The Passion Projects of the Modern Western

A Year of Underrated Excellence

I saw two Westerns in theaters in 2024: Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 in Los Angeles, and The Thicket in New York City. There was one other person in the theatre for Horizon, and I was alone for Thicket. I’m guessing the traditional Western audience assumes The Thicket, with its dwarf hero and lesbian villain, is too gimmicky, and the mainstream audience thinks the traditional epic Horizon will be too old-fashioned. It’s a pity, because they are both excellent films and excellent Westerns, made with great talent and great passion. In fact, if there is one uniting factor among many of the best Westerns of the year, it is that they are all passion projects, many the result of years of work.

As has been discussed thoroughly in these pages, Kevin Costner spent years planning and financing Horizon, and even more than with Dances with Wolves and Open Range, he put his reputation and personal fortune on the line. It has not received nearly the reception it deserves, and while we’ll clearly get to stream Chapter 2, the fates of Chapters 3 and 4 remain in doubt.

Thicket star and producer Peter Dinklage recalls, “I read Joe Lansdale’s book, and it was so cinematic. COVID hit this [project] hard and blocked us for a couple years.” The theme of a youth hiring a lawman/bounty hunter to bring a villain to justice, or in this case rescue his sister, has been overworked since True Grit. What’s fresh is the quality of writing, and a role worthy of Dinklage’s vast talent but limited stature. “The older I get, I want them all to be passion projects, to get me out the door.” To bring something new to the familiar character of the evil kidnapper, they’ve changed Cutthroat Bill into a woman, and remarkably, the gravel-throated, face-scarred Juliet Lewis seems as real as the snow they struggle through.

Three-time Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen had already starred in three Westerns—Young Guns 2, Appaloosa and Hidalgo—and has now written, directed and plays second lead in The Dead Don’t Hurt. Here he’s a Danish immigrant who falls for a woman (Vickie Krieps) so independent that her idol since childhood is Joan of Arc. The Civil War begins, and she’s not proud, but furious when he enlists for the Union, leaving her to run their farm alone. Mortensen based her character on his mother. “The idea was to not simply have a woman play the leading role in a Western, but to have her lead the way in our story by virtue of her fiercely uncompromising nature.”

Mario Van Peeples wrote, directed and stars in Outlaw Posse, not a sequel, but a follow-up to 1993’s Posse, both with a substantially Black cast and crew. “When I did the first one, I had my dad [Melvin Van Peeples] with me…and then the next one, I have my son. I think culture can be healing. You know, some of us watch Fox News, and some watch MSNBC, but we might all go see this fun-ass crazy Western.” Although the film loses its footing a bit when the preaching starts, there’s a lot to like here, including Van Peeples giving M. Emmet Walsh his final role, just as Posse gave Woody Strode his second-to-last.

In Place of Bones, farm widow Heather Graham and daughter Brielle Robillard foolishly drag the wounded Corin Nemic to their isolated cabin and, you guessed it, he’s an outlaw with saddlebags full of loot, and his gang is gunning for him. From the predictable setup, the film grows in interest with memorable performances and surprising story turns, especially toward the end.

Three Westerns made by non-Americans are not closely based on, but inspired by, little-known events in the history of the American West. From Germany comes The Forgotten Winchester suggested by the 2014 discovery of an 1873 Winchester found leaning against a tree in Grand Basin National Park, probably for more than a century. From England, Last Flamingo of the Red Summer Sunset was triggered by the story of Ishi, the so-called “last wild Indian,” who in 1911 made himself known; he was the last Yahi, all of whom were thought to have been killed in the 19th century. Taken From Rio Bravo, an American-made film, is Russian-born actor/producer and three-time Mr. Universe Alexander Nevsky’s tribute to Ivan Turchaninov, a Russian Cossack who came to the United States in 1856, enlisted in the Union Army when the Civil War broke out and attained the rank of brigadier general.

Though the history is unreliable, The Ballad of Davy Crockett is an unexpectedly strong little film, detailing a rarely dramatized period of our history, and the conflicts between the very lives of the Colonists and the business interests of the British. Colm Meany, the most familiar actor, makes a hateful yet understandable villain.

Starring Emily Brett Rickards, and Wynona Earp’s Tom Rozon, Canadian-filmed Calamity Jane, also with jumbled history, is elegantly written, acted and directed. With the F-word removed it would be a tough and strong family-appropriate Western.

Joe Crist is so gleefully bloody in a cartoonish way that it’s hard to be sure if it’s a faith-based Western comedy, or a parody of one—a Touched by an Angel in the Old West.

With the cost of filmstock, always the priciest item on low-budget films, replaced by dirt-cheap digital recording, student-made and amateur-made Westerns that would have once been 10 or 20 minutes long are now YouTube features: the Aussie import Bullet or Rope boasts a budget of $1. With sufficiently lowered expectations, some have merit: Buried on Shine Mountain is a slacker Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and in the amusing Death After Dusk, nine bounty hunters track the same psycho in a one-horse town.

Among the foreign Westerns is Russia’s Zoloto Umalty. Set in 1917, when a shipment from the St. Petersburg goldfields is stolen, members of the nomadic Tungus tribe are accused. Alas, the Russians appear to be having the same problems with Westerns that we are. Posted online from Volgodonsk: “Yesterday with my husband, at the evening screening, 20:00, we went to see this film. We were alone in the hall. Empty.”

