MONSTROUS QUESTION:  WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE WESTERN?
(Monstrous Question created by Michael Arruda)

Tonight’s MONSTROUS QUESTION comes from L.L. SOARES.

Since there’s been a decent number of a westerns released in the past few years, including this summer’s COWBOYS AND ALIENS, L.L. thought that our readers might like to know what our favorite westerns were, and so he asked his illustrious panel of writers, including himself, to weigh in on the subject.

Our panel responds:

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L.L. SOARES: 

Since I came up with the question, I’ll answer this one first for a change.

What’s my favorite western? This is an easy one. I’m a hardcore fan of director Sam Peckinpah, and, as far as I’m concerned, he directed the best western ever made with 1969’s THE WILD BUNCH.  Peckinpah had done other westerns before, including the classic RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962).  But THE WILD BUNCH was something else entirely. It was a game changer. Not only did it deal with a more melancholic view of the west—in THE WILD BUNCH, the old west as we know it is winding down and the “heroes” are a bunch of aging outlaws who want to pull off one last job and then retire—  but  there’s no clear-cut hero, since they’re all pretty much anti-heroes, and it also ushered in a more explicit level of violence than westerns had ever seen before. The gory ending of THE WILD BUNCH was as much of a shock to the system of its time as the bloody shoot-em-up at the end of Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967). These movies ushered in the wild and wooly cinema of the 1970s, when” anything goes.”

The cast is chock full of amazing actors, from 1950s leading men like William Holden and Robert Ryan to top-notch character actors like Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Strother Martin, Edmund O’Brien, and Peckinpah mainstay Warren Oates. For a potent shot of rye from the wild west, you can’t do much better than this.

A close second is John Ford’s 1956 classic, THE SEARCHERS, starring John Wayne hisownself, Jeffrey Hunter and a young Natalie Wood.  Ford might just have been the most iconic western director of all time, and THE SEARCHERS comes toward the end of his career. Both he and Wayne had made a lot of westerns before this, but none has the pure gut punch THE SEARCHERS gives you. Indian Hunter Ethan Edwards might just be the darkest character Wayne ever played (and he’s such an anti-hero, he would have been at home in a Peckinpah film), and the ending is cinema at its finest. When I was a kid, I wasn’t much of a John Wayne fan, and he kind of grew on me as an adult. THE SEARCHERS is his finest moment.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

THE “SPAGHETTI WESTERNS” that Clint Eastwood did with director Sergio Leone in the 1960s—Their trilogy together, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965), and THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY  (1966) not only made Eastwood an international star, but they injected new, vibrant blood into a mostly stagnant genre and made westerns exciting again.

Monte Hellman’s westerns: RIDE THE WHIRLWIND (1965) starring Cameron Mitchell and a young Jack Nicholson (in one of his early leading roles) and THE SHOOTING (1968) starring Nicholson and the great Warren Oates—two low-budget, meditative westerns that kind of transcend the genre.

© Answer copyright 2011 by L.L. Soares

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Tune in next time for another response!