| THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943) directed by William A. Wellman and starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan and Anthony Quinn. It’s 1885 when Art Croft and Gil Carter ride into the town of Bridger’s Wells to find the atmosphere subdued, in part because of the recent incidents of cattle-rustling. Everyone wants to catch the thieves.
Shortly, a man on horseback announces that a man named Kinkaid has been murdered. Kinkaid was, it turns out, a very good friend of Farnley, a local rancher. The townspeople immediately form a posse to pursue Kinkaid’s murderer thought to be the cattle rustler. Art and Gil are too afraid not to join them. Soon, three men are found with Kinkaid's cattle, but the posse is told by the judge that they must bring the alleged rustlers back alive.
Late in the night the posse finds three men in an area known as Ox-Bow with the stolen cattle nearby. The posse interrogates the men; a young, well-spoken man, Donald Martin speaks for the others in saying that he purchased the cattle from Kinkaid but received no bill of sale. No one believes Martin, and it is therefore decided that the three men are guilty. A vote is taken on whether the men should be hanged or taken back to face justice in town. Seven in the group (of approximately twenty-five) including Gil and Art vote to take the men back to town. Due to the outcome of the vote, the decision is made to hang the three men at sunrise. One member of the posse wants the three men lynched immediately because he does not want any to escape. Gil tries to stop it but held back and told: “Hangin’ is any man’s business that’s around.”
After the lynching, the posse heads back towards Bridger’s Wells. On the way, they meet the judge and the sheriff, and are informed that Lawrence Kinkaid was not killed after all but was only injured, and is under the care of the doctor in Pike's Corner, and that the two men who shot Kinkaid have been caught.
HIGH NOON (1952) directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. The film tells the story of Will Kane, longtime marshal of Hadleyville, New Mexico, who has just married a pacifist named Amy, turned in his badge, and is now preparing to move away. Soon after, the town learns that Frank Miller, a criminal that Kane brought to justice, is due to arrive on the noon train. Miller had vowed revenge on Kane with three of his gang awaiting him at the station. The worried townspeople encourage Kane to leave, hoping to defuse the situation.
Kane and his wife do leave town but he has an attack of conscience, knowing full well if he runs away that Miller will catch up with them and kill him and his bride. So he turns back, reclaims his “tin star” then tries to swear in a posse. But it becomes clear that no one is willing to get involved. His deputy, Harvey Pell resigns; and Amy threatens to leave on the noon train with or without him. Stubbornly, Will Kane refuses to give in.
In the end, Kane faces the four gunmen alone, gunning down two of Miller’s men, though he himself is wounded. Amy has boarded the train but gets off when she hears shots fired. Choosing her husband's life over her religious beliefs, Amy kills the third gunman by shooting him in the back.
Miller takes her hostage and offers Amy in trade for Kane. The marshal agrees, coming out into the open. Amy, however, claws Miller's face, causing him to release her and allowing Kane to shoot him dead. Only now do the townspeople emerge, praising the marshal's bravery, as Kane throws his badge in the dirt with contempt then leaves with his wife for a better life.
 THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) directed by John Sturges and starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach and Steve McQueen is about a Mexican village periodically raided by bandits led by Calvera. Desperate, an envoy of villagers travel to a border town to buy guns in order for the village to defend itself; approach a veteran gunslinger named Chris who tells them guns alone will not do them any good. They are farmers, not fighters. Chris recruits six other men—but even with seven, he knows they will be vastly outnumbered. However, their expectation is that once the thieves know they will have to fight, they will move on to some other unprotected village, rather than bother with an all-out battle.
Upon reaching the village, the group begins training the residents. As they work together, the gunmen and villagers begin to bond, until Calvera returns needing food for his men. Disappointed to find that they have hired gunmen, the banditos are chased away. But the seven learn of Calvera’s plan to return in full force. Chris, adamant that they stay and fight, leads his men in a surprise raid on the outlaws' encampment only to find that they have gone. Returning to the village, they’re suddenly surrounded by Calvera's men. But fearing revenge from the Americans up north, the bandit leader spares the lives of Chris and his men, certain the Americans have lost any further will to fight, especially for a loss cause. The seven are disarmed and escorted to the border.
