The Civil War is arguably the defining event of American history, a conflict that is still in many ways unresolved. Unsurprisingly, a lot of movies have resulted from this. Most recently, The Free State of Jones, which tells the story of a southern man who teams up with former slaves to battle the Confederation from within.
Somewhat more surprisingly, a lot of these films have been westerns, which use the escalating conflicts that lead to, and the aftermath of, the Civil War as fuel for their plots. Here are The 15 Best Civil War Westerns Of All Time.
15. Django Unchained
Tarantino has suggested that his Django Unchained, which uses the iconography of the Western cowboy to run riot through the Antebellum South, should be termed a "Southern" (interestingly enough, this term would only work for a handful of the films on this list). It's as good a term as any for this borderline indescribable film, a dizzying, brutal act of wish fulfillment about a freed slave who enacts a brutal revenge on slave owners while on a quest to save his wife.
At the time, many criticized the film for turning slavery and racism into something cartoonish, never mind that even the most outrageous indignities and violence in the film is drawn from life, but what Tarantino did was something even more remarkable, he made slavery unfamiliar. Not merely an ugly fact of history class, but something startling and absurd in its injustice. That he achieved this not through solemnity but through irreverence makes a brutal kind of sense.
14. Red River
Red River, which tells the story of a cattle rancher who is nearly ruined by the Civil War, is another film in which Wayne bucks the expected rules of his persona. Instead of a confident patrician presence, Wayne, as the rancher who stakes his fortune on a make or break cattle drive, becomes a dark-eyed, haunted figure. His personal ruin is juxtaposed against the stark beauty of the landscape he rides through, shot in almost unbearably rich black and white.
Red River is also a change of pace for director Howard Hawks, best ed for being the greatest director of the ensemble cast in the first half of the twentieth century. There are great ing characters in Red River, but the central conflict is between two of them, Wayne and his adopted son, played by Montgomery Clift with his usual damaged poeticism. Though it doesn't draw as much from the Civil War as some of the other films on the list, Red River is a reminder of what cataclysmic reverberations the war sent through our society, and how it set in motion even peripheral stories as epic as this one.
13. Vera Cruz
Brightly colored where Fort Apache was starkly black and white, swashbuckling where Apache was elegiac, and about as much fun as films are legally allowed to be, Vera Cruz is pretty much the exact opposite of what postwar films are supposed to be. The film follows Gary Cooper as a veteran who drifts down to Mexico to look for mercenary work after the war has ended. There, he runs into a renegade played by Burt Lancaster and the two begin a long series of one-ups and double-crosses until eventually ing forces to steal $3 million in gold from their employer.
It's classic Hollywood melodrama at its best, filled with duels, plot twists, easy banter and great character actors (Charles Bronson AND Ernest Borgnine, how's that for a twofer?) all packed into 94 minutes by director Robert Aldrich. Try getting that kind of efficiency from your multiplex entertainment today.
12. The Naked Spur
Though not as iconic as the films that John Wayne made with John Ford, or the westerns Clint Eastwood made with Don Siegel, the cycle of films that director Anthony Mann made with James Stewart stand out as some of the finest westerns ever made. Of these, The Naked Spur is arguably the best, following Stewart as a veteran and bounty hunter whose land was sold out from under him while he was away at war. He's spent the postwar years trying to earn the money to buy it back by hunting a group of dangerous, desperate men while fighting off his own inner demons.
The Mann films incorporated the psychological darkness and frank violence of film noir and juxtaposed it against the wide open spaces of the American wilderness, creating movies both vividly beautiful and disturbing. Stewart's channeled his own experiences as a veteran into his character; working through what to the modern viewer is unmistakably PTSD. All of the Mann/Stewart films are worth watching, but start with this one.
11. Major Dundee
This film's making was nearly as contentious as the Civil War itself. Sam Peckinpah's third film was the first to include one of his legendary battles with the powers-that-be at the studio. After a reported four hour, 38-minute cut was chopped to a mere two hours, the film was relegated to the status of cautionary tale. However, a "restored" version that put back a whole thirteen minutes of lost footage inspired a reconsideration.
