David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

The results for our best Western were more chaotic than our contest to pick the best award for political dissembling; that was the Distinguished Lying Cross as you may recall. So, in my role as ultimate arbiter of taste and culture, I will now take a dally around the pommel, lean back in the saddle, and settle this here argument.

Best Western: Unforgiven
In a league by itself.

Almost Best: The Searchers
Done in by historical inaccuracies, but  a masterpiece nonetheless.

Honorable Mention: High Noon
Brought down by silly gunfight, but has best song. Grace Kelly is the best-looking newlywed ever to shoot a bad guy through a pane of glass.

Honorable Mention: Shane
Raised high by the unforgettable Jack Palance, marred by Alan Ladd's spotless buckskin outfit.

Honorable Mention: The Gunfighter
Great Gregory Peck, and way ahead of its time.

Honorable Mention: Tombstone
What Jack Palance did for Shane, Val Kilmer does for this one. The gunfighting has a fair amount of b.s. in it, but is saved by "You're a daisy if you do."

Honorable Mention: Ulzana's Raid
Bert Lancaster at his best. Great script, and some very disturbing questions raised.

Worst Movie from a Great Book: The Shootist
John Wayne deserved better for his last picture. The book, by Glendon Swarthout, is possibly the best Western novel ever written. Read it, then see the movie, and you'll see what I mean.

Western that Ruins All Other Westerns: Blazing Saddles
Mel Brooks couldn't make it today.

It occurred to me that we need a contest for best Western movie, so here are the criteria for your nominations:

*Only one nomination per blogger. This will create some painful decisions.

*Authenticity. Clothes, guns, etc. The HBO series Deadwood would get very high marks here. The Searchers, great as it is, would do poorly.

*Qualities as a movie.

*Reality of gunfights

My own selection is The Culpepper Cattle Company, a low-budget, no-star 1970s masterpiece filled with chaotic violence, death, and viciousness. You can practically smell the cow flop.

Go to it.

What follows is not my original thinking. I read something like it years and years ago. Apologies to whomever's thought I am borrowing.

One of the staple plots of the Western movie is the town that is held hostage by bad guys, the classic example being High Noon. In this 1951 classic, an entire town collectively wets itself because a bad guy named Frank Miller and two equally bad friends are coming to settle old scores with Marshall Will Kane. Kane can't get anyone to help him, and surivives only because he is played by Gary Cooper, who can't get killed off in the end.

Being a child of the 1950s, I absorbed a fatal dose of both movie and TV westerns, and what I learned from them was that every living soul in the Old West used the Colt Model 1873 Army revolver and the Winchester Model 92 or 94 lever-action rifle (which was a neat trick, as both these guns were invented when the Old West was history).

I saw the original version of this movie when it came out in 1957, and remember it mostly as Glenn Ford and Van Heflin sitting in a hotel room talking, and thinking For God's sake shut up and somebody shoot somebody.

In this remake, plenty of people get shot. It is, however, a dopey movie, filled with lapses in logic and a script that tries for profundity and fails. It has plenty of Old Western Funk, and people carry Old Western guns like Colt 1860 Army revolvers converted to cartridge use, and Smith & Wesson Schofields, and Sharps, and Spencer carbines. But there are some lamentable lapses in authenticity.