10 Best Revisionist Westerns Of All Time, Ranked

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The Western is America's quintessential, foundational text, shaping our myths and legends about the country's formation into dramatic, romantic stories of heroic quests across a frontier on the verge of full settlement. Mysterious drifters dispense uncompromising justice; retired lawmen are forced to pick up their six-shooters one last time; a high-noon stand-off maintains order as our still-standing hero rides off as the sun sets on a boundless landscape full of more stories to tell.

Plenty of those tropes come from the more classical ideas of the Western, movies like "Stagecoach," "Shane," and "High Noon" (three movies that are on our list of the greatest Westerns of all time) that feature clear-cut morality and easy-to-root-for protagonists. Those films are excellent fantasies, but revisionist Westerns are where reality sets in. The stories we're told about those wild western days are demythologized before our very eyes, revealing the foundations of corruption and violence on which America was founded. For this list, we're looking at the best of the best of the Westerns that get to the true heart of the American spirit.

Here are 10 of the best revisionist Westerns of all time, ranked.

Nicholas Ray's "Johnny Guitar" looks like nothing else in the genre, before or since. It's a delirious, stylized melodrama shot in gaudy Trucolor that swaps the Western's usual gun-slinging rivalries for a feud between two women. Joan Crawford stars as Vienna, a hard-nosed saloon owner staking her future on a railroad that hasn't arrived yet, opposite Mercedes McCambridge's Emma Small, a rival driven by jealousy so intense it becomes a witch hunt. Sterling Hayden's title character, a reformed gunman turned house musician, mostly circles the women's war rather than resolve it.

When a stagecoach robbery gives Emma an excuse to accuse Vienna's associates of the crime, she whips the town into a lynch-mob frenzy, and the film's back half plays out as a siege against Vienna's saloon. Ray shoots it all with an operatic intensity that made contemporary American critics uneasy; they dismissed the film as camp. It was Philip Yordan, the credited screenwriter working amid the Hollywood blacklist, who helped embed the film's undercurrent of mob hysteria and false accusation as a none-too-subtle rebuke of McCarthyism.

French critics, including filmmaker Francois Truffaut chief among them, got there first, championing "Johnny Guitar" as a work of genuine feeling and formal daring. Its reputation has only grown since, prized now for putting women at the center of Western power struggles decades before the genre made a habit of it, and for the operatic strangeness that still makes it a standout favorite among cult-object Westerns and well-read critics — it's one of Roger Ebert's ten favorite Westerns.

Kelly Reichardt's 2010 film strips the wagon-train Western down to a naturalistic, elemental realism, using a boxy 1.33:1 frame — the shape of an old daguerreotype — to visually wall off the audience, as its female characters are walled off from decision-making. Loosely based on a real 1845 disaster on the Oregon Trail, it's a patient, punishing depiction of the genre's most mythologized ritual: the westward crossing.

Michelle Williams plays Emily Tetherow, one of three families following guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) on a shortcut that quickly reveals itself as a wrong turn. Water runs low, tempers fray, and the group captures a lone Native American man (Rod Rondeaux) whose intentions, like Meek's competence, remain frustratingly ambiguous. Whether to trust him becomes the film's central question.

Reichardt is characteristically less interested in the drama of the trail than in its tedium and power structures. The men debate loudly in council while the women, often relegated to the edges of the frame, do the actual labor of keeping everyone alive. That imbalance, along with the film's refusal to offer a tidy resolution, has made "Meek's Cutoff" a favorite among critics who prize its slow formal rigor and slow-cinema patience over conventional payoff. It's since become a fixture on best-of-the-decade lists, and it's seen as one of the best neo-Westerns, a touchstone for how spare, hostile landscapes can evoke as much brutality as gunslingers and showdowns.

"High Plains Drifter" is not the only Clint Eastwood film on this list, but it is the most evil. Eastwood's second film as a director takes the moral shorthand of his Sergio Leone Westerns and transforms it into a stomach-churning, metaphysical allegory. Where "The Man With No Name" was ambiguous yet heroic, the nameless stranger who rides into the town of Lago in "High Plains Drifter" appears as a personification of spiritual punishment.

Eastwood stars as the drifter, hired by Lago's townspeople to protect them from three outlaws set to be released from prison — men the town itself once hired to murder its own marshal, Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn, Eastwood's longtime stunt double), for uncovering a mining-claim fraud. As the stranger settles in, he humiliates and terrorizes the town with an escalating cruelty the film never fully explains, though it drops enough hints to suggest he's something of an avenging ghost or devil. See his final act, in which he orders the town to be painted blood-red and rechristened "Hell."