Despite the odds, and betrayal of the villagers, the seven return to finish the job when during the ensuing battle the villagers, seeing the gunmen's bravery, are inspired to overcome their own worse fears by joining the mêlée until Calvera is killed and what remains of his men routed. One by one, four of the seven perish. Later, Chris pauses briefly before leaving to reflect on the graves of his fallen comrades and observes: "Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose."
THE PROFESSIONALS (1966) directed by Richard Brooks and starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, Jack Palance, Ralph Bellamy and Claudia Cardinale is set in 1917 and centered around the kidnap of Maria, the Mexican-born wife of a much older wealthy Texan, J.W. Grant.
 A once respected Mexican soldier, Raza now leads former revolutionaries, including a female sidekick, Chiquita. Allegedly, Raza has kidnapped Maria and is now asking for $100,000 in gold coins.
Four hard-boiled adventurers are hire to bring her back; each a specialist in his own field (ordinance, explosives, horse wrangler, bow-and-arrow marksman)—hard men, cynical professionals but with a code of honor.
Knowing both the territory and their foe, they successfully locate Maria. But a huge surprise undermines the entire enterprise when they tear her out of the kidnapper’s grasp. Chased across the border by the enraged Raza and his banditos, the four “Professionals” settle their accounts on both sides of the border.
 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) directed by Sergio Leone and starring Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale neatly ties multiple storylines into a cohesive narrative about a beautiful widow and three ambiguous gunmen.
Jill McBain moving from New Orleans to frontier Utah finds her new husband and his children slaughtered. Consequently, she inherits her husband's property and his plans to build a railway station.
This puts her unwittingly on the bulleye of a robber baron industrialist named Morton, out to increase his fortune in a scheme to grab McBain's land to further construction of his trans-continental railroad.
Morton’s henchman,  get-rich-quick gunslinger Frank, after murdering Jill’s husband yearns to become a businessman like his boss. But a drifter nicknamed Harmonica is drifting slowly toward Frank with revenge on his mind.
Meanwhile, Cheyenne, a desperado is desperate to prove to Jill (despite evidence to the contrary planted by Frank) that it wasn’t he who murdered her husband and children.
Intricate subplots intertwine with cinematic flair until these three men meet in an operatic showdown, not only with each other but also with the Industrial Revolution, marking the death of the Old West with the advent of the modern age.
 THE WILD BUNCH (1969) directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmund O’Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sánchez and Ben Johnson are aging outlaws on the verge of forced retirement, constrained to make one final score—a bank robbery. But the gang is haunted by a former member leading a misfit posse of bounty hunters.
When the gold coins they’ve stolen turns out to be washers, their leader, Pike Bishop says, “We've got to start thinking beyond our guns.” This is 1913 and days of the Old West are closing fast. They have no place in twentieth century modern society.
Now, hounded by the posse into Mexico, they take up refuge in an old village where the Mexican Revolution has taken its toll on the people at the hands of a corrupt warlord named Mapache who steals food from the villagers to feed his men. Pike decides his “wild bunch” will work for Mapache, who hires them to steal an arms shipment from the U.S. Army to resupply his troops when they meet the bounty hunters still doggedly on their trail. Returning to Mapache’s garrison, they find one of their men being tortured. Confronted at gunpoint, Mapache promptly slits the throat of his captive and a violent gun battle ensues. The garrison nearly destroyed, Mapache is killed and his troops depleted. Pike and his men are almost ritualistically slaughtered in a mad final bow.
 THE COWBOYS (1972) directed by Mark Rydell stars John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne and Bruce Dern. Montana cattle rancher Will Andersen facing the prospect of financial ruin if he can't make his yearly 400-mile long cattle drive to the railhead at Belle Fourche, South Dakota, gets help from a dozen or so schoolboys. Not genuine cowboys, they can all ride, some can rope and others are pretty good with a gun. While training the boys for the cattle drive, Anderson is accosted by Asa "Long Hair" Watts and his men who come asking for work. Suspicious of these men, Anderson refuses to hire them. Shortly, Jebediah "Jeb" Nightlinger, a black cook arrives with the chuck wagon, and now Anderson's outfit is complete. But while herding the cattle to Belle Fourche, somewhere along the way “the cowboys” become aware of Long Hair and his party shadowing the herd. The inevitable confrontation results in Anderson being cold-blooded shot in the back by Watts, and the herd is taken. Baptized by the blood of their surrogate father, and the senseless violence of his enemy, these boys set out on a quest to avenge Anderson’s brutal murder.
