Tombstone is the kind of Western that makes respectable rankings nervous because it is too damn enjoyable. You can spend all day talking about genre h
Tombstone is the kind of Western that makes respectable rankings nervous because it is too damn enjoyable. You can spend all day talking about genre history, frontier mythology, revisionism, widescreen composition, whatever. Then somebody puts this movie on and suddenly half the room is waiting for Doc Holliday to say something cruel while the other half is quietly remembering how absurdly frosty Kurt Russell looks walking down Allen Street. It has gunfighters, grudges, gambling, romance, tuberculosis, moustaches with their own screen presence, and one of the most quotable supporting characters Hollywood ever produced. Pretending that pure rewatchability is somehow less significant than stern greatness has always felt dishonest.
The frustrating part is that three Westerns really are better. Not because they are older, more significant, or easier to defend in a film-school conversation. They simply go deeper without becoming less entertaining. One turns the heroic gunslinger myth inside out. Another makes three selfish men chasing buried gold feel bigger than the Civil War happening around them. And one opens with three men waiting for a train for nearly ten minutes and somehow makes waiting feel perilous. Tombstone sets an outrageous bar. These three clear it.
3
‘Unforgiven’ (1992)
Clint Eastwood, as William Munny, looking pensive, in Unforgiven.Image via Warner Bros.
Unforgiven begins where the heroic version of an senior gunfighter’s story usually ends, with the man himself forced to remember what being “good with a gun” actually meant. William Munny (Clint Eastwood) used to be the kind of man Westerns normally build legends around, except there was nothing noble about him. He killed people, drank difficult, and did terrible things until his wife helped him leave that life behind. Years later, widowed, broke, and struggling on a pig farm, he accepts one more job after two cowboys brutalize a sex worker in Big Whiskey and a bounty is offered for them.
Everything around Munny keeps stripping glamour away from violence. The Schofield Kid boasts about the men he has supposedly killed because he desperately wants to belong to the mythology. English Bob arrives with a biographer ready to turn his exploits into legend, only for Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) to expose how much of that legend is nonsense. Even Munny’s first attempt at returning to the saddle is humiliating because he can barely mount the horse. That detail is entertaining until you realize how thoroughly the movie is refusing to let him become the senior invincible Eastwood gunfighter people expect. Unforgiven knows exactly how much affection audiences have for the genre’s myths, which is why watching it dismantle them feels so brutal.
2
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)
The Man with No Name looking ahead while standing in the desert in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’Image via United Artists
Blondie (Clint Eastwood), Tuco (Eli Wallach), and Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) are all chasing the same cache of Confederate gold, but each man possesses only part of the information needed to find it. That arrangement turns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly into nearly three hours of betrayal, ephemeral alliances, bad luck, worse manners, and three men repeatedly deciding they need one another slightly more than they want to kill one another.
Tuco is the reason the movie never becomes too frosty for its own good. He is greedy, clamorous, furious, resourceful, insecure, entertaining, and capable of turning a bath into one of the greatest responses to a villain monologue ever filmed. “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Done. Meanwhile, Blondie says almost nothing and somehow makes every small reaction entertaining, especially when Tuco’s latest disaster requires rescuing. Their search eventually carries them through the Civil War, including a section where two armies keep dying over a bridge neither side has any meaningful employ for. Sergio Leone lets that absurdity sit right beside the treasure hunt. Then Ennio Morricone’s score takes over at Sad Hill Cemetery and suddenly a man running in circles looking for a grave feels monumental. Movies are allowed to be this excessive when every ounce of excess is this good.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes
Which Western Icon Are You Most Like?
No Name · Doc Holliday · Wyatt Earp · Mattie Ross
Pick your name, your gun, your horse and how you spend a night in town, and we will tell you which legend of the Old West you would have been. Four icons are waiting at the end of this: the stranger who never gives his name, the gambler who would die for a friend, the lawman who never wanted the badge, and the girl nobody has ever talked out of anything.
No Name(Dollars Trilogy)
Doc Holliday(Tombstone)
Wyatt Earp(Tombstone)
Mattie Ross(True Grit)
FIND YOUR ICON →
01
The town is about to learn your name. What do they call you?
In a Western, what people call you is already half the character.
AThey never do find it out, so the stranger will have to do.
BA nickname I picked up at a card table and never shook off.
CMarshal, and most people say it with a bit of respect.
DMy full name, and I will correct anybody who tries to shorten it.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
What are you carrying?
Everything out here is character, right down to what is sitting on your hip.
AOne revolver I have had for years and have never once talked about.
BA pistol, a knife and a deck of cards, and the cards do most of the damage.
CA shotgun, because it tends to end arguments rather than start them.
DMy father’s gun, which is far too massive for me, and I am carrying it anyway.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
What are you riding?
A hero and their horse is one of the oldest relationships in cinema.
ASomething plain that nobody in town would look at twice.
BWhatever I won last night, which may not be strictly mine yet.
CA massive steady horse that will not spook when things get clamorous.
DA pony I overpaid for and named myself, and I will hear nothing against him.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
You have got one evening in town. How does it go?