Sadly, Major Dundee is not a masterpiece and probably never was. It's a big ungainly thing, at war with itself, halfway between the revisionist epic it wants to be and the straightforward heroic picture it's forced to be. But these contradictions make it more fascinating, not less. The film follows Major Dundee (played by a teeth grinding, ever-enunciating Charlton Heston) a soldier demoted during the war to managing a prison camp in New Mexico. After several attacks by Apache Guerrillas, Dundee marshals a command comprised of Union prison guards and Confederate Prisoners, promptly invades Mexico and gets into a war with somehow. It has a strange plot, to say the least.
It's a movie about divided loyalties that is itself divided. One can feel the tension in the iconoclastic Peckinpah as he goes from iring the sheer hubris of Dundee to being appalled by his overreach, sometimes within the space of a single scene.
Most of its pleasures come for the modern viewer comes from the interplay of its cast. Including Heston, who, though currently out of vogue, is the type of larger-than-life figure to pull all of this off, and Richard Harris, who brings the full force of his Irish bluster and flair to the leader of the Confederates. Brock Peters, James Coburn, Slim Pickens, LQ Jones, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates fill out a cast that looks like the result of a drunken game of "Western Character Actors Bingo."
10. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The three titular characters in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly care about nothing but themselves. That's the whole point. Far from fighting for a cause they'd laugh at the very notion; since the three are waging their pitched battle in the middle of the Civil War this can be a little tough to do. But they mostly manage.
Still in one of the very best set pieces of the film (and given that the film is nothing but great set pieces this is saying something) Blondie (The Good) and Tuco (The Ugly) end up caught in a pitched and pointless battle over a contested bridge. The fight has long since devolved into a bloody meat grinder of a stalemate and since there's no other way through the two decide to end the battle in rather spectacular fashion. It's director Sergio Leone at his best, operatic, intense, sentimental ("Could you help me live just a little longer? I'm expecting good news") poetic, cold and above all almost unbearably badass. Just like the film as a whole.
9. Buck And The Preacher
The '70s saw the flourishing of the revisionist western, whose seeds can be seen in Major Dundee, and the spaghetti western, which reached the peak of its form with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Somewhere between the two lies the influx of Black westerns. Though the tradition of the black cowboy movie stretches back to the '30s and Herb Jefferies, the '70s saw an increase of the subgenre's popularity, which combined the political consciousness of the revisionist westerns and the increased violence of the spaghetti.
One of the best examples is Buck and the Preacher, starring and directed by Sidney Poitier and also starring Harry Belafonte. The film takes the old western trope of the scoundrel and the straight man. One a frontiersman leading a group of freed slaves into the western territory, the other a conman trying to prey off them, the two eventually team up against a team of vicious bushwhackers. The film delights in turning traditional western iconography on its head, climaxing with a group of Native Americans riding to the rescue against the cavalry. Buck and the Preacher has never been as popular as it should be, but it's begging for rediscovery.
8. Bad Company
Bad Company is a western after the '70s own heart. Loose, improvisatory, shot by the prince of darkness himself, Gordon Willis (The Godfather), and directed by the bizarrely ubiquitous Robert Benton. It follows a young man who dodges the Union draft and falls in with, well, some bad company. The newly formed crew heads west, with no greater aim than to stay out of the war's way.
Bad Company isn't a great film, it's episodic and unfocused and not always to its benefit. But it's worth watching just to see so much talent in its prime. This is only the third movie Jeff Bridges starred in (behind The Last Picture Show and Fat City) and he makes a good rogue. The film's point of view is obviously as influenced by Vietnam as it is The Civil War, but that doesn't necessarily make it invalid. Far from it, it's actually interesting to see the characters treat the defining conflict of their age as just an inconvenience.
7. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is the story of one of the most famous bank robberies of all time. The fact that it was famous for having just about everything go wrong during its execution makes for an interesting film. The robbery was perpetuated by Jesse James and the rest of the infamous James/Younger gang, a band of Confederate Bushwhackers who stayed together after the war and just started robbing stuff. After they were offered amnesty by the state of Missouri, the James Younger Gang responded by attempting to rob "the biggest bank west of the Mississippi."
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid was more or less the end of the gang. A series of disasters that would be unfair to give away strike during the robbery. The film is set apart by Phillip Kaufman's assured direction, and Robert Duvall's reptilian performance as the coldest, scariest Jesse James ever put on film, a title for which there is no small amount of competition.