FRwL

If you could pick 2 that are in order (consecutive) what would they be.

for me 1950s-1960s followed by 1940s-1950s......

JumpCutz

1960's-1970's followed by 1940's-1950's.

islandclaws

'70s-'80s all the way!

My Other Self

80s and 90s

Mondo Kane

I'd want to say 60's & 70's, but deep down, it would have to be 70's & 80's.

Mountain Biker

It ain't even close...

70's-80's

PopcornTreeCt

40s and 50s

Ideally, I'd pick 70s and 90s but the damn 80s got in the way.

Charlie Goose

Same with me.

asianxcore

70's-80's

Ash Ketchum

1940s-50s

Here's why:

1940s:
WWII Combat movies
Film Noir
Abbott & Costello
Hope & Crosby "Road" movies
Great musicals: THE PIRATE, ON THE TOWN, etc.
Great crime movies: HIGH SIERRA, THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, WHITE HEAT.

Directorial debuts of: Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Elia Kazan, Anthony Mann, Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Phil Karlson, Don Siegel, Vincente Minnelli, to name a few...

Movie star debuts: Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day, Rhonda Fleming, Montgomery Clift, Janet Leigh, etc.

1950s:
Epics: QUO VADIS, BEN-HUR, THE VIKINGS, etc.
Swashbucklers: FLAME AND THE ARROW, THE CRIMSON PIRATE, SCARAMOUCHE, AGAINST ALL FLAGS, etc.
Cinemascope
Best decade for westerns
Great musicals: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, etc.
Great crime movies: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, RIFIFI, THE KILLING, THE PHENIX CITY STORY, etc.
Hammer horror
Godzilla
American sci-fi explosion (DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, THEM!, THIS ISLAND EARTH, FORBIDDEN PLANET, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN)
Some good 3-D (KISS ME KATE, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, REVENGE OF THE CREATURE)
THE SEVEN SAMURAI

Directorial debuts of Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Martin Ritt, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, John Sturges, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Fellini, etc.

Movie star debuts: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Elvis Presley, Kim Novak, Dennis Hopper, Audrey Hepburn, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Clint Eastwood, Harry Dean Stanton, Sidney Poitier, etc.

CardiffGiant

For me, it's the 50s and 60s by a long shot. I mean, not even close. But, I appear to be in the minority there.

Most of my favorite directors made most of their best films during this era. Some highlights include:

Bergman: Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Persona, The Passion of Anna

Fellini: La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2

Godard: Breathless, A Woman is a Woman, Vivre Sa Vie, Bande A Part, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou

Antonioni: L'Avventura, L'eclisse, Blow-up

Kurosawa: Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai

Hitchcock: Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho

Leone: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West

Kubrick: Paths of Glory, 2001, Dr. Strangelove

There are so many other films that would get the nod of greatness from thes decades, but the above film are some of the masterpieces for me that I continue to return to over and over.

Bobby Shalom

I had to go with 60's - 70's.

I feel I don't even have to explain why I chose the 1970's.

I was torn for a minute between the 60's and the 80's, but after just a few seconds I really felt that the 80's were in the running for me just because I was a teenager in that decade.

Here are a few reasons why I chose the 1960's:

The Wild Bunch, Point Blank, Le Samouraï, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Manchurian Candidate, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Peeping Tom, Army of Shadows, 8 1/2, Yojimbo, Man With No Name Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, If..., Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Lawrence of Arabia, The Leopard, Cool Hand Luke, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Shoot the Piano Player, the Haunting, and last but not least Blood Feast, and 2000 Maniacs.

FRwL

^60s-70s would probably be the objectively best era , most experimental/revoltuionary etc.

FRwL

Wouldnt that be 60s?

cleaver

I voted 80s-90s. 70s are my 2nd favorite decade, but the 90s have so many movies. The 2010s is off to a great start.

Mr. Cinema

absolutely.

The 70s had Nicholson, De Niro, Pacino, Hackman, Newman all on top of their game, not to mention all the heavyweight directors Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, Scott, Forman, etc in their younger/prime years. Not to mention an all-time greatist films collection of Jaws, Star Wars, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Cuckoo's Nest, French Connection, Alien, etc. The list goes on. Easily the best combination of A-list acting/filmmaking.

The 80s was just an extremely fun and entertaining decade. Raiders, Empire, Aliens, Gremlins, Back to the Future, Karate Kid, Wall Street, Ghostbusters, and on and on and on.

Jaymole

60's - 70's...and then followed my least favorite decade

Ash Ketchum

No. The '50s boasted many more great westerns and great directors of westerns. The decade offered:
Ford: RIO GRANDE, WAGONMASTER, THE SEARCHERS, THE HORSE SOLDIERS
Hawks: THE BIG SKY, RIO BRAVO
Anthony Mann: WINCHESTER '73, THE FURIES, DEVIL'S DOORWAY, BEND OF THE RIVER, THE NAKED SPUR, THE FAR COUNTRY, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, THE TIN STAR, MAN OF THE WEST
Robert Aldrich: APACHE, VERA CRUZ
Samuel Fuller: FORTY GUNS, RUN OF THE ARROW
John Sturges: GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL, BACKLASH
Nicholas Ray: JOHNNY GUITAR, RUN FOR COVER
Raoul Walsh: DISTANT DRUMS, GUN FURY, THE LAWLESS BREED, THE TALL MEN, A KING AND FOUR QUEENS
Budd Boetticher: SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, THE TALL T, DECISION AT SUNDOWN, RIDE LONESOME
Henry King: THE GUNFIGHTER, THE BRAVADOS
Delmer Daves: BROKEN ARROW, DRUM BEAT, WHITE COMANCHE, JUBAL, COWBOY
And I haven't even mentioned those oft-trumpeted middlebrow classics, HIGH NOON, SHANE and THE BIG COUNTRY.
Plus, dozens of fine westerns starring Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Richard Widmark, Charlton Heston, and war hero Audie Murphy, to name but a few. Any male star in the '50s who was worth his salt made westerns. Today, you can tune in to the Western Channel and find a '50s western playing and it will, at the very least, grab your attention and keep you watching, no matter who's in it or who directed.

