Western

Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samurai was a natural for an American remake--after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. Thus The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turns samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa's Yojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). The beleaguered denizens of a Mexican village, weary of attacks by banditos, hire seven gunslingers to repel the invaders once and for all.

Clint Eastwood stars as former bounty hunter turned hired gunslinger Joe Kidd, who finds himself in the middle of a range war in rough and rugged New Mexico. Following an armed uprising by local Mexican revolutionaries who claim they've been cheated out of their land, Kidd is hired to quell the rebellion by a wealthy land baron (Robert Duvall) with interests in the disputed territory. But Kidd's and his employer's interests are soon at odds when he falls for a beautiful Hispanic rebel in this top-notch action-adventure from acclaimed veteran western director John Sturges.

Oklahoma, 1873. Jed Cooper, mistaken for a rustler and killer, is lynched on the spot by crooked lawman Captain Wilson and a rampaging band of vigilantes. But as Wilson and his gang flee the scene, there's one very important detail they've overlooked: Cooper is still alive! Saved in the nick of time by a sheriff, Cooper takes on the job of deputy marshal in order to bring hard-handed justice to the Oklahoma territory... and to the nine men who "done him wrong."

Clint Eastwood's second film as a director finds the celebrated action star returning to his familiar Old West stomping grounds and his internationally acclaimed role of "The Man With No Name". This time, The Stranger (Eastwood) mysteriously appears out of the heat waves of the desert and rides into the lawless, sin-ridden town of Lago. After making a name for himself with a string of blazing gun battles, The Stranger is hired by the townspeople to provide protection from three ruthless gunmen just out of jail.

By far the most ambitious, unflinchingly graphic and stylistically influential western ever mounted, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is an engrossing actioner shot through with a volatile mix of myth and realism. Clint Eastwood returns as the "Man With No Name," this time teaming with two gunslingers (Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef) to pursue a cache of $200,000, and letting no one, not even warring factions in a civil war, stand in their way.

The leading icon of a generation, --Roger Ebert, Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood continues his trademark role as the legendary "Man With No Name" in this second installment of the famous Sergio Leone trilogy. Scripted by Luciano Vincenzoni and featuring Ennio Morricone's haunting musical score, For A Few Dollars More is a modern classic - one of the greatest westerns ever made. Eastwood is a keen-eyed, quick-witted bounty hunter on the bloody trail of Indio, the territory's most treacherous bandit.

A Fistful of Dollars launched the spaghetti Western and catapulted Clint Eastwood to stardom. Based on Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai picture Yojimbo, it scored a resounding success (in Italy in 1964 and the U.S. in 1967), as did its sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The advertising campaign promoted Eastwood's character--laconic, amoral, dangerous--as the Man with No Name (though in the film he's clearly referred to as Joe), and audiences loved the movie's refreshing new take on the Western genre.

It's Sergio Leone meets Sam Peckinpah meets Quentin Tarantino in this ultraviolent, mythological shoot-'em-up by auteur Robert Rodriguez. In Desperado, Rodriguez creates larger-than-life, genre-tweaking stock characters and puts them through their paces. As they stride bravely through an Old West lightly dusted with camp humor, they're periodically called upon to nimbly dodge bullets and fireballs through outrageously choreographed displays of Hollywood pyrotechnics.

John Wayne has brawled bare-knuckled, gunned down desperadoes, fought jungle wars and piloted the skies. But The Cowboys gives him one of his juiciest roles as a leather-tough rancher who, deserted by his regular help, hires eleven greenhorn schoolboys for a cattle drive across 400 treacherous miles. When the dust settles, Wayne gives one of his best performances. In The Cowboys, Rex Reed wrote, "All the forces that have made him a dominant personality as well as a major screen presence seem to combine.

One of the most popular screen Westerns ever made, this Academy Award-winning classic blends adventure, romance and comedy to tell the true story of the West's most likeable outlaws. No one is quicker than Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) when it comes to get-rich-quick schemes, and his sidekick Sundance (Robert Redford) is a wizard with a gun. When these two bungling train robbers tire of running from the law, they set out for Bolivia with Sundance's girlfriend (Katharine Ross).