The Greatest Westerns of All Time RANKED pits Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946)—John Ford’s masterpieces with John Wayne’s iconic performances—against Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood’s Oscar-winning deconstruction of Western myths. Shane (1953) earns an S for its classic storytelling, while Red River (1948) and The Man with No Name trilogy (1960s) dominate despite flawed endings or production hurdles. True Grit (1969) gets a B, but the Coens’ 2010 remake rises to an A, closer to McCarthy’s novel. Dances with Wolves (1990) scores a B for its technical brilliance, though its woke simplification of the Indian Wars sparks debate. The episode reveals how even "greatest" Westerns clash—between legend, rewatchability, and moral complexity—challenging rigid rankings in cinema history. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, I don't know why, but suddenly I must have done something nice to my staff.
I can't remember what it could have possibly been.
The last couple of bonus videos we've done, instead of me watching people on TikTok say stupid leftist stuff while I suffer, I've actually been at get get to talk about movies, which I love doing, talking about any kind of art, novels, movies.
And last time it was action movies, which I just loved so much it was hard for me to give any of them anything under an A.
And this time it's Western movies, same thing.
The internet ranking is S for Superior, A, B, C, D, E, and then I forget what the letters are after that.
Now, the difference between Westerns and action movies, even really good action movies are very rarely good movies.
There are a few.
There are a few good action movies that are also great movies.
But action movies are kind of a sub-genre.
Westerns are at the core of great movies.
So there are some great, great films that are also Westerns.
So the first one is No Country for Old Men, based on a Carmack McCarthy novel.
I think his best novel, at least the one I like best, No Country for Old Men, and made by the Cohn brothers, who I think are terrific filmmakers.
Excellent film.
It is an excellent film, re-watchable.
I think that's an S film.
You know, I'm a little worried because for me, there are only like, you know, 100 great films.
I'm not sure I would list it as one of the 100 great films, but I have to say it's a superior film.
It is an excellent film.
Hell or Highwater, also great.
That's the one by Taylor Sheridan, who is, or at least was at that point, was an excellent, excellent writer.
Hell or Highwater, with Jeff Bridges giving a spectacular performance.
Chris Pine, also good.
I think that's a really, really fine model.
These are modern Westerns so far.
You know, it's a, I think that that's an S picture too.
That is really a good movie.
And it's kind of, you know, the values about going after the banks are a little bit silly because I don't think the banks are to blame for some of the things they were looking at.
But still, still, I understood the idea of people who are down and out going after the rich and just a really, really interesting, moral, and exciting movie.
Jeff Bridges, maybe one of his greatest performances.
Shane, 1953, one of the classics.
I got to give it an S because it is one of the classics.
It doesn't hold up as well as you'd like it to.
It sort of goes on a little bit, but when it's great, it's as great as any film ever made.
And it is also a great story.
If you really want to experience the greatness of Shane, read the novel by Jack Schaefer.
Ballad of Buster Scruggs, another, that's the Cone Brothers 2, I believe, that was on Netflix.
That's fun.
I'll give that an A.
That was definitely fun.
Not a great movie.
The Outlaw Josie Wales by the wonderful Clint Eastwood, I thought it was okay.
I mean, I thought it was not one of Clint's greatest Westerns.
His greatest Western is Unforgiven, but for sure.
But I didn't think it was as good.
I would give it a B, which is very good.
You know, I mean, it's certainly watchable.
I would watch Clint Eastwood read the phone book before watching a lot of other actors, but I didn't think it was as great as people said it was.
Red River, one of the greatest movies ever made.
1948.
Red River, John Wayne, and Montgomery Cliff in a cattle drive.
I used to always, whenever it has one of the great lines in it, let's take them to Missouri.
Let's take them to Missouri.
Whenever I would have my children or my wife, I would always say, let's take them to Missouri.
What a great movie.
I always had a problem with the last like five minutes of the film.
I didn't feel the film resolved as well as it could have or should have.
But still, it is a classic, classic American movie.
Very few or anywhere near it.
So an excess.
Little Big Man, that's a good movie.
That's Dustin Hoffman.
It's a 1970 film, and it's about a guy who keeps being sent back and forth between the Indians and the whites.
It's funny.
It is endearing.
It's Arthur Penn, who is a very fine director.
You know, let's say, it's been a long time since I've seen it.
I'll give it a B, really top-notch stuff in it, but I thought overall it's not one of the most memorable films ever made.
