Embrace your inner cowboy with these Western movies
Western movies are known for making historical fiction captivating. They can take us anywhere in time, painting a picture in a way that textbooks often have a difficult time doing. Historical fiction is usually thought-provoking and exciting!
Let’s go back to the old west, to images of desert landscapes, primitive stores, gunfights, and scampering war horses. These are days of cowboys, young men who were usually in need of money. The average cowboy made about $25 to $40 a month doing things like herding cattle, caring for horses, and assisting with the development of frontier towns.
Nat Love (1854-1921), Billy Stiles (1871-1908), Clay Carr (1909-1957), Slim Whitaker (1893 – 1960), Don Bendell (1947 – present), and Wylie Gustafson (1961 – present) are all famous cowboys in real life. Fiction or not,, you could make a whole movie night out of the lives of cowboys/girls, all the folks of the old west through these great western movies.
All the Pretty Horses (2000)
Directed by Billy Bob Thornton and nominated for the Golden Globe and two Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, All the Pretty Horses stars Matt Damon, Penélope Cruz, Lucas Black, Henry Thomas, Robert Patrick among others, this is the story of a young Texan man named John Grady in 1949.
Grady’s mother has sold the ranch that he’s called home his whole life. Left without a home, the beauties of cowboy life with the great hope of a fresh start take John south.
Having a friend by his side, the two are taken down a path dissecting & testing both their maturity & strength.
Shanghai Noon (2000)
The fashion of mixing martial arts and western movies may not be the most common genre in film, but it’s more than doable as we’ve seen through works like The Warriors Way and Buffalo Boys. Shanghai Noon is perhaps the most iconic of the genre.
The incompetent Chon Wang (Jackie Chan) is an Imperial gaurd in the forbbiden city of China. One day, the princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) is taken hostage by a traitor who fled the forbidden city. Wang stalks her kidnappers, chasing them to the fierce land of Nevada.
On that Nevadan frontier, he joins forces with cowboy Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson), a kind-hearted thief, to find the missing princess.
Posse (1993)
Posse portrays a little-known piece of American history: black cowboys. Textbooks & Hollywood tend to ignore the cowboys of color who roamed the west in those days. In fact, one in four cowboys were black, and their stories deserve to be told too!
In Cuba, the fearless Jesse Lee (Mario Van Peebles) and a group of Buffalo Soldiers with a gambler are sent on a suicide mission to seize a shipment of gold from enemy troops in the midst of the Spanish-American War.
Soon, they discover that Colonel Graham (Billy Zane) had every intention of betraying them. The soldiers are forced to free themselves through several lives being lost. They escape the islands for a dangerous journey across the American frontier.
Texas Ranger (2001)
Texas Ranger is purely 1875 Texas, known as a land without justice. Chaos runs free like a happy child. One man who’s been declared a legend, Leander McNelly (Dylan McDermott) is the chosen one for leading a group of unlikely heroes.
The outmanned & outgunned naive young men are faced with fighting treacherous outlaws, led by the heartless John King Fisher (Alfred Molina).
Heavily motivated by the needs of the many innocent lives involved which includes the women they love (Rachael Leigh Cook) and (Leonor Varela), the young rangers risk their lives to right the wrongs that were done.
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Our list covered just some of the celebrated western movies, so we know there’s plenty more to cover. Drop them off in the comments for our next installment!