It's a much nastier, more punitive film than its Leone predecessors, using the Western's revenge template to indict an entire community's complicity rather than a single villain, as well as the drifter himself. The film unsettled audiences and critics alike on release — John Wayne reportedly wrote Eastwood a letter objecting to its bleak, unflattering portrait of frontier townsfolk — but its blend of supernatural dread and moral reckoning has only grown in stature, now regarded as one of the most purely nihilistic entries in the revisionist Western canon.

If you want to relitigate the supposed heroics of the West, no film does it more directly than "The Ox-Bow Incident." William A. Wellman's 76-minute, ethics-focused powder keg from 1943 takes an approach Sidney Lumet would iterate on 14 years later in "12 Angry Men," following a feature-length deliberation by a large cast about whether capital punishment is the answer to a disputed crime. The two films even share a star: Henry Fonda, who plays the lead in each.

Based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, the film is set in 1885, where two drifters, Gil (Henry Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan), enter a settlement on edge just as news breaks that a local rancher was killed and cattle are missing. The two tag along with the locals as they form an angry mob to track down the men; once found, a majority consensus seems to be that the men deserved to be hanged for their crimes rather than handing them over to the law. The hang-up is that the men begin to plead their innocence desperately and convincingly.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" is one of the best examples of a darker breed of Western, and it's one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker taking a revisionist approach to the fanciful ideas and mythos of the Wild West. Its ethos rests on the hard questions of vigilante justice, culpability, and egalitarianism in the form of law. So many of the great classical Western stories are based on easy dichotomies of right and wrong; "The Ox-Bow Incident" resolutely refuses to traffic in that same fantasy.

Sam Peckinpah had been working in Westerns for a decade before "The Wild Bunch," but nothing prepared audiences for this: a 1969 outlaw picture so viscerally violent it forced the MPAA to grapple with its brand-new ratings system. Peckinpah's signature slow-motion carnage and rapid, multi-angle editing turned gunfights into balletic sequences of horror, and the technique would echo through decades of action cinema, from John Woo to Quentin Tarantino.

William Holden leads as Pike Bishop, the aging head of an outlaw gang that includes Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson, men who've outlived their usefulness in a West rapidly modernizing around them. Set in 1913 along the Texas-Mexico border, where automobiles and machine guns creep into the frame, the gang takes one last job that spirals into betrayal and a bloodbath, pursued all the while by a former partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), now working for the railroad that wants them dead.

Peckinpah, who cultivated his own outlaw reputation on and off set, uses the Bunch's obsolescence as the film's real subject: These are men clinging to a code of loyalty and honor that the encroaching twentieth century has no use for. Rather than romanticizing that code, the film exposes its brutality and futility, making "The Wild Bunch" a blood-soaked eulogy for a dead-and-gone outlaw ethos, one that incensed controversy among the public and Hollywood — John Wayne notably did not like the film (and neither did Clint Eastwood), citing its explicit violence as too much to handle.

Robert Altman had already needled genre conventions in "M*A*S*H," but with "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," he took the myth of frontier self-invention and reflected its rot right back at it. Where "The Wild Bunch" and "Unforgiven" interrogate the West through violence, Altman does it through commerce and atmosphere: his ever-reliable overlapping dialogue, a hazy, flash-film look courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond, and a mournful Leonard Cohen score that turns the whole film into a softly melancholic elegy.

Warren Beatty plays John McCabe, a small-time gambler who rolls into the muddy Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, claiming a gunfighter's reputation he almost certainly doesn't deserve, and sets up a ramshackle brothel. Julie Christie's Constance Miller, a shrewd, opium-smoking madam, offers to professionalize the operation, and the two build something like a business partnership and something like a romance until a mining conglomerate arrives offering to buy McCabe out. His refusal gets him hunted through the snow by hired killers while the town he built barely notices.

It bombed on release and confused critics expecting a shootout, but "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has since been reappraised as one of the great American films, frequently landing on Sight & Sound's greatest-films polls, and described as "perfect" by Roger Ebert. Its quiet, unglamorous vision of the West as a place built on hustle, capital, and bad luck rather than heroism makes it one of the genre's most thoroughgoing deconstructions.

Andrew Dominik offers a painterly reimagining of our country's collective sense of myth and legend in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." This 2007 film was a major box office bomb — its slow pace and tone compounded by moody stylings that ran counter to what audiences might have expected from a Brad Pitt-starring Western epic — but it remains a critical darling 20 years later, thanks to its compelling contemporary renderings and subversions of the genre's archetypes.

