Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood took time out from their popular series of Universal programmers for this very personal exercise in American gothic (1971)—one that should have played the art houses rather than the drive-ins.
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Sam Shepard stars as an aging Butch Cassidy, who has survived the gun battle with the Bolivian military that supposedly killed him and the Sundance Kid in 1908.
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With this 1974 western spoof, Mel Brooks abandoned the sweetly sentimental tone of his first two movies, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, for the manic vulgarity that would become his cinematic calling card.
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Quentin Tarantino follows his head-turning World War II adventure Inglourious Basterds with another exercise in pop-culture provocation, turning the old western hero Django into a freed slave who sets out to rescue his wife from bondage in the antebellum south.
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Sergio Leone followed up his international hit A Fistful of Dollars with this 1965 spaghetti western, continuing a trilogy that would end the following year with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
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Sergio Leone's comic, cynical, inexplicably moving epic spaghetti western (1966), in which all human motivation has been reduced to greed—it's just a matter of degree between the Good (Clint Eastwood), the Bad (Lee Van Cleef), and the Ugly (Eli Wallach).
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Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths.
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Walter Hill's first outright failure, this revisionist western (1980) draws on the major themes of his work—the relationship of pursuer and pursued; the beauty of clean, planned action; the attraction to violence and resultant moral revulsion—but none of them ignites.
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Sam Peckinpah's notorious western depicted an outlaw gang, made obsolete by encroaching civilization, in its last burst of violent, ambiguous glory.
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