The 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
If any eight words could sum up the best Western movies in their entirety, it’s those from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” At times misunderstood, at times marginalized, at times written off by Hollywood as less than bankable even following periods of extraordinary success, the Western is nonetheless the most enduring genre in the history of American movies. Assembling IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time resulted in movies appearing there that represent every single decade since the turn of the last century: The earliest film on the list is from 1903 and the most recent from 2023, with movies from five continents represented.
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That endurance is not just because of sagebrush and spurs and cowboy hats and horses and train robberies and six-shooters, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. It’s because the best Western movies — whether modern Westerns or those made a century ago — are unparalleled vehicles for ideas about what America is, what it represents, how it was founded, and all the hypocrisies and contradictions and agreed-upon myths therein. Ideas so powerful they inspired reflection among filmmakers from other nations using that cinematic grammar about what their own cultures’ say about themselves too. (The Soviet bloc even made a series of “Osterns” using the imagery of the Western, sometimes displaced to the steppes of Central Asia, to tell their own stories about themselves.) Even unintentionally on many occasions, this is a genre that looks, more than any other, dead-on at race, gender, capitalism, environmentalism, colonialism, and the deepest question of all: Who are you really when there’s no or little authority hanging over you to mediate your behavior? When you don’t have all the creature comforts of civilization? What would you become?
Is that, deep down, who you are already?
That’s why, even though the Western is the ultimate American genre, the ultimate lens through which to examine America, it can even transcend it’s American-ness. Because above all: The Western is a genre about why people are the way that they are. And the many myths we tell ourselves about who we’d like to think we are.
In 1894, at his studio in New Jersey, Thomas Edison made short “actuality” films featuring stars of the touring “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show, such as Annie Oakley. 130 years later, the genre continues with Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga.” But even before those Edison shorts, Buffalo Bill’s traveling show had been touring the country for over a decade peddling its vision of what the Old West was like… as the Old West was actually happening. Mythmaking about the Old West was happening from the very start — there was a book written about Buffalo Bill in 1869 — simply because, more than anything, America loves to tell stories about itself. An obsession that Hollywood would deepen even so much more.
The Western, as an idea, as a vehicle for other ideas, was so potent that the rest of the world then picked it up. John Ford, as essential a driver of creating an idea of what America is as anyone ever was, influenced Akira Kurosawa, who found a grammar all his own to tell stories about Japan that, when you squint, look a bit like the Western. They’re distinctly not, of course, instead rooted in the traditions of jidaigeki, but Kurosawa’s films influenced Italy’s stunning explosion of Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s that brought an entirely different lens to the genre. A number of Spaghetti Westerns are on IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time, as is a Korean Western set in 1930s Manchuria, an Australian Western, and a couple of South American Westerns.
Assembling IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time resulted in a dawning awareness of the genre’s elasticity: There’s a sci-fi Western serial (doubling as a “singing cowboy” saga) in 1935’s “The Phantom Empire” that paved the way for “Nope.” There are avant-garde short-film takes on the Western, such as Carroll Ballard’s “Rodeo.” There are Westerns set at the time of those films’ actual release, such as “Paris, Texas,” that nonetheless feature journey and reunion motifs central to films set 100 years earlier. There’s the fact that, as much as Black experiences in the Old West have been marginalized by Hollywood (even though around a third of all cowboys in the Old West were Black) there have been many more Black Westerns than are typically acknowledged by the canon today — and that it’s on us now in the present to appreciate what those films have offered. And there’s the realization of iconoclastic, even form-busting, storytelling elements we’ve taken for granted in canonical classics: Which is to say, paraphrasing Robin Wood, that if you don’t love “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” in “Rio Bravo,” you don’t love movies.
Read on and enjoy, pardner.
This Top 100 Westerns list is a living document and will be added to over time to go beyond 100. With editorial contributions from Tom Brueggemann, Bill Desowitz, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Marya E. Gates, Jim Hemphill, Ryan Lattanzio, Tony Maglio, Tambay Obenson, Harrison Richlin, Sarah Shachat, Anne Thompson, Brian Welk, and Christian Zilko.
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