The 50 Essential Western Films (Part 2)

Below I continue my survey of 50 essential western films. (Click here for part one.) I’m sharing these in chronological order. In this installment, I cover films released from 1955 through 1968.

It was a strange period for cowboy movies. The mass audience would soon abandon the genre, turning instead to space operas, disaster films, and superhero movies. The whole idiom sometimes now felt like a tired string of clichés—almost the antithesis of the free and untamed ethos that had originally made the Wild West so appealing.

But this shift in preferences also allowed—or even required—directors to take more chances when dealing with western themes. So in some ways, this end-of-an-era mentality produced many of the most innovative films in the genre’s history.

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The 50 Essential Western Films (Part 2)

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

This film is as tightly constructed as a Greek tragedy, and even abides by the three Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action. The entire drama plays out over the course of a single day in Black Rock, a small desert outpost, where a World War II vet named John Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) attempts to repay a favor to a Japanese soldier who saved his life on the battlefield. But he finds himself unexpectedly caught up in a criminal investigation, with the entire town conspiring against him.

The film features five past or future Oscar winners—Tracy, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan and Dean Jagger—who between them would eventually earn eight Academy Awards for acting. That’s essentially half of the cast, and it ensures a gripping ensemble performance rarely surpassed on screen.

Together they create a slowly building tension finally resolved in a fiery desert confrontation. The widescreen CinemaScope technology is artfully employed, and André Previn makes full use of its stereophonic capability for his brash, electrifying score. This film has…