The Top 10 Westerns Ever Made, Plus 10 More Deep Cuts
With their clear-eyed moral messaging, Westerns are a great antidote to much of the modern filmmaking landscape, where audiences are often asked to identify with the bad guy.
Inez Feltscher Stepman
By Inez Feltscher Stepman
March 23, 2018
No film genre is more quintessential to the American soul than the Western. The virtues Westerns champion—courage, moral clarity, self-reliance, individualism—are American virtues; their vices—excessive or hokey moral simplicity, caricatures of the enemy—are American too. Westerns are so synonymous with the legend that is America that it’s little wonder that from their heyday in the 1950s until today, they’ve played a key role in shaping our perception of ourselves, as well as the world’s opinion of us.
The white-hatted cowboy standing firm against long odds is iconic, and not only within our borders. Western imagery has had such a powerful impact across the globe that Gary Cooper’s character in “High Noon†(No. 3) was used by the anti-Communist Polish party Solidarity in a poster campaign urging people to overcome their fear of tyrannical system and show their true colors at the polls.
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http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/23/top-10-westerns-ever-made-plus-10-deep-cuts/