Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves are the two Westerns worth returning to when you want to remember what the genre is actually capable of. Eastwood’s classic took the mythology of the heroic gunslinger and gutted it from the inside, and Costner’s movie had the patience and the humility to perceive the frontier from the eyes of the people already living on it. Both movies arrived in the same decade and proved the same thing… that Westerns could be honest, and that they could hold the complexity of what happened out there.
Most of the classic American Western movies that built the genre didn’t make that choice, though. The eight on this list are not obscure misfires being dragged out of a cave for a verdict. Several of them are extraordinary pieces of filmmaking, crafted by some of the greatest directors of Hollywood. But craft and honesty are different things, and when you return to these movies with fresh eyes, you realize how much work the craft was doing to keep the honesty at a distance. The lands were never empty, and the heroes were never who the posters said they were. Here are some American Westerns that haven’t aged well.
‘Cimarron’ (1931)
When people ask me which Best Picture winner has aged the worst, this is the one I talk about every time. Directed by Wesley Ruggles, this sprawling Oklahoma Land Rush epic was Hollywood’s idea of grand, ambitious filmmaking in 1931. The opening sequence, featuring thousands of settlers thundering across the plains to stake their claims, is technically impressive even now. We follow Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) across decades of westward expansion with the kind of confidence that made Academy voters feel like they were watching history being honored.
What they were actually watching was a celebration of displacement. The Land Rush of 1889 involved the forced opening of land that had been legally designated as Indigenous territory, and instead of framing this as dispossession, Cimarron frames it as destiny. White settlers surging toward their rightful inheritance while Native Americans exist nowhere in the frame at all, voiceless and irrelevant to a story that was entirely about them. I find this kind of erasure more insidious than outright vilification, because it doesn’t even grant people the dignity of being acknowledged as obstacles.
‘Stagecoach’ (1939)
My complicated relationship with John Ford starts here, with the movie that essentially industrialized the Western as a genre and, in doing so, industrialized its worst habits alongside its best ones. Stagecoach is an excellent movie. Ford’s use of Monument Valley is painterly, and the ensemble dynamic among the passengers gives the movie a novelistic texture that B-movie Westerns of the era never came close to. I understand why it made John Wayne a star and why it gets taught in film schools.
However, the Apache in Stagecoach are furniture. They exist as a threat and Ford neither asks nor answers a single question about why they’re there, what they want, or what the stagecoach’s passage through their territory represents from where they are standing. Ford made the choice along with the movie so beautifully and so influentially that it handed a template to every Western that follows. So, the genre’s dehumanization of Indigenous people was actually codified in one of the most technically celebrated American movies of all time. Even Roger Ebert wrote in his review:
“The film’s attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land … Ford was not a racist, nor was Wayne, but they made films that were sadly unenlightened.”
‘They Died with Their Boots On’ (1941)
Few Hollywood myths have required as much maintenance as the legend of George Armstrong Custer. Raoul Walsh’s movie, They Died with Their Boots On, is essentially a full-time maintenance crew. Errol Flynn plays the character as the romantic ideal of the American soldier. He is reckless, brilliant, beloved by his men, and meets his end at Little Bighorn in an act of pure martyrdom rather than as the consequence of poor military judgment.
Walsh directs the movie with genuine momentum and Flynn brings everything he has to it. As a piece of old Hollywood spectacle, I can see why audiences responded the way they did to it in 1941. But the Custer I know from historical records is a different figure. He ordered and led the 1868 assault on Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village, which killed men, women, and children in a sleeping camp at dawn. And Little Bighorn, far from being a tragedy, was a military defeat for an army waging a campaign of elimination. I don’t think the movie is made in bad faith. I think it genuinely believed in its own mythology, which makes it more revealing than propaganda would be.
‘Buffalo Bill’ (1944)
William Wellman was a skilled director. The Ox-Bow Incident came out that year before this, and it’s still one of the best Westerns ever made. Which is part of why I find Buffalo Bill such a perplexing follow-up. William Cody (Joel McCrea) is a frontier statesman, a man of principle, who treated the Native people with respect and stood as a bridge between civilizations. He sells his role completely, and Buffalo Bill knows exactly how to polish him into a larger-than-life hero.
