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Doug Gordon
Having grown up in the 50s, much of my early movie and TV watching was of course westerns (I can still sing or hum the theme songs to many of those cheesy TV series). Anyway, although I don't own many DVDs, I do have a small set of what I consider my favorite westerns that I occasionially rewatch on a winter shut-in afternoon. These include:
Seven Samurai - The Japanese equivalent of a western, and especially interesting to see how closely the story was copied by its American remake...
The Magnificent Seven - Remake of the Japanese original. A true American classic with a memorable musical theme.
High Noon - Iconic plot, characters, and actors (Princess Grace!)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - The best of the spaghetti westerns, its gross historical inaccuracies notwithstanding
Unforgiven - Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman at their best in this more modern western with a conscience
The Wild Bunch - The ultimate male buddy movie, fittingly at the end of the "wild west" era. A Sam Peckinpah film that was considered ultra-violent at the time but is tame by today's standard.
Steve, I also have a copy of LeMans. My wife asked about it and was not impressed when I told her that I liked it because it's about 20 minutes into the film before there's a single line of dialogue (and there are probably only a dozen more after that!).
Another of my favorites is the Director's Cut edition of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. The theatrical release was hacked up to shorten it to the point where it made the plot a bit confusing and left out some side-plots. Of course it's not completely historically accurate, but it is close in many ways (it's about the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and its recapture by Saladin in the 1180s).
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