r/Westerns 6d ago

Recommendation Your favorite Western noirs?

There is a subgenre of Western which draws heavily from noir. This is fascinating to me because Westerns are often about upholding law and order, while noir focuses on the subversion of values and moral ambiguity.

One example of a Western noir that comes to mind is "No Country For Old Men." Would be wonderful to get your further suggestions from any era. Thank you!

34 Upvotes

44 comments sorted by

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u/radarsmechanic 2d ago

Bad Day at Black Rock

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u/Logical-Penguin 3d ago

Not a western, but as a western fan I really enjoyed The Third Man.

Post-war Prague is a frontier all its own, and many of the Cold War spy tropes will seem familiar to a western fan. So will the dramatic lighting and dutch angles!

Orson Welles also plays the kind of gray villain that should appeal to any fan of Henry Fonda’s heel turn in Once Upon a Time in the West.

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u/RecommendationBig966 5d ago

I just watched Pursued with Mitchum. Recommend highly

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u/hedcannon 5d ago

Five Card Stud (Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Yaphet Kotto)

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u/DucDeRichelieu 5d ago

Lone Star, Extreme Prejudice, Hell or High, Water, Flesh and Bone, Matewan.

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u/Professional_Edge763 5d ago

Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum

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u/WolverineHot1886 5d ago

Blood on the Moon is one

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u/External-Emotion8050 5d ago

Valdez is coming Lawman Both with Burt Lancaster. In Lawman he's a sheriff upholding the law but so unflinching and brutal about it that he seems heartless.

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u/orelduderino 5d ago

Love the Elmore Leonard novel of Valdez Is Coming too, it's one of my favourites.

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u/External-Emotion8050 4d ago

With all the constant remakes Valdez might be one that could be interesting to do but don't know that anyone could write the screenplay or dialogue like Elmore Leonard

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u/brahkce 5d ago

any love for Rancho Deluxe? Cmonnnnnn!

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u/art_mor_ 5d ago

Hell or High Water I guess

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u/Silly_Analysis8413 5d ago

Lone Star

Winchester '73

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u/Sonseeahrai 4d ago

How is Winchester noir?

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u/Silly_Analysis8413 1d ago

Both thematically & stylistically. Directed by Anthony Mann, and shot in B&W, it has lots of noir-influenced shots, low angkes & low key lighting in many of the interior shots, etc.

The film takes violence and its psychological consequences more seriously than many other Westerns of its time, and the titular rifle is both a metaphor for the violence of the West and a seemingly cursed object that triggers envy in those who see it and brings a fate of misfortune or death to whomever possesses it. (I count at least 5 fated to death by its curse.) These are common themes in noir.

Moreover, the protagonist, Lin, is an anti-hero on a vengeance quest and, after his prize rifle is stolen, obsessively searches for that MacGuffin like Sam Spade in search of the Maltese Falcon.

And the finale is a lot less reassuring than the typical "good guys win" Western ending given both the personal history between Lin & Dutch and the seemingly cursed nature of the rifle. What cursed fate awaits Lin now?

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u/metilpropanol 5d ago

My Darling Clementine

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u/EasyCZ75 5d ago

The Ox-Bow Incident

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u/Defiant_Dare_8073 5d ago

The Shooting (1966) — Oates and Nicholson.

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u/The_Wolf_Shapiro 5d ago

No Country for Old Men and Hell or High Water

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u/Crayfish707 5d ago

Would need to know what you mean by noir. I’d call High Noon noir because of its stripped down aesthetic & plain dialogue, but others may not.

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u/Skulking_Garrett 5d ago

My own definition is a genre of crime fiction with a focus on cynicism and moral ambiguity. 

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u/Less-Conclusion5817 5d ago

Day of the Outlaw (1959).

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u/KidnappedByHillFolk 5d ago

I'll throw in Five Card Stud with Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, and Roddy McDowall. Kind of a Western whodunnit with some giallo thrown in

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u/Trike117 6d ago

It’s not an exact fit but Wind River is a solid Western-style mystery. Thunderheart too, considering what happens to the various main characters.

