A crop of the poster for The Wild Bunch (1969)
There’s always been value in old-fashioned Western movies and their well-worn tropes. It can be fun to see a clear good guy go up against a clear bad guy, likely rescuing the girl in the process before everyone who deserves a ride into the sunset gets to do just that. But by no means do all Westerns follow such conventions, and there’s an argument to be made that things would get boring if every movie played by such rules.
There are consequences within the story of The Cowboys that one might not necessarily expect, and a certain savagery to some of the violence, too, that’s out of step with most American Westerns made in earlier decades. There are hardships and tragedies throughout, though the ending is ultimately bittersweet, preventing The Cowboys from being totally miserable .
8 'The Hateful Eight' Director: Quentin Tarantino From its title alone, The Hateful Eight promises bitterness and a certain misanthropic attitude to be found from watching the film, and it sure does deliver. The instantly chilly setting also foreshadows how cold and brutal things will get, with the premise involving a bunch of shady and/or evil individuals getting confined within the one cabin during a blizzard. Before long, some find reasons to want certain other people there dead.
Balancing out the dark story and difficult thematic content, to some extent, are the technical qualities of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, because it happens to be as beautiful as it also is psychologically devastating. It’s a long and sometimes challenging film, but an ultimately rewarding one, and another fantastic deconstruction of Western movie tropes.
5 'Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid' Director: Sam Peckinpah Though Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid implies early on that things aren’t going to end well, it still feels surprising when it gets as dark as it does. The two titular characters are put in conflict with each other here, as despite being friends earlier, the narrative ultimately follows Pat Garrett as he’s tasked with hunting down Billy the Kid, which ends badly for both of them, unsurprisingly .
That they indeed do, in a famous climactic gunfight that’s one of the most spectacular ever staged, in the Western genre or otherwise. If the main characters in The Wild Bunch wanted it that way, it might make things feel a little less bleak, but it’s still shocking and nihilistic stuff on the surface… but it hits hard however you want to interpret it, delivering some catharsis even among all the somewhat senseless loss of life.
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