Another topic about some guy saying 50s westerns were better than 60s got me thinking. Which era do you think it is? I usd to think it was 60s since everyone talks of GBU/Wild Bunch these days and all but now i'm thinking the 1950s since it really did accomplish more things.

I am not a big fan of any pre-60's westerns (with a few exceptions, but even with those I prefer the later movies) so it's an easy call. Yes, I know people will point out everything accomplished in the earlier westerns but its just what I enjoy watching.

I much prefer revisionist westerns, so between Leone and Peckinpah, the 60's takes it.

High Noon came out in 1952. For that alone I choose the 1950s.

One of the few I like. In fact I would call it my favorite pre-60's western. The thing is, though, I can name at least a dozen that came in the 60's and later I like more.

There's the great western ever, Once Upon A Time In The West, and it's also one of the greatest films ever. That was '68..well '69 here. And there's also The Wild Bunch that came out in '69. Sooooooo....yeah...Leone and Peckinpah win the decade.

Leone and Peckinpah alone give this to the '60s for me.

Let's not forget that three of the greatest Westerns of all time are from the 1940's - My Darling Clementine, Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, plus plenty of great ones like Pursued, The Ox-Bow Incident, Canyon Passage, I Shot Jesse James and The Westerner. That being said, for this poll I voted for the 1950's. Spaghetti Westerns are fun and certainly visually striking, but they simply can't compare to their 1950's American counterparts as far as acting and stories go. I do love Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch though, obviously. Other excellent 1960's Westerns - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Hud, The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, Lonely are the Brave, The Misfits and Flaming Star (with Elvis!).

Gotta go with the 50s overall even though my 2 all-time favs are in the 60s. Spaghetti Westerns are for the post-Tarantino crowd who think they are the only westerns that exist. They are a blast, but empty mostly and wouldn't exist without the classics that influenced them. the 50s were better. The Furies, High Noon, Ride Lonesome, The Tall T, Warlock, Man with the Gun, The Searchers.

This, especially the revisionist part.

I won't deny that everything before influenced Leone and Peckinpah obviously...especially Leone. But...the undeniable cinematic presence they brought was amazing.

I love Leone's spaghetti westerns but don't like Tarantino. Not really sure what Tarantino has to do with spaghetti westerns...

I understand that because of the pop-culture resurgence of the Tarantino era the Spaghetti westerns will get more votes for the 60s being better here, but in terms of pure filmmaking and influence they pale in comparison to the 50s. The Man with No Name films don't exist without Randolph Scott doing the character before Eastwood did. Day of the Outlaw is as well crafted and stone-cold cool as anything the 60s had to offer.

Once Upon a Time in the West and TGTBTU are my two favorite westerns, so I had to go with the 1960's.

What about those of us who came to revisionist westerns ourselves, without Tarantino telling us to check it out?

1960's

with Clint Eastwood (spaghetti western and Hang Em High) and The Wild Bunch.

that's what I'm saying. I had so much to hear about the Leone flicks from my mum that well....they were raised to excessive standards. Luckily...the films were that badass. Tarantino has nothing to do w/ my love for Peckinpah and Leone. I knew what their works were before I even saw a Tarantino flick. They hold up without the orgasmic love from QT.

The 1960s were a horrible decade for Westerns. Sure, you had Peckinpah and Leone, but they were the exceptions. Most '60s Westerns were formulaic crap churned out by studios that couldn't keep up with changing tastes, and aging directors past their prime -- Cheyenne Autumn, Rio Lobo, The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, and the ouevre of Andrew McLaglen.

But the 1950s had Ford, Hawks, Mann, and Boetticher at the height of their powers, and tons of great B programmers like Duel at Silver Creek and Day of the Outlaw.

And everyone saying how much they love revisionist Westerns -- you do know that revisionism started all the way back in 1950 with Broken Arrow. The Searchers, Winchester '73, Warlock, 3:10 to Yuma, The Left Handed Gun are all revisionist. Hawks made Rio Bravo as a reaction against revisionist Westerns.