Taylor Sheridan has driven the quality Western revival for several years, but in 2024, his only presence was the belated Part 2 of Yellowstone’s season five. Happily, more series are in the works.

And for the first year in recent memory, there was not a single Western TV-movie. Two impressive new limited series are Elkhorn and Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War. In the interest of transparency, True West publishers Bob Boze Bell and Ken Amorosano received producer credits for  Wyatt Earp for contributions made in the development stages of the project.  It’s a global hit for Netflix, a six-episode telling of the OK Corral gunfight that is like no other. Slyly narrated by Ed Harris, it looks at the events in the context of national politics and international business—not only Wells Fargo, but President Chester A. Arthur, railroad magnate J. Pierpont Morgan and the Rothschild banking family figure prominently.

The INSP drama Elkhorn stars Mason Beals as 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, a rising New York politician who, in one day lost his wife and his mother. Distraught, he abandoned his career, headed west to deal with the loss, and created a new life for himself as a rancher. A second season is coming, and INSP continues to focus on Westerns, with other original programming like Wild West Chronicles, The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger and the contemporary Western police drama Blue Ridge.

One of the big streaming hits of the year, Amazon’s post-apocalyptic Fallout stars Justified’s Walton Goggins. He plays a cowboy movie star in the candy-coated flashbacks of the 1950s, and the same man, as a 200-year-old noseless ghoul bounty hunter in the later story. It’s entertaining sci-fi, but if you watch it hoping for a real payoff to the cowboy setup, you’ll be disappointed: this isn’t season one of Westworld, even though the same folks made it.

And after 14 seasons, Blue Bloods was cancelled. Admittedly that’s a police show, not a Western, but it means Tom Selleck is at large. Isn’t it time someone got him and Sam Elliot back together?

MOVIES

Best Western Movie

Editors’ Choice

Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 (New Line Cinema-Warner Brothers)

A marvelous first quarter of Kevin Costner’s epic of the settling of the American West

Readers’ Choice

The Thicket (Tubi)

Best Western Documentary

Editors’ Choice

In Search of Bass Reeves (Knox Robinson Films)

The true story of the man who went from slavery to become one of the nation’s finest lawmen

Readers’ Choice

The Wolf in the Chute (Riders Up Productions)

 

Best TV Western Series

Editors’ Choice

Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War (Netflix)

History’s most famous gunfight, and its reverberations around the globe

Readers’ Choice

Blue Ridge (INSP)

 

Best Western to Stream

Editors’ Choice

Black Creek (Cynthia Rothrock Productions)

Readers’ Choice

Calamity Jane (Tubi)

 

Best Blu-Ray Western Movie

Editors’ Choice

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Criterion)

Readers’ Choice

Navajo Joe (Kino Lorber)

 

Best Western Movie Collection

Editors’ Choice

When Cowboys Were King, Volume 2 (VCI Entertainment)

Sparkling prints of a Hoot Gibson, a Johnny Mack Brown, and two Buck Jones B-Westerns from the 1930s will have you reliving your grandpa’s childhood matinees!

 

Best TV DVD

Editors’ Choice

The Alaskans (Warner Archive Collection)

It’s like finding a lost season of Maverick. In 1959, before he’d been sainted or bonded, Roger Moore travelled to the frozen north of Burbank to star in the long-forgotten Warner Brothers Western series.

Best Silent Western

Editors’ Choice

Buster Keaton in Go West! (Alpha Video)

 

Best Foreign Western

Editors’ Choice

Australia: Mayall Creek Day of Justice

The true story of the trial of eight white men accused of slaughtering 30 Aboriginals in 1830s Colonial Australia

Readers’ Choice

Japan: Golden Kamuy

 

Black Creek

One of the completely unexpected, dizzy delights of the year, Black Creek, comes from “The Queen of Martial Arts Films,” Cynthia Rothrock, who starred in her first in Hong Kong in 1985, and 70 films later decided to make a Western. “My inspiration came from Yellowstone because I just loved the gritty darkness of it.” She’s loaded the cast with several generations of martial arts champions. She shot at the Mescal Movie Set near Tucson. Rothrock co-wrote and co-produced the film, made most of the costumes and stars as the sheriff’s sister, who vows revenge against the outlaw gang that wiped out her family.

“We started two years ago with the Kickstarter program. We did this movie in 14 days, for about $425,000. One of our top Kickstarter incentives was they could be in a fight scene or have a line in the movie. We had people from Greece, England, Australia, coming just to do this.”

While it’s a surprisingly elegant production, with strong art direction, costuming, and night-for-night photography, even one of its stars, the greatest kickboxer in history, suspected it might not be based on actual events. “Don [The Dragon] Wilson said to me, ‘Cynthia, how could everybody in the Old West know martial arts?’ I said, ‘Because the Chinese came there for the gold rush. They taught it.’ He goes, ‘Oh, okay.’ I’m very proud of it. I’m hoping that someone says, wow, look what she did for two weeks of shooting and this money. If we give her a million and a half and 20 days of shooting, what can she pull off?”

—H.C.P.