Ain't gonna hang no picture frame (Top 10 Westerns)

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 22:01:02 GMT

About a month ago I accidentally ran into a Twitter film poll of top ten westerns and I thought “Why not?” and this is what I posted:

The Searchers
Two Road Together
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Red River
The Wild Bunch
For A Few Dollars More
Day Of The Outlaw
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Seven Men From Now
I Shot Jesse James

Btw, when I saw McCabe in its first run it didn't occur to me to think of it as a western at all, either revisionist or otherwise, and honestly I still don't; but the snowbound showdown is so intense and so emotionally similar to the snowbound final third of Day Of The Outlaw – which is unquestionably a western – that I included both. And both endings redeem what was up to then too much wise-ass-ness in McCabe and too much clumsiness in Outlaw.

(Okay, I'm being too glib. McCabe came in w/ a puff of air that the film deliberately pricked and then built him up again as a man in desperate circumstances; Day got the Robert Ryan character to get over himself. Still, some of the puffs and prickery and self-involvement were the films', not just the characters'; of course as usual in Altman lots of the bullshit is really funny, too.)

This being a top ten it's not that representative of my general bread-and-butter taste, which tends more towards bread-and-butter oaters (Day, Seven, and Shot, for instance). Whereas I surprised myself with how top-heavy w/ A-list and A-list spaghetti this is.

I've only ever seen the last 25 minutes of I Shot Jesse James, actually. I misread the start time on the film program. And that was 47 years ago! Still, I'll stand by my memory of gigantic close-ups facing off against other gigantic close-ups almost as if it's Eisenstein but w/ the visceral naïve force of Sam Fuller, magnified.

Here's my tweet – and also here's the link for my old Sight and Sound/BFI post 'cause of its real good discussion of westerns with Dave and Mark on the comment thread.

P.S. A couple that I've never seen that keep showing up on people's ballots are Meek's Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt) and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik)

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Second fiddle, creepy violin, sidekicks, electric punks

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Frank Kogan

Ain't gonna hang no picture frame (Top 10 Westerns)

Second fiddle, creepy violin, sidekicks, electric punks