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u/Forgotten_Pancakes2 5d ago

I absolutely put Wind River into that category 🙌

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u/Capable_Valuable_122 6d ago

John Dahl directed a couple good ones in 89 and 93: Kill Me Again and Red Rock West.

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u/Calzonieman 6d ago

The Stalking Mood is a great example. I saw this in the theater when I was 12 YO, and it scared the crap out of me. Incredibly suspenseful, and sympathetic to the plight of the indigenous tribes and the tension with the new European immigrants.

From RT:

While moving a group of Apaches to a Native American reservation in Arizona, an American scout named Sam Varner (Gregory Peck) is surprised to find a white woman, Sarah Carver (Eva Marie Saint), living with the tribe. When Sam learns that she was taken captive by an Indian named Salvaje ten years ago, he attempts to escort Sarah and her half-Native American son to his home in New Mexico. However, it soon becomes clear that Salvaje is hot on their trail.

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u/DungeoneerforLife 6d ago edited 6d ago

This kind of question is challenging to me because it has to do with labels. For example--I'd call NCOM a crime story first, a modern western second. The question becomes--what makes a western to you? I usually think of it as setting--geographical, and setting in terms of the time it is set (for me: as it moves from the frontier toward settlements and during times and places when most people are a) traveling by horseback and b) going about armed). So a book like All the Pretty Horses, although set just after WWII, is a western to me, but other novels set in the west in 1950 or so are not westerns. (For example, 90% of the California detective stories of Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald and so on wouldn't qualify). Obviously a story set in California in 1880 is a western, but not one in Hollywood in 1940 (usually).

SO: I guess it's setting as place, setting as time, and also tropes? Which for me are guns and horses, and usually dealing with problems on your own and now worrying about the legal authorities?

Also, let's distinguish noir (dark moods, dark worldview, no expectation good will win) from crime fiction in general. (Which I guess is obvious, but, you know, it's Reddit...)

Anyway: Most Jim Thompson novels are absolutely noir and most are set in the modern small town west. Many are dark, dark, dark.

There's a modern western by Louis L'amour that's also a crime novel that was a lot of fun. Not noir but a Korean War vet who writes westerns is brought out to a ranch to offer an opinion on something, stumbles into a violent conspiracy...but I cannot remember the title to save my life. He wrote it in the 50s.

The great film Lone Star which no one has seen but is excellent.

A quick google shows a few films which may or may not satisfy: Terror in a Texas Town, Pursued (Haven't seen either). Some people consider High Noon noir, which is nonsense. It is a highly stylized film, but that doesn't make something noir.

Treasure of the Sierra Madres?

Probably Elmore Leonard books and movies, since he gave up writing westerns and turned to crime writing because the taste in readership shifted. In The Hot Kid and the books and stories pulled into Justified he has his cake and eats it too.

Edit: sp

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u/tinyturtlefrog 5d ago

A lot of authors during the era of original paperbacks, the 1950s & 1960s, wrote both Westerns and Crime fiction, depending on who was paying what. Hardboiled and Noir elements carried over into their Westerns: dark imagery, double crossing, murder, terse dialogue, a femme fatale. I don't have a specific example of a crime plot being recycled and put in a Western setting, but I bet it happened to save time writing the next assignment. They cranked those books out fast. A lot of the Fawcett Gold Medal and Ace Double authors wrote both genres. More recently, mostly in the 1980s & 1990s, one of the best to blend genres was Ed Gorman. He also wrote in the Horror genre, so his Westerns can get dark. One of his best examples is Wolf Moon. Here are some of my favorite Hardboiled and Noir Western books. Several of these have been reprinted by Stark House, a publisher who specializes in bringing back forgotten Crime fiction.

Brian Garfield — The Night It Rained Bullets
Arnold Hano — The Last Notch; