10 Horse Operas to Live Your Life By
October 3, 2006
Ten Horse Operas to Live Your Life By:
10. Winchester ’73 (’50): The first, and best, of five westerns directed by Anthony Mann starring James Stewart in what was arguably the best decade of his famed career. Look for a young Shelly Winters as the dame with one of the screen’s best fictional names, Lola Manners.
9. The Ox Bow Incident (’43): Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews in a studio bound morality tale from director William A. Wellman about a rabid posse and the evils of mob justice. A companion piece to Fonda’s legendary performance in “Twelve Angry Men” 14 years later.
8. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (’66): The final film in Sergio Leone’s classic Man Without a Name trilogy starring Clint Eastwood and featuring some of the most stunning wide-screen photography, not to mention intensely personal close-ups, of all time. Ennio Morricone’s slightly comical score is one for the ages.
7. Stagecoach (’39): John Wayne in his star turn as The Ringo Kid, ushered in by his most famous of collaborators, John Ford. The two would go on to create a canon of films together that rivals any star-director pairing in film history, but this was the first, and still arguably the most exciting of the bunch.
6. High Noon (’52): Gary Cooper, tall, dark, handsome, heroic, standing alone to face Frank Miller when everybody in town, including his best friend and former lover, abandons him in his hour of need. Cooper won his Oscar for this performance, the All American hero who throws down his tin star at the end of the film, sickened by it all, as much a commentary on the congressional Communist witch hunts of the ‘40s and ‘50’s as it was your simple Western study in singular heroism.
5. My Darling Clementine (’46): Many have played Wyatt Earp in the long history of the filmed horse opera, but nobody has gotten it as sympathetically right as Henry Fonda in this all time great from John Ford. Equaling Fonda is Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, a dying vigilante with a soft side for the artistic beauty of a good Shakespearian monologue, something sorely lacking in the gin mills and flop houses of the old west.
4. Red River (’48): John Wayne and a young Montgomery Clift coming to blows on an epic cattle drive for director Howard Hawks. Cowboys, cattle, fistfights, horses, fireside chats, Indians, and Walter Brennan, this legendary dust drama has it all, and it never gets old.
3. Unforgiven (’92): The premise is simple for this Clint Eastwood directed gem; a prostitute is cut up beyond recognition by a no good drunkard and a bounty is sought by the girl’s fellow workers, prompting retired gunslinger Eastwood and his partner, Morgan Freeman, to enact vengeance on the cowboy in the name of vigilante justice. The premise may be simple, but the execution is anything but, and what we get out of it all is a stark, depressing anti-western that says more about the treatment of women in the 19th century (and the classic western), and the history of screen violence for entertainment’s sake, than anything else has in the last three decades. A monumental achievement for Eastwood, an iconic American institution.
2. Seven Samurai (’54): Don’t grumble at me and say that this Japanese epic from Akira Kurosawa isn’t really a western, because what symbolizes the western more than a self contained group of good guys protecting a destitute village from oncoming bad guys, at all costs? Kurosawa’s two great leading men, Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, star as the leaders of a band of wandering samurai who take up the task of defending a small village from a pack of bandits hovering just beyond the outer hills of the valley. Famed as much for it’s brilliant story and acting as it is for it’s revolutionary use of sound design and non-formulaic action cutting (a Kurosawa trademark that would essentially change the way we view action films today), “Seven Samurai” is revisionist filmmaking of the highest order by this greatest of all directors. Recently re-released by the Criterion Collection on a must have three-disk DVD special edition that is as epic, and impressive, as the masterpiece it contains.
1. The Searchers (’56): The crowning achievement of the Wayne-Ford cannon, this road film, about an embittered ex war general who goes on a cross country hunt to find a niece that was kidnapped by a Comanche chief, “The Searchers” explores what most typically “classic” western films never dared to, the inherent racism involved in your nominal cowboys and Indians tale. Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is at times a despicably hate filled man, suggesting at one point that he’d rather see the girl dead than covered in Indian head dresses and speaking the native tongue, making the character the most conflicted “hero” of his long career, a stark contrast to the almost godlike likeability of The Ringo Kid 17 years earlier. In one of the most beautiful, and justly famous final shots of all time, Ford frames his derisive leading man in a pure black doorframe against the red dirt of Monument Valley, slowly walking away from the audience, and his closest family before the door slams shut, effectively ending what is widely regarded as the single most important film in the western genre. I can’t deny that claim, but I can go one step further and say, barring “Citizen Kane”, “Casablanca”, or “Gone With the Wind”, this is the Great American Movie, and rightly deserves every hyperbolic praise-filled phrase you can conjure up to describe such a towering work of cinematic art.
by Adam Suraf