If you’ve discovered Kevin Costner’s Horizon and want to watch more westerns, here are five great ones to start with.
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is now available on VOD. There’s no way around it – the film’s theatrical release was a huge disappointment, as it earned back only a fraction of its reported budget and has put the release of the second film in major jeopardy. However, now that it’s streaming, the hope is that people will be able to discover it at home, perhaps paving the way for this saga to continue. If you’ve watched Horizon and are jonesing for more modern westerns to check out, here are some we really like here at JoBlo.
Tombstone (1993):
This is perhaps an ironic one to put on a list that pays tribute to Costner’s Horizon, as the star’s own big-budget western epic, Wyatt Earp, was badly overshadowed by this competing story about the same historical events. The fact is, George Pan Cosmatos and Kurt Russell’s Tombstone is among the best modern westerns, embracing old-fashioned, epic storytelling, albeit with a dose of harder-edged violence that makes it feel contemporary. It remains one of Russell’s career-defining films, although it can’t be denied that the movie is all but stolen by Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday, with his final showdown with Michael Biehn’s Johnny Ringo the film’s coolest moment. When are we going to get this one on 4K?
Dances With Wolves (1990):
The tragedy of Dances With Wolves is that, in the decades since it won Best Picture and Director at the Oscars, people look back and feel that Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas was robbed. I’m inclined to agree, to the point that I actually never watched this movie until about five years ago. While it’s not Goodfellas, it’s still pretty damn close to a masterpiece, with Costner’s moving, humane depiction of an army officer becoming part of a Lakota tribe being one of the greatest stories ever told in a Western. The film also has one of the greatest musical scores of all time, courtesy of the late John Barry.
A Man Called Horse (1970)
This one is similar to Dances With Wolves but a bit harder-edged. In it, an English aristocrat, played by Richard Harris, is captured by a band of Sioux. While initially their captive, he begins to appreciate their lifestyle and values over time. Eventually, in a brutal sequence, he’s inducted into their tribe (in a gruesome ceremony that involves him being hung by his pectoral muscles -which was VERY controversial in its time). The movie received two sequels, but they’re more fantasy-based, with the realistic approach of the first film (where the tribe speaks unsubtitled Sioux) being done away with. One of the movie’s enduring legacies is that it inspired everything from Dances With Wolves, to The Last Samurai to Avatar.
Little Big Man (1970)
This is a sneaky film in that it begins as a lighthearted satire and slowly becomes a heart-wrenching tragedy as it goes on. In it, Dustin Hoffman plays a white man raised by the Cheyenne who goes out into the world and has a series of adventures that include brief spells as a gunfighter (known as the Soda Pop Kid), con man, preacher, and finally, an alcoholic. Throughout, he returns to his Cheyenne home and his adopted father, Chief Dan George’s Old Lodge Skins, and eventually bears witness to their near extermination by a genocidal General Custar (brilliantly played by comic actor Richard Mulligan in a complex depiction). One thing about this movie is that many of the Native American characters, such as the woman who becomes Hoffman’s wife, are played by Asian actors in an attempt to draw parallels to the war in Vietnam. Over time, its legacy has grown and grown, with Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone recently calling it a great film (she’s 100% right).
The Proposition (2005)
John Hillcoat made one of the greatest modern westerns of all time, and it doesn’t even take place in the American West! Rather, this takes place in the Australian Bush, where a bandit, Charlie (memorably played by Guy Pearce), is forced to hunt down and kill his psychotic older brother (Danny Huston) to save his more innocent younger one. Danny Huston delivers an unforgettable performance in this, with Nick Cave (who also wrote the movie) and Warren Ellis also contributing a superb score. If you like this, check out another terrific western written by Cave, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.