Bone Tomahawk.
Well, now I have to be nice to Bone Tomahawk because that's made by our own Dallas Sonier, but is it Dallas' best movie?
I think it is Dallas' best movie.
It is a terrific movie, and it says things that you will not see said anywhere else.
I'm going to give it an A.
It's not one of the great classics of all time, but it is a really, really good movie.
And if you're a conservative and you watch it, you will laugh and laugh because it's just got so much great stuff in it.
And it's got Kurt Russell.
I said this before, the action films.
Kurt Russell never became like a Harrison Ford level star, but he is in some terrific movies, and this is one of them.
Tombstone.
Now, Tombstone, we all love Tombstone.
The first hour of Tombstone is among one of the great tough guy films ever made.
The dialogue in that film is great.
Another Kurt Russell film.
It is so fantastic.
If it had only had the line, skin that smoke wagon and see what happens.
I'm your Huckleberry.
That's just my game.
You're a daisy if you do.
Such great lines.
Some of them real.
I mean, some of them, Doc Holiday really said some of that stuff.
I hate to say this because we love the first hour so much.
The last 30 to 45 minutes of the film really unravels.
It really does unravel.
So what can I give it?
I'll give it a B to A because it's like a B in the second, that last half hour.
It's not very good.
And for even some of the rest of it, the story kind of just unraveled.
I don't know what happened to it.
There were troubles with the writing of it.
Rio Bravo, I feel another overrated film, John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson.
It's, you know, people, young people think that John Wayne is the films he made.
This is a 1959 film, the films he made into the 60s.
It's got a lot of good stuff in it, Rio Bravo, but it's nowhere near his great films like Red River.
You know, it's nowhere near that.
I'll give it a B.
It's very watchable.
It's still good John Wayne, but it's not great John Wayne.
The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford is 2007.
That is Brad Pitt.
It's got a great, great performance by Casey Affleck.
It's one of Casey Affleck.
Casey Affleck is really, really good.
I thought this was a spectacular movie.
I'm going to give this an A.
I don't think it's a classic film, but I thought it did not get the attention that it in any way deserved.
Two great performances.
Pitt is great in it.
Affleck is great in it.
Sam Shepard is terrific in it.
Mary Louise Parker.
And it's a really good version of the Jesse James story and the story of his death.
I recommend it highly.
Jeremiah Johnson, Robert Redford, also an A movie for sure.
I can watch that movie again and again.
And it really has, it has what a lot of movies try to do, but very rarely accomplish.
It has a sense of legend about it.
It's by the great director Sidney Pollack and Redford.
It is one of his really, really good films.
If I give it an A, it's only because it's a little bit offbeat and quiet, but it is, and I'm just trying to limit the things that go into that very, very top level.
But it's a good movie.
It is a really good movie, and it's worth rewatching, which is true of very few films.
Stagecoach, another one, 1939, as good a film as you will ever see.
It is, you know, it's different.
You know, it's different than people remember it.
It's slower than people remember it, but it is really, really worth it.
Just as good a Western as you will ever see.
I think it is John Wayne's, I don't know if it's his first film, but it is his first great film because it's directed by John Ford.
And the collaboration between John Ford and John Wayne is just absolutely one of the great collaborations.
He let Wayne, John Ford let Wayne be what he was, which was a reactor.
John Ford's Great Films00:06:20
He was not an actor.
He was not a great actor.
There were things he couldn't, places he couldn't go, but you could just see all his emotions on his face, and he was iconic.
The only actor who comes anywhere near that is Clint Eastwood.
And Stagecoach just shows you the moment he makes his appearance in that film.
I won't even describe it to you.
One of the great moments in film.
The scenery is beautiful.
It is shot outside.
It's just unbelievably great film.
You'll enjoy every minute of it.
Likewise, these are some great films.
I don't want to overpraise everything, but it can't help it when you're giving me classics.
My Darling Clementine, 1946, one of Henry Fonda, Henry Fonda, one of the great actors of movies, and this is one of his greatest films.
This is also John Ford.
It's a legend.
It's Wyatt Earp.
It's the legend of Wyatt Earp.
You know, the Tombstone tries to give you a kind of more down-to-earth Wyatt Earp, but this is the legendary Wyatt Earp, and there's nothing like it.
And I think it's the last line of the film.
I won't give it away, but it is just a great, great line, and it's a great movie.
Dances with Wolves.
