With no live sporting events due to the Coronavirus pandemic, it has caused many to seek alternative forms of entertainment. For many like myself, it has been watching movies on Netflix or through my Amazon Prime membership. Having this downtime allowed me to catch up on a lot of current movies that I missed as well as watching and rewatching classics.

Since my favorite movie genre has always been Westerns, I thought it might be of interest to put together an all-time greatest Western movie list. Initially, I wanted to produce a Top 10 list but I came up with twelve movie candidates and had difficulty cutting two from the list. So I opted instead to make it a Top 12 list.

As you will notice, I have no Black & White Western films in my Top 12. If a Western was properly shooting to be more than just a B-movie and one of the greatest of all-time, it should have been filmed in Technicolor. The Technicolor technology was perfected in 1932.

The Western movie genre, once a staple of cinema until the 1970s, has sadly waned out. Westerns have become too high risk for failure at the Box Office, so there has been a dearth of Westerns produced the last 30 to 40 years. I blame this on the increase in violence in movies in general that have placed the “wild, wild, West” into present day movie scripts.

So, without further adieu, here is my Top 12 Western movies of all-time along with their trailers:

Top 12 Western Movies of All-Time (in chronological order)

The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

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Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

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The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)

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A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

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For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

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Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

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The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

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Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

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Tombstone (George Cosmatos, 1993)

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Ride with the Devil (Ang Lee, 1999)

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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)