The saloon is where these films quietly tell you who somebody really is.
AOne drink at the far end of the bar with my back to the wall.
BAt the card table, holding court, up forty dollars and climbing.
CA quick drink, then a walk round town to see that everything is still.
DUpstairs with the ledger, working out exactly what tomorrow is going to cost.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
A stranger offers you money for a job that sounds like trouble.
Somebody always turns up with a full purse and a bad idea.
AI ask how much, and then I ask for a good deal more than that.
BI say yes before he has finished, mostly because it sounds like a story.
CI ask him who gets hurt if I turn him down.
DI ask for the terms in writing before anybody shakes on anything.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
Somebody is waiting for you in the street. What does the town see?
Two people, an empty road, and everybody else watching from behind the shutters.
ASomebody walking out very slowly who has not said a single word.
BSomebody grinning, which everyone watching finds deeply unnerving.
CSomebody making one last attempt to talk the other man down.
DSomebody far too juvenile to be out there, walking out regardless.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
What is the one thing you will not do out here?
The code is about the only thing west of the river that actually holds.
AExplain myself to somebody who has not earned an explanation.
BRide off and leave a friend standing out there on his own.
CLet a whole town pay for a fight it had nothing to do with.
DLet a grown man tell me I am too juvenile to be standing here.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
The job is finished. Where does the story leave you?
Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your icon.
AOn a ridge somewhere, riding away, without saying goodbye to anybody.
BSomewhere hot and worn out, having enjoyed very nearly all of it.
CHome, with the badge on the table and the whole thing behind me.
DOlder, changed by it, and telling this story for the rest of my life.
REVEAL MY ICON →
The Dust Has Settled
Your Western Icon Is…
Four icons and four completely different ways of walking into trouble.
This is the one you would have been out there, why it fits, and what it would have cost you.
The Man With No Name
You have never explained yourself and you have never needed to,
because people work out fairly quickly that you are the most capable person in the room
without you ever having to mention it.
- Eastwood built the character out of everything he refused to do, stripping away the
backstory, the speeches and every bit of reassurance until only the competence was left. - You keep your own counsel, and while other people occasionally find that unnerving, you
have never felt any real need to fix it for them. - The Dollars films work because he genuinely is in it for himself right up until the
moment he is not, and he never explains that part either. - You would be gone before anybody got a chance to thank you.
Doc Holliday
You are the funniest person in most rooms and the most faithful
person in all of them, and you would be genuinely insulted if somebody suggested those two
things were in any tension.
- Doc has no real reason to be in this fight beyond the fact that his friend is in it,
which is the only reason he has ever needed for anything. - You lead with wit, and it does a very effective job of hiding how seriously you take the
handful of people you actually care about. - Val Kilmer’s performance is the most quoted in the entire genre because the jokes keep
getting sharper as the situation gets worse. - You would spend everything you had on this and still describe it as a good week.
Wyatt Earp
You never wanted this job, and you took it anyway because the
alternative was standing there watching somebody less careful do it badly, which is the most
Western reason there has ever been.
- Earp is the reluctant authority figure, a man who came to town specifically to be left
alone and somehow ended up answerable for all of it. - You are protective by instinct, so when something goes wrong your first thought is who
is exposed rather than who is to blame. - These films understand that keeping order costs far more than breaking it, and that the
person holding the line almost never gets thanked. - You would do the whole thing again, and you would complain about it the entire time.
Mattie Ross
Nobody has ever successfully talked you out of something you had
already decided was right, and a long line of grown adults has found that out the difficult way.
- Mattie is the most relentless character in the Western canon and she manages it through
argument, paperwork and flat refusal rather than a rapid draw. - You have no patience for being managed, so you negotiate, you check the details and you
turn up exactly when you said you would. - True Grit is the uncommon Western where the moral centre is the youngest person on screen
and every adult around her has to catch up. - You would get what you came for, and the film is straightforward about what that takes out of
you.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
1
‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968)
Harmonica (Charles Bronson) confronting Frank (Henry Fonda) in Once Upon a Time in the WestImage via Paramount Pictures
Three gunmen wait at a remote station for a train. A fly buzzes around one man’s face. Water drips onto another man’s hat. A squeaking windmill keeps turning. Nobody explains much of anything. Then the train arrives and Harmonica (Charles Bronson) steps off. Once Upon a Time in the West has enough confidence to spend its opening making you study faces and listen to ambient noise until a few men standing around become almost unbearably tense.
The story eventually brings Harmonica together with Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), outlaw Cheyenne (Jason Robards), and Frank (Henry Fonda), a railroad enforcer whose first major scene becomes even more disturbing because Fonda had spent years embodying fundamentally decent men. This too comes from Sergio Leone and he knew exactly what that familiar face meant to audiences and used it against them. Jill is just as significant because the railroad, Sweetwater, and all the violence surrounding them are really about who gets to own the future once the senior West starts disappearing. And Harmonica’s little melody keeps returning until you understand that it is carrying history, not just atmosphere. Plenty of Westerns have better gunfights than most movies. Once Upon a Time in the West can make someone slowly walking toward a doorway feel just as significant. That is why it stays on top.
