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Let’s see … it’s probably Bud Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959) in my number one slot (for the minimalist desolation, a hardscrabble dry run for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, all broken waste and laconic cowboy palaver), then Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) at two (for the austere classicism—horse, rider, sky, mountains, piney breaks—with sudden pointillist spurts of color, e.g., in the mountain mining camp, to counterpoint the Zen-like stripping down), and … then what?
- The Ruse, William S. Hart (1915). Because something by or with this silent-era icon has to be on the list, and since (shame, shame) I haven’t seen Hell’s Hinges … Come to make fun, then go away astonished: as an early modernist study in the psychology of underplaying, the guy’s at least 30 years ahead of the competition.
