peckinpah's Westerns are. I think we can be permitted in reading a bit of Vietnam into the story of young, optimistic, and enterprising Americans being unable to escape inevitable defeat in a foreign land. Most of the film is much lighter than most revisionist Westerns, which I think is the reason we remember so well the grim and iconic ending.
  
• The Wild Bunch (1969). Peckinpah's most influential film. I won't get into discussing it's importance here. The sensational violence that was its most remarkable feature when it was originally released seems less over-the-top today, but is still striking. It remains as much of a paen of utter bitterness as it ever was.
  

h_double fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Oct 26, 2008

We Are Citizen fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Oct 27, 2008

• You don't seem to know what an exploitation film is
  
• You don't seem to know what sort of films John Ford made
  
• You don't seem to know what sort of films Sergio Leone made