The '60s was more focused on "fin-de-siecle" westerns and the deconstruction of the genre. There were many great works among these (THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, MAJOR DUNDEE, EL DORADO, THE WILD BUNCH, plus the Leone films), but the numbers don't add up to anywhere near the proportion of those made in the 1950s. Most of the studios really cut down on their production of westerns in the 1960s, preferring to co-produce or simply import the ones made in Europe, which weren't always as good. Many Hollywood western stars, including the TV ones, had to go over there to find work in westerns. (Eastwood was just one of many.) Plus, the glut of TV westerns in the late '50s cut down on the genre's popularity in theaters in the '60s.

Boba Fett

1.) 1970s-1980s
2.) 1940s-1950s
3.) 1950s-1960s
4.) 1980s-1990s
5.) 1930s-1940s
6.) 1990s-2000s

boredsilly

80s and 90s, but for no other reason than that's when I grew up, and thus my formative years and media had a much greater impact on me then.

FRwL

Would Pekinpah also be with the fin-de-siecle descontructions? I get what you mean about the 50s westerns now, but nowadays people just keep talking about GBU, Wild Bunch, etc. and would you say the deconstruction ones are untrue westerns unlike the 50s ones? I think they're all really westerns and many are self-pick apart types but if you went by quantity>quality wouldn't the 60s still outweigh it since the spaghetti western boom caused many countless ones (even if most weren't good), i know many called the 60s back then as the genre getting dead but then it was resurrected on the latter portion of it. I'd like to think the 50s was the greatest era of it but the 60s just seems to ring louder (leone, pekinpah) and John Wayne actually got better as he got older.

Ash Ketchum

Yes, Peckinpah westerns were definitely end-of-an era pieces and Leone definitely deconstructed the genre. Leone's films weren't about the west, they were about the genre, the westerns Leone had grown up with. Mark Jacobson once did a piece in the Village Voice complaining how Leone's westerns ruined the western for 42nd Street theaters. I forget how he put it, but he said something like Leone's westerns made every other western anti-climactic. There was one 42nd Street theater that played nothing but westerns for over 20 years. But by the early '70s, it stopped that practice.

It may be true that Italian westerns may have outnumbered Hollywood westerns in the '60s, but most of them never showed up in the U.S. There are probably more Italian westerns on DVD now than actually played in theaters in the U.S. Also, most of the ones that did play here didn't arrive till after the success of Leone's trilogy. I saw a lot of Italian westerns in theaters in the 1970s and most of those were made years earlier. The very first ones I saw, in fact, were THE UGLY ONES and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, both in 1969. I first saw the "Man with No Name" trilogy after that. They used to play in theaters for years. A lot of Italian westerns showed up on TV in the '70s without having played theaters first.

RE: John Wayne. Wayne's great in LIBERTY VALANCE, EL DORADO, TRUE GRIT, CHISUM, etc., but I'd argue that THE SEARCHERS and RIO BRAVO are his finest works.

Serious critics started to NOTICE the western more in the 1960s. A surprising number of great '50s westerns went under the critical radar. You'd be startled at some of the negative reviews THE SEARCHERS got. Middlebrow critics of the time preferred self-important westerns like THE GUNFIGHTER, HIGH NOON, and SHANE to much better films like the Anthony Mann westerns or Aldrich's influential VERA CRUZ (the spiritual inspiration for THE PROFESSIONALS, MAJOR DUNDEE, THE WILD BUNCH and a lot of Leone).
So in the 1960s, as the western was, in a sense, dying, some critics took notice and started paying attention to things like Peckinpah's RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. There was a great article in Film Quarterly in 1962 about that film and other "end-of-an-era" westerns, like Ford's MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. I remember the New York Times' Vincent Canby doing a whole piece comparing THE WILD BUNCH, which he liked a lot, with TRUE GRIT and BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, all of which came out in 1969. The Times' lead critic in the '50s, Bosley Crowther, would never have done that.

My point is that the '50s had a larger number of greater achievements in the genre, while the '60s offered key touchstones that may have attracted greater attention and debate precisely because the genre was dying or being transformed in significant ways.

NoirFan

50's and 60's is an easy no-brainer, the former being the greatest decade for American films, the latter the greatest for foreign films.

FRwL

I'm no fan of "end of the western" westerns. It's selfish because you're going "i feel sorry for the future generations because westerns are dying, they ARE DYING!!!!! and it's real sad and dramatic...." nothing's dying, i doubt even Clint Eastwood cared when he was making all of his westerns afterward or all the westerns of the future eras. That's why i actually don't like Once Upon a Time in the West because of the "last gasps of the genre" Leone was spouting which aged badly. I guess i do like the traditionalist westerns more (though Ford can get boring at times), a lot more b-westerns. I saw Vera Cruz and liked it a lot. Leone's Dollars trilogy is also pretty traditionalist.

mightysparks

70's and 80's! The 70's produced the best movies: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Holy Grail, a Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Jaws etc... The 80's were cheesy as hell, but I just love 80's horror movies. And the teen movies.