I'm not calling it that...but those 2 guys alone carry a sense of freshness that was unseen in the Western

I went with the 60's for the obvious reason's and of course 'The Shakiest Gun in the West' ...even though my favorite western 'El Topo' was released in 1970.

On an overall basis, the 1950's was the better decade for westerns.

"Some guy"?????

Smile when ya call me that...


I made my case for the 1950s as the best decade for westerns in that thread. Sure, the 1960s had some great "last hurrahs," e.g. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, and EL DORADO, but the genre was in serious decline. Leone and Peckinpah were only possible because of that. Their films were grand comments on the decline of the genre.

Here's a quote from Lawrence Alloway, who called attention to this connection in a great book called Violent America: The Movies 1946-1964 (Museum of Modern Art, 1971):

“The Westerns made by Sergio Leone in Italy from 1964 revived the genre by the new magnitude of slaughter. Based on a mastery of the American Western, he expanded action to the high pitch of violence characteristic of Japanese Samurai films. The original The Seven Samurai, 1954, directed by Akira Kurosawa, wasremade by John Sturges in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven, 1960, but Sturges failed to catch the cruel edge of Kurosawa. Leone, however, succeeded in uniting the two forms. Only after this was Samuel Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, 1969, able to cope with violence of Italo-Japanese intensity.”

AND I finally found that quote I was looking for about how Leone ruined 42nd Street, from the article, "A Film Freak’s Plea: Nationalize 42nd Street!" by Mark Jacobson (Village Voice 1/6/75):

“The Street was a creep’s Greyline tour through the Grade A and B obsessions that the movie mind had consolidated into genres. All you had to do was call out WAR! and the Harris had it. That’s why I’m concerned now. I’ve been cruising the marquees now and coming up empty.
“Sergio Leone is responsible. I’d like to shove a harmonica into Leone’s mouth for what he did to the Street. He understood that in times of no foreplay, the souped-up revenge themes he craved were not to be found in the pageantry of John Ford. Ford’s long shots weren’t nearly visceral enough. So Leone came copping from the maniacal and self-centered Kurosawa, to create a cinema of scowling cracked lips and wide-screen nosehairs. With one overwhelming pan-shot in ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ he swept away the waning genres. Eli Wallach is foraging through a vast graveyard, because he knows that one of those tombs contains all the money in the world. Leone’s camera swirls madly. There is a crescendo of Jew’s harps and trumpets. The shot might have lasted a week, but it ended when Wallach fell drooling and exhausted at the Man with No Name’s feet. It was awesome, Yeatsian. Who could watch another cavalry charge after that?
“It wasn’t long after that the Times Square stopped showing American Westerns. Leone had bulldozed all the Hathaway and Hawks prototypes into the cloying arms of television. But that’s not all. He had created a hero who was too big for any genre to contain. It used to be that there were reasons and limits to the exercise of vengeance. The hero would chase the bad guy and set right the damage he had done and at the end of the film things would be back in place, ready to be upset again during the second half of the double bill.
“Leone’s films don’t work that way. You never feel that Clint Eastwood has avenged himself because his paranoia tells him there are still people out there who deserve to be killed. This makes inescapable sense on 42nd Street where most of the audience is very street wise and knows that there are no hard and fast, good and bad guys, that everyone is a potential enemy. A man who kills everybody according to the theory that a good offense is a good defense, is a personality to be reckoned with. It was easy to transport the Eastwood character from riding the range to stalking the streets. A convincing case can be made for Sergio Leone as the godfather of the new genres that came to prominence after the Man with No Name hit it big on the Street."

I wouldn't quite say the '60s were a horrible decade for Westerns, but I pretty much agree with all of the above. Watching stuff like Boetticher's The Tall T, or 7 Men From Now---holy cow are those fantastic movies.

That's probably true, but there are more westerns I like from the 60's than the 50's.

overall? 50s win. More great stuff....BUT Sergio and Sam alone made films that were much better than most of the 50s....