Criteria for greatness in a western movie:

• Setting:  It almost goes without saying that a western is set in the American west, almost always during the period of greatest western expansion and settlement (around 1840 to 1890).  But that isn’t invariably true.  Last of the Mohicans, for example, is set in the east, in upstate New York, when that was on the frontier of white settlement.  The same is true of Drums Along the Mohawk.  There have been westerns set in the far north (The Spoilers and North to Alaska), even in South America (Savage Pampas, Way of a Gaucho) and Australia (Quigley Down Under and The Man from Snowy River).  There are many westerns set during the Civil War, which took place almost entirely east of the Mississippi River.  There is a subgenre of westerns set in the modern west but dealing to some degree with traditional western themes (Bad Day at Black Rock, Lone Star, No Country for Old Men, Wind River).  Some science fiction and samurai movies seem to be westerns.  It is one of several criteria, and it has some flexibility.

• Use of traditional western themes:  Similarly, there is a wide range of western themes, many of which expand into universal human themes such as the search for family in an unfriendly world.  They include clashes of races (usually whites and Native Americans), clashes between social and commercial objectives (law vs. anarchy and unrestrained self-interest, ranchers vs. farmers, for example, or cattlemen vs. sheepmen), man against nature, self-reliance and the place of violence in society.  They are too numerous to make any comprehensive list.  At times “a western theme” almost seems like Justice Potter Stewart’s elusive definition of pornography:  “I know it when I see it.”
• Story and performances:  It’s hard to have a great western without a good story and strong performances.  As with any other cinematic genre, directors can sometimes get distracted by the magic of movie-making at the expense of story.  (Here’s looking at you, Sergio Leone.)  While that can lead to some interesting movies, they’re not generally as strong as those where story is more at the front.
• Visual sweep and impact:  Good use of the American west’s big skies, open plains, towering mountains and general natural splendor is a hallmark of great westerns, such as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River and, more recently, Jeremiah Johnson and The Horse Whisperer.  Westerns offer a unique scope for the physical background to become another character.  In fact, the west’s visual magnificence can become distracting if the director isn’t careful.  But there have been great westerns shot on back lots in Hollywood that make virtually no use of traditional western scenery beyond a western town set—High Noon, for example.

• Re-watchability:  In a way, this is the Cimarron vs. Stagecoach question.  Is this something you welcome the opportunity to see again, even though you’ve already seen it before?  Yes for Stagecoach; not so much for Cimarron.  However, this question is not determinative—it’s one of several.  Some of the great westerns one just doesn’t go back to as often as others, and that doesn’t mean they’re not great.  Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves are great westerns, but once seen one might not re-watch them as often as, say, Rio Bravo or The Outlaw Josey Wales.
• Film-making skills for its time:  Most movies are inseparable from the time they were made.  The state of movie-making technology, the social attitudes, the fashion and actors’ makeup, the approach to story and cliché—all these and many other things speak of the time a movie was made.  You probably wouldn’t confuse 1939’s Stagecoach with a movie made only eleven years later in 1950, although black-and-white was still common for westerns in 1950.  Is the director making good use of what’s available to him at the time he made the movie?  If the direction isn’t remarkable in any way, is there something else that’s carrying the movie so you don’t think about it much?
• Impact on the genre in its time:  How was the movie received upon its original release?  How are westerns different (if at all) because of this movie?  Unless you’re interested in film history, this might only be a subtext, and a subconscious one at that.  Sometimes you can even forgive a clunky story if a movie changed the course of what was made later.  That’s one reason to watch some of the influential silent movies, like The Iron Horse or the films of William S. Hart.  If it is just influential and not of continuing greatness on a number of levels, however, you won’t tend to go back to it.  Sometimes it is the body of a director’s work that seems to shift the course of westerns made after.  Think, for example, of the films of John Ford, Anthony Mann and Sergio Leone.
• How does it age?  (The Test of Time):  Is it still a good and enjoyable film notwithstanding its age or the time at which it was made?  Cinematic and societal fashions change.  Although one can’t really separate a film from the time it was made, is there something that pulls you back to it?

• Historicity—How true is it to its supposed time?:  This one is tricky, in part because standards of historicity change.  In 1939, for example, historicity was all but ignored in the service of what was thought to constitute a good story.  Jesse James is much more interested in perpetuating the outlaw’s myth and getting people into theaters than it is in telling the actual story.  Compare it with The Long Riders, Walter Hill’s 1980 retelling of the story of the James Gang, which has a much stronger historical sense.  My Darling Clementine, however, works magnificently as a film even though it’s a very garbled retelling of the Wyatt Earp myth that worries very little about what actually happened and feels free to toss in invented characters, such as the titular Clementine.  In westerns from the 1950s, western clothes (hats in particular) and women’s garb tend not to be very accurate historically.  Recent decades (since the 1980s, perhaps) seem more concerned with historical accuracy, although those financing the movie will seldom let the actual facts get in the way of the movie they want to make.

