This film and Tombstone are the GOAT of westerns!
Any others that you think are just as good?
shareTo me, these two films seem more like tributes to the western genre than actual westerns. They seem... I guess, self conscious is the best way to describe it. Of course, I do like them, and I prefer them greatly to more recent westerns that seem to have been informed more by video games than old western movies and history of the actual west.
shareI see what you mean about the two I picked. They are a lot different than say, The good, the bad and the ugly which is another favorite. People seem to love the game Red Dead Redemption a lot and I'm sure that it inspired more current directors who wanted to bank off of its appeal with millennials and Gen Z so you are probably right about that also.
shareMy favorite westerns come from the mid-60s to early 70s. Some of the ones I like the best are The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Little Big Man and Ulzana's Raid. I also have a thing for the big technicolor widescreen epics of the 1960s like How the West Was Won, Custer of the West (despite the many inaccuracies) McKenna's Gold and even the comedy The Hallelujah Trail is a good example of that subgenre. A western I really love that most people either do not know or dismiss is El Condor, starring Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef. I could watch that over and over.
I am really grateful to Rockstar for Red Dead Redemption and all the renewed interest it has brought to my favorite genre.
Of those films you listed I have seen The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man and How the West was Won, all of which I really enjoyed. I'll have to look up the others. I usually don't dismiss many films because they are stories and to me anything can happen in a story. Western stories are like American mythology to me, you know how every culture has their myths like the Norse with Odin and Thor and the Greeks with Zeus. They are our tall tails, there is something so fun about that.
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