My Western Movie Review Marathon

"Since pictures began moving in Tom Edison's lab at the turn of the 20th century, more than 4,600 Westerns have been shot. They come rolling down the trail in every imaginable size and shape: shoot'em-up shorts and cliffhanger serials, melodramas, satires, musicals, noirs, costume dramas, comedies, tragedies and epics; sweeping historical narratives filmed in widescreen and 3-D; and small-budget, tight focused B-movies pumped out in a few days. And don't forget the thundering postwar TV herds like Gunsmoke (1955-75), Bonanza (1959-73), Rawhide (1959-66), Wagon Train (1957-65), Have Gun Will Travel (1957-63) and Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-61). What all Westerns share is wildly varying doses of history and hokum stirred into stories that have thrilled the world. (Gene Santoro, "Parables from America's Promised Land," 100 Greatest Westerns, 2010)

I blame my western movie review marathon on the video game, Red Dead Redemption. I'm not into video games, nor have I played this one, but if not for its recent release, the IGN website wouldn't have posted a list of their "Top 25 Westerns of All Time." My coworker showed me this list, and the two of us proceded to fill up our Netflix queues with all the "top westerns" we hadn't seen. I probably took it a step further by evenly selecting three or four movies from each decade going back to the '30s. Then after I was over halfway through watching those, I ran across the magazine pictured below. By that point, I had seen all the titles listed on its cover except for Fort Apache (1948) and Stagecoach (1939; recently re-released on Criterion Blu-ray), but it led me to discover the two best westerns I've ever seen: The Big Country (1958) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). In case you're interested, the two worst westerns I've seen are The Great Silence (1968) and Little Big Man (1970). Here is an alphabetical list of all the movies I watched for the first time last month and the ratings I gave them (titles in bold are "Top Westerns" on IMDb):

2008 Appaloosa (3 stars)
1955 Bad Day at Black Rock (2.5 stars)
1994 Bad Girls (3.5 stars)
2006 Bandidas (2 stars)
1972 Buck and the Preacher (3 stars)
2008 The Burrowers (3 stars)
1965 Cat Ballou (4 stars)
1939 Destry Rides Again (4 stars)
1966 Django (2.5 stars)
1971 Duck, You Sucker (2.5 stars)
1948 Fort Apache (2.5 stars)
1956 Giant (2.5 stars)
2008 The Good, the Bad, the Weird (4 stars)
1903 The Great Train Robbery (1 star)
1999 Grey Owl (1.5 stars)
1950 The Gunfighter (3 stars)
1917 The Heart of Texas Ryan (1.5 stars)
1963 Hud (3.5 stars)
1992 Last of the Mohicans (2 stars)
1989 Lonesome Dove (3.5 stars)
1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales (3.5 stars)
1943 The Ox-Bow Incident (3 stars)
1995 The Quick and the Dead (3 stars)
1954 Red Garters (2 stars)
1940 The Return of Frank James (2 stars)
2008 Seraphim Falls (3 stars)
1985 Silverado (3 stars)
1968 Sons of Great Bear (2 stars)
1939 Stagecoach (4 stars)
1925 Tumbleweeds (2 stars)
1970 Two Mules for Sister Sara (2.5 stars)
1937 Way Out West (2.5 stars)
1999 Wild Wild West (1 star)