Buffalo Bill Cody himself claimed that he killed more than 4,000 bison while working for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and the mass killing of buffalo across the Great Plains wasn’t just some accidental side effect of expansion. It played a major role in destroying Indigenous communities, whose survival depended heavily on those roads. The movie turns Cody into this noble frontier hero without acknowledging the damage tied to real history.
‘Duel in the Sun’ (1946)
I return to Duel in the Sun from time to time because it fascinates me in the way classic Hollywood movies often do for people born in a different generation. It’s excessive and overripe and strange. Jennifer Jones gives a physically committed performance in a role that the movie has decided to destroy before she even opens her mouth. Pearl Chavez, mixed-race and wild-blooded and doomed, became one of the most talked-about characters, and the movie’s sensuality made it both a scandal and a phenomenon.
David O. Selznick produced the movie with the same maximalist obsession he brought to Gone with the Wind, and it shows. But Duel in the Sun is saying, all along, that Pearl’s Indigenous heritage is the cause of her destruction. That the half-breed blood running through her veins is what makes her incapable of choosing the right thing, what pulls her toward wrong men and wrong decisions and eventually toward death. It’s not an implication; it’s what the movie states through dialogue and through the camera’s relationship with her body, with a directness that I find startling even now.
‘Apache’ (1954)
It’s interesting how Apache comes close to doing something worthwhile. Robert Aldrich was working against the grain of the genre back in 1954 by focusing on an Apache warrior’s story of resistance against forced relocation and treating that resistance as real grievance rather than savagery. He technically gave the Western’s traditional villain the position of protagonist. That instinct was unusual and risky, and the movie’s sympathy for Massai’s cause isn’t even performative.
I can see what Aldrich was aiming for, but Burt Lancaster in bronzer and braids is that aim runs foul. Comprehensively and irretrievably. Lancaster was one of the most commanding actors of his generation, and he threw himself at the role with intensity, but what I’m watching is a white actor performing Indigeneity. He wears it as a costume, complete with makeup and mannerisms, and all of it sits on the surface of a story that needed authenticity. The Apache Nation has its own storytelling traditions, its own history, and there were Indigenous performers who could have brought it into the frame. But this is the kind of erasure the movie is supposedly pushing back against, and that contradiction never stops fazing me.
‘The Searchers’ (1956)
I want to be careful here because The Searchers is a movie I genuinely wrestle with, and I think that is the correct response to it. The British Film Institute ranks it among the greatest movies ever made. Scorsese, Spielberg, and Bogdanovich have all cited it as foundational. John Ford’s visual intelligence is operating at its absolute peak. I mean, the doorway compositions alone have been analyzed in countless essays, and rightfully so. Ethan Edwards is a complex protagonist; his heroism and pathology are so intertwined that the movie sometimes feels ahead of its time in how it renders that.
And then the Comanche are depicted with an inconsistent humanity, and the movie never reconciles. The redface casting sits heavily over every scene involving them, and I find myself thinking about the 1971 Playboy interview in which John Wayne expressed his views on race and Indigenous people with a sincerity that makes it difficult to separate the man from the performance. Ford built something extraordinary here, but for a movie about obsession and what it costs, The Searchers doesn’t care about the cost of its own assumptions.
‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962)
Of all the movies on this list, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the one I find most frustrating, because Ford is working at a level of thematic self-awareness that makes its omissions feel less like oversight and more like a choice that the movie doesn’t have the courage to accept or address. Ford builds the movie around the idea that people prefer clean truths over messy truths, and he explores the idea in a way that’s never preachy. You can feel him fighting with the lore Westerns spent decades creating, and that moment when the newspaper editor chooses to print the legend instead of the truth is still one of the most powerful movie endings.
What really stands out now is how a movie so consciously obsessed with the American West leaves Indigenous people out of the story altogether. I keep thinking about the absence because Liberty Valance revolves around the history of displacement, and while the movie questions official legends, it ignores the same people Westerns had ignored for decades. Hallie’s character also feels more limited the older the movie gets. Vera Miles gives her warmth and personality, but the narrative still pushes her into the clichéd role of choosing between two men instead of letting her want something beyond that.
We talked about the Westerns that aged poorly, but which ones do you think actually got better with time? Tell us in the comments.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
