Favorite Westerns?

[Oblivion138]

Any western directed by Sergio Leone
Django
Dead Man
High Noon
The Searchers
The Wild Bunch
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
3:10 to Yuma (both versions, though I lean toward the more recent one)
True Grit (much prefer the Coen Brothers' adaptation)
Unforgiven
Tombstone
The Proposition
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (more of an Existentialist character study than a traditional western)

Some of those are not at all suitable for family viewing, however. The classic Hollywood westerns (High Noon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, etc.) are clean. Leone's spaghetti westerns introduced much harder violence, and that facet has pretty much stuck in modern westerns. Django is certainly quite violent. Peckinpah's westerns (Wild Bunch, in particular) thrive on major displays of violence. The Proposition is probably the most violent film on my list, and also features characters who are rapists. A great, great film, but not something you'd want to watch with the kids. As for the new True Grit, which I loved, I was actually pretty shocked at how violent it was, considering its PG-13 rating. It felt R-rated to me.

And depending on your attention span, a lot of these films could potentially be considered boring. Leone's later films, in particular, move at their own pace, and are alternately viewed as mesmerizing or boring. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has also been criticized for its slow pace and long runtime.

Originally Posted by painted_klown

There is a film titled "Sukiyaki Western Django" out on BD and I am curious about it as well. I assume it is sort of an homage to the original Django film. Either way, I need to get the original film so I have a baseline for comparison when I watch the others.

SWD is a fun flick, in my estimation. Since the spaghetti westerns had their roots in the Japanese samurai films of Akira Kurosawa (A Fistful of Dollars is essentially a scene-for-scene remake of Yojimbo), it was cool to see a talented Japanese director like Takashi Miike bring the genre back to Japan.