 TOM HORN (1980) directed by William Wiard and starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans and Richard Farnsworth tells the story of Tom Horn, a man who during his lifetime gained fame from a variety of exploits that included serving with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and as a Pinkerton detective. With the reputation of an Indian tracker preceding him, Horn now a bounty hunter rides into Cheyenne, Wyoming where a rancher, John Coble quickly hires him to assist in putting an end to the problems the ranchers are having with homesteaders. To protect Coble’s livestock by killing rustlers, if necessary, the skill Tom Horn once used in dealing with the Old West no longer serves him well in 1901 as he performs his job with chilling intensity. 
Carrying out his job like a homicidal maniac, as if something in him has snapped, as though his violence cannot be stopped, Horn kills so many people with such bloodthirsty efficiency that it becomes too much for the ranchers to stomach. Coble finally decides to take the law into his own hands by putting an end to the bloodbath.
On July 19, 1901 Horn happened to be in the area where Willie Nickell, the 14-year-old son of a sheepherding rancher was murdered. Horn was immediately arrested, tried and convicted based on a drunken confession and perjured testimony. Despite a school teacher who testified on his behalf (that Horn was being set up because of the ongoing feud involving the boy's family related to several disputes over the Nickell family's sheep grazing on someone else's land) Tom Horn was hung on November 20, 1903, the day before his 43rd birthday.
 TOMBSTONE (1993) directed by George P. Cosmatos (and Kurt Russell) starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliot, Bill Paxton with narration by Robert Mitchem involves Dodge City peace officer Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Virgil and Morgan moving to a growing mining town, Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 where they hope to open a small business and settle into a quiet life. But the town is lawless, infested with and victimized by a boundless bunch of carousing locals, infamous outlaws like the Clantons, a ruthless criminal clutch called “the Cowboys”—and strange relationships among extremely violent men. To make matters worse, as tensions rise, the Earps along with Wyatt’s long-time friend, Doc Holiday (a southern gambler in Arizona to relieve his tuberculosis) are the only force formidable enough to defend the townspeople by confronting this sprawling terror head-on.
 OPEN RANGE (2003) directed by Kevin Costner and starring Costner, Robert Duvall and Annette Bening is set in Montana during 1882 and concerns aging cowboy Bluebonnet "Boss" Spearman, a free-range cattleman, staunch traditionalist yet a very caring man who realizes his way of life, free-grazing cattle, is coming to an end. With his partner Charles Travis Postlewaite (a/k/a Charley Waite) and two hired hands, Boss is driving a herd cross country, when he sets up camp near the town of Harmonville controlled by the greedy Irish-born land baron Denton Baxter who hates free-rangers. Most of the townspeople look past Baxter's corrupt dealings, accepting the situation, while the arrogant and greedy land baron secretly harbors animosity toward Spearman. And although he advises the cattlemen to move on, Baxter secretly covets the herd. After one of his men is cold-bloodedly murdered by Baxter’s henchmen, and another seriously wounded, Boss Spearman along with Charley Wait force a lopsided gunfight in which townspeople flee to the hills. Boss is wounded in the stomach during the fray; Charley is shot in the leg; some of Baxter's men flee; and Baxter finds himself wounded and trapped in the jail house with Boss who by hit-and-miss eventually kills him.
         
Western movies since 1903 have defined the iconographical horizon of the American cinematic landscape. It’s these films, the ones tough to let go of, that have made my list of the Top 10, crafted into the ironic reversal of the stock Hollywood convention; villainous heroes and heroic villains surviving their era of chaotic violence while riding the rails into what would become the 20th Century.
By Frederick Louis Richardson
Copyright© 2008 All Rights Reserve
frederick@dreamerchant.com
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