• Good introduction of non-traditional elements? Sometimes the ability to think beyond traditional western elements broadens the scope of the movie.  Sometimes it’s just distractingly anachronistic.  Some consider McCabe and Mrs. Miller a great western because it approached some subjects (such as prostitution) in a different way than previous movies set in the west had.  It is very much a movie of its own time (the anti-authoritarian early 1970s, with a grainy-ish look) and its director (Robert Altman, who made only one other western even more explicity revisionist).  The nihilism and explicit violence of The Wild Bunch (combined, of course, with terrific performances and stunning cinematography) have affected every western made since, although they were mostly new to westerns when the movie was made.
• Use of supporting elements (musical score, writing, supporting performances, cinematography, etc.):  Movie-making is such a collaborative art that it’s kind of amazing when it all comes together to produce a great film.  That’s as true of westerns as it is of any other kind of movie.  Good writing (think Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, for example) produces lines that the movie fan mutters to himself as he watches the film again; writing is always more important than movie makers (especially the financial backers and the studio) think.  Music undeniably influences one’s memory of the film (the Tex Ritter version of the theme from High Noon, Dmitri Tiomkin’s “Deguello” from Rio Bravo, Bruce Broughton’s stirring theme from Silverado, and Basil Pouledoris’ rollicking theme from Quigley Down Under all come to mind), and become inseparable from the experience of that movie.  Sometimes the statement is made by not having music, as in Westward the Women.  John Wayne’s bravura performance as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach wouldn’t have been as effective without the talented ensemble of supporting actors (Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, John Carradine, Donald Meek, George Bancroft and others).  In fact, Wayne is more one of the ensemble than the star.  Wayne and James Stewart are giants in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but it wouldn’t have worked as well without the despicable malevolence of Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance.  You may or may not overtly notice the brilliant cinematography in Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Wild Bunch or Jeremiah Johnson, but it’s part of what makes you think you’ve seen a great western.

Everybody who likes western movies has his own mental list of the greatest of them.  This starts with a list of the fifty-five greatest westerns since 1939, with some description of each film and why it’s on the list.  There are lots of sublists as well, including a list of westerns that don’t show up among the fifty-five greatest, but for which an argument can be made that they belong there.  There are lists of westerns according to their thematic material, lists of westerns with social concerns, lists of spaghetti westerns, lists of westerns according to their supposed historical content, and lists of the greatest directors, stars, writers and composers who have worked on westerns.  And lists of westerns not among the fifty-give greatest but which are nevertheless worth watching, often with descriptions.  The site is just starting out, so some of those sections are still in development, but it’s all coming.

Although westerns, like most forms of cinema, are more generally available than they once were if you know where and how to look, nobody has seen all the westerns that exist.  Even some of the fifty-five great westerns aren’t generally available these days on DVD. The list has been given a great deal of thought, but it’s not cast in stone and is open to the addition of new or overlooked western movies.  Although westerns have been mostly out of cinematic fashion for more than three decades, some filmmakers with an ongoing affection for the genre do continue to make them.  The most recent great western was released in 2010.

Not a western?  1939, though.

So if you like western movies already or are just curious about them and where to start, look things over.  Chances are that no matter how well you know westerns, you can find one or two additional gems you’ll come to appreciate.  It’s a uniquely American genre of film (although related to both samurai films, private eye-films noir, many science fiction films and others), but westerns can be either simple or thematically complex.  People far beyond America’s shores love these stories and films, too.  So if you’re looking for battles, stories about man against nature, Native Americans, revenge, the search for family, the extravagant beauty of the American west, courage, honor—you can find something here you didn’t know about.  Or maybe enjoy again something you already did.

Why start in 1939?  Several reasons:

• It is a truth universally acknowledged (well, mostly) that 1939 was the greatest year in the golden age of the Hollywood studios.  Movies released that year included such gems as Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Gunga Din, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Dark Victory, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Wuthering Heights, Beau Geste, Only Angels Have Wings, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Roaring Twenties, and, of course, Stagecoach.  The list is amazing.
• While there were many great movies of all sorts made earlier during the decade of the 1930s and the even earlier period of silent movies, that is not as true of westerns.  There had been an ambitious western released in 1930 that might have revolutionized the genre and introduced a major new star: director Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, with handsome and inexperienced young John Wayne.  But it was not a success at the box office, and both the genre and Wayne had to wait for most of a decade for their cinematic breakthrough.  This was true despite the fact that 1931’s winner of the Oscar for the best movie of the year was a western—the only western best picture winner until the 1990s. And it was an epic in scale.  It was Cimarron, based on the Edna Ferber novel and starring Richard Dix.and Irene Dunne, albeit with an uncredited director (Wesley Ruggles).  But it is not much watched these days, unlike, say, Stagecoach.

• What was so revolutionary about Stagecoach, then?  It was a departure in a number of ways.  Cinematically, it made striking use of western settings not seen much before (Monument Valley in the Four Corners area on the Utah-Arizona border, which became one of director John Ford’s trademarks).  It had a strong story.  It made use of small historical connections with the west (the names Luke Plummer and Ringo Kid, for example, and the aces and eights hand of playing cards).  It featured the work of both the greatest director of westerns (John Ford) and the most enduring western movie star (John Wayne) the movies have yet seen.  Notwithstanding Wayne’s considerable presence, it was a well-cast ensemble movie that worked extremely well. It even featured ground-breaking stunt work by Yakima Canutt, one of the greatest and perhaps the best-known Hollywood stunt men ever.  It was not only the best western of 1939; it was one of the greatest movies ever made.  Unlike The Big Trail, it also made a star of John Wayne.

• Even leaving aside Stagecoach, this list would probably start in 1939 anyway.  There were several near-great westerns that year that indicated a new, more serious and larger budgetary approach to the making of westerns.  Many of them are still watched, too:  Dodge City (with Errol Flynn), Destry Rides Again (James Stewart in his only western before the 1950s), Jesse James (Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda), and Union Pacific (Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Preston).  All this revitalized the genre and made it more significant cinematically.  By the late 1940s, such stars as Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were devoting their careers almost entirely to the making of westerns.  By 1950, Scott was the biggest male box office star in Hollywood.  There are those who would say that before 1939, the biggest stars were women, but after the social and cinematic changes brought about by World War II, men had become bigger stars.  And westerns had come into their own as a genre.