IndieWire Names ‘Johnny Guitar' the Best Western of All-Time

It’s not hard to figure out the reasoning behind IndieWire selecting Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” as the best Western ever made. Their argument is right there, in plain sight, written in the opening paragraph:

Westerns have been inextricably linked with a strain of classical white masculinity — mostly glorifying it, sometimes critiquing it, but always centering it. So maybe that’s why cinema’s most surprising, unique, unforgettable Western is one that throws out all of that baggage …

Yeah, the female lead kind of gives away IndieWire’s agenda here. We already saw how extreme progressivism can infect the way we define seminal works of art, as evidenced by the last Sight and Sound poll, and it’s no different here. Calling “Johnny Guitar” the best Western of all-time is similar to naming ‘Jeanne Dielman’ the best film ever made.

I’ve always found “Johnny Guitar” to be high-end camp, and the fact that it transcends the melodrama is what makes it so brilliant. There’s also something to be said about Joan Crawford’s sumptuously haunted performance.

By no means do I want to criticize “Johnny Guitar”, which I quite like and find many profound things to admire about, but in no way shape or form is it the greatest offering the genre has ever had to offer. Not when there’s “The Searchers,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “Unforgiven,” “Rio Bravo,” “Once Upon A Time in the West,” “The Good the Bad and the Ugly,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “My Darling Clementine,” “The Wild Bunch” and “Red River.”

Speaking of John Ford’s “The Searchers,” there are 15 films ahead of it on IndieWire’s list. That’s rather blasphemous. It’s a wondrous technicolor masterpiece that features one of the great final shots in film history. Might this lower-than-usual ranking have something to do with the recently unearthed criticism that Ford’s film is actually a racist diatribe?

Yes, “The Searchers,” constantly cited as an all-timer, for decades now, has more recently been reassessed, by some, for its dated tackling of race relations in the west. I always thought it was more a study of racism than it actually being racist. That seems to go over the head of many who criticize Ford’s greatest film.

List-making is obviously very subjective, but it should be noted that “One-Eyed Jacks,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “High Plains Drifter,” Little Big Man,” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales” are nowhere to be found in the top 100. Also, Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” which I wouldn’t even qualify as a Western, is ranked higher than a bunch of classics, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and “A Fistful of Dollars.”

You can check out IndieWire’s Top 100 Westerns right here.