That's what the left would call problematical for me.
It's a really well-made movie, and Kevin Costner is great, and the direction is great.
It really bothered me because I've often said this, that good art will always convey a truth.
And yet, you can skew good art by shifting around the values.
This is directed by Kevin Costner, and it's his signature film, although I like some of his other movies better.
But this is a film that basically, it's basically Pocahontas, Avatar, the civilized man goes into the savage country and finds out the savages of the civilized and the civilized are the savages.
It has a film scene where people cheer for the slaughter of the U.S. cavalry, and that just didn't sit right with me.
I did not think that that was the truth about that situation.
It gave away all complexity for this kind of woke idea that the primitives were the guys we should be siding with.
Listen, the Indians were terribly, terribly treated by this country, but they also never invented the wheel.
And a group of people who never invent the wheel can't be left alone to run a continent.
I'm sorry, you know, that's just not the way life works, and it's tragic and it's terrible, and horrible things were done by both sides in the Indian wars, but this is just too simplistic for me.
And so even though it's a well-made film worth watching, I can't really recommend it at the top levels.
I'll give it a B.
It's a B between a B and an A because it's so well-made.
The Man with No Name trilogy, great.
1960s, Clint Eastwood.
And this is, people forget that Glenn Eastwood was not doing that well in America.
And he went over and made, these were called spaghetti westerns because they were made in Italy and sometimes they had to be dubbed and stuff like this.
Fist Full of Dollars, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.
And Clint Eastwood is iconic in it.
There's just no way this is not an S film simply for his presence.
You know, you may see cheap production values.
You may see things that don't make any sense, but still, he is just so great in it that it has to stand.
True Grit, which was made twice, once in 1969 and 2010.
You know, John Wayne won the Oscar for True Grit.
Finally, he won the Oscar for True Grit.
They kind of had to give it to him.
I did not feel that it was his best film.
For one thing, Glenn Campbell, great country singer, was in it, and he is terrible.
He is so bad, he's like a weight that sinks the movie into the depths.
And I just think it's a B movie, except for Wayne's performance.
Wayne's performance just, you know, spreads out of it.
It's one of his great, great performances.
It's kind of like an old John Wayne's takeoff on young John Wayne, and it's really good for that.
So, you know, I give it a B because as a film, it's just not that good.
John Wayne, I will give an S.
He is just that great.
The 2010 remake by the Cone Brothers is excellent.
I'll give that an A. That's a really good film and better, better than the one.
It's closer to the book, too, which is a wonderful novel if you've never read it.
Magnificent Seven, yeah, you know, like Magnificent Seven is another one that's iconic, but not as good as people remember it as being.
But it has got some great stuff in it, and it's a great tough guy film, which I love.
Does it hold up?
It holds up okay.
It's lots of, lots and lots of fun to watch.
So I'm going to give that an A because it's really just so iconic and so much fun, but it doesn't hold up as well as you think.
John Sturtis, terrific director, and it's based on an Akira Kurosawa film called Seven Samurai, which is one of the greatest films ever made.
Unforgiven, 1992, one of Eastwood's greatest films, and truly one of the greatest films.
That's a film that definitely would make it into the top 100.
And what I love about Unforgiven is it's, here's a guy who made iconic Westerns, Clint Eastwood, makes a Western about the Western.
It is a story basically about how the legends of the West and the reality of the West diverge and how the stories about the West capture something real, which is the same theme of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, also an S film, one of the greatest films ever made, and one of the last great John Wayne films.
Like as he got older, he started kind of imitating himself.
He got kind of overweight.
For some reason, there were always women getting spanked in his later films.
You sit there and go like, Duke, take it easy.
Take it easy on that.
I mean, you know, like, I'm glad you're having a good time, but I don't want to see someone.
Not in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, another one of the great John Ford, John Wayne collaborations, and with the also great, if I can just use the great some of my time, Jimmy Stewart.
And it's the classic Western because it is the duel between the man who is tough enough and mean enough and hard enough to settle the West, and then Jimmy Stewart, the softer guy who wants to bring law to the territories.
That it is just a great film, S all the way.
All right, I'm going to stop there.
But those are some terrific movies, and go and watch.
Anyone that I give an S to, believe me, is worth seeing.
Anyone I give an A to, I'm a tough, I don't have grade inflation.
I'm a tough grader, and if a film is not among those top 100 films, I'm not going to give it an S.