Set in 1881, the film stars Pitt as the legendary Jesse James, now paranoid and unpredictable as he lives under an alias, while his infamous gang begins to fracture. Meanwhile, 19-year-old Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) has read every dime novel about Jesse and is desperate to win his approval. After tracking him down and introducing himself, Ford does everything in his power to integrate into the gang, only to be disillusioned when he discovers the man behind the mythos.

"The Assassination of Jesse James" is Pitt's favorite movie he's been in, and it's easy to see why. His performance personifies the ghostly fabrications we tell ourselves about America, with one foot in reality and the other in an elusive, fleeting sheath of illusion. Dominik crafts an introspective epic that feels as sweeping in scope as it is intensely intimate, aided by career-best work from cinematographer Roger Deakins, who famously aimed to use only natural light in his evocative shooting. It is a modern masterpiece.

"The Searchers" is one of the most beautifully made and most damning Western movies ever made. Directed by John Ford, a stalwart of the genre, the film's stunning landscapes and character blocking, shot in gorgeous VistaVision and accentuated by the bright grandeur of Technicolor, belie the film's incendiary temper, as Ford turns to a more critical, probing tack in depicting the legends of the West.

That anger emanates from John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, who returns to Texas after the Civil War and witnesses a Comanche raid destroy his family farm, killing his relatives and kidnapping his young niece. Ethan then spends years searching the frontier for Debbie, but the motives of his quest become steadily more insidious and violent — much more than simply finding and saving his niece; his journey seems to become an outlet for a long-simmering, callous hatred of Native Americans. His heroic adventure is undercut by the stark reality of how Ford depicts Wayne's character, who seems more on a racist warpath than anything else.

"The Searchers" has become a touchstone of the genre, inspiring everyone from Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese to Clint Eastwood. The long shadow of its influence seems to stem from its adherence to formal Western classicism while subtly upending the romantic and mythic ideas that came with the Hollywood Golden Age of Westerns — "The Searchers" was released at the earliest beginnings of the genre's slow decline out of popular fashion, and Ford is prescient in how the timing aligns with this film about what the heroism of the West was actually born from in the first place.

If "The Searchers" marked the start of John Ford's thinking about the falsities in our collective ideas of history found within the Western, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is where he forms a complete thesis from his re-evaluation of a genre he helped codify on screen. His last Western with frequent collaborator John Wayne, and his second-to-last overall, it takes a diagnostic approach to the evolution of justice and criminality in America, asking whether we've ever really aged out of being a savage class of bandits and outlaws.

James Stewart stars as aging senator Ransom Stoddard, who returns to a small Western town for the funeral of a poor, forgotten local man named Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), prompting reporters to ask why he traveled so far. Mostly told in flashback, the rest of the film traces their shared history, beginning with Ransom's arrival as a young, idealistic lawyer. He had arrived years earlier hoping to bring the rule of law and education to a town terrorized by a sadistic outlaw named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).

That basic premise gives way to a clash between violent frontier justice and institutional democracy, while Ford suggests that the violent lawlessness of the American frontier never really went away — it just got fitted for a suit. Notably made right when Hollywood felt the first inklings of cultural tides shifting away from the classical studio pictures Ford helped create, it remains one of the most incisive movies about how America was founded on printing false legends. It's one of the best of the genre, and IMDb users have rated it as John Wayne's best Western.

Clint Eastwood gained international acclaim for his work with Sergio Leone as The Man With No Name in the spaghetti Westerns now known as "The Dollars Trilogy," and "Unforgiven" serves as a spiritual sequel to what many consider his best role. It's also the quintessential deconstructive Western: Eastwood was already the face of a new form of the genre in the '60s — more violent, with more shades of gray in heroism — and now he would make the ultimate statement on why our mythic, romanticized ideas of the Wild West are at best flighty fabrications and at worst dangerous fantasies.

Eastwood stars as William Munny, a former bounty hunter who turned to a life of domesticity after finding a woman willing to settle him down. After she passes, he receives a proposition from a budding sharpshooter who calls himself the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to track down the bounty on a man who brutalized a sex worker. Recruiting his former partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), Munny begrudgingly sets out on one last job that he hopes will provide the money to secure a new future for him and his kids.

It's the basic template for any Western exploit, but David Webb Peoples' script is written entirely around theme. Eastwood cunningly weaponizes his Western star image to subvert audience expectations, turning in a genre film that's more about the weight and anguish of death and the passage of time than the satisfaction of seeing Eastwood mow down outlaws. The Best Picture winner at the 1993 Academy Awards, it breathed new, profound life into a dormant genre and is considered Eastwood's masterpiece in a long, prolific career.