More Westerns

The Spectator's film critic doesn't like westerns. She wrote this week: "I didn't go to see the Ceon brothers' remake if True Grit because I couldn't get excited about it and don't like westerns anyhow." Is it a male thing? Do we see ourselves as the hero, the one in the white hat sitting on the white horse, gunning down the one in the black hat (and waistcoat and unshaven jowl) with the black horse? Maybe. Maybe we haven't grown up but still dream like kids of riding the range and saving good folks from villains.
Here's my other five favourite westerns.
THE GUNFIGHTER: A Henry King film with Gregory Peck. David Thomson, the film guru, said that King only made two good films, this and "Twelve O'clock High" (which has one of the finest openings to a film ever). Peck plays a gunfighter who is getting on in years and wants to settle down, not gun-fight; but he keeps getting challenged by young bucks who he has to kill to stay alive himself. Until.... Sad ending.
THE SEARCHERS: Saw this one twice in the same week when it first came out. John Wayne's best film and possibly John Ford's best film too. Many times I've said, when the film is on TV, "I'm just going to see the opening twenty minutes, that's all" and I find I'm stuck there to the end. Great film.
RED RIVER: The best western that Howard Hawkes made (including "The Outlaw"); better than the late Rio films. Wayne again with Montgomery Clift, both fine performances. A western on a big scale with thousands of cattle being driven across country - fist fights, gun fights - the lot.
WINCHESTER 73: The first and best of the films in which James Stewart collaborated with Anthony Mann.
RANCHO NOTORIOUS: A liked this film a lot. It was directed by Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang? The man who directed Metropolis and M? The very one. What's he doing directing a western? Well, he came from Germany to America and settled into making all sorts of exctiting films there: "Man Hunt", "The Woman in the Window", "The Big Heat" and a couple of westerns. This one had that fine actor Arthur Kennedy who never really made it as a star but everything he did had class. And, of course, it also had Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich in a western? Well she'd already made "Destry Rides Again" hadn't she..... "See what the boys in the back room will have and tell them that I'll have the same".
Perhaps I should have mentioned "The Big Country" instead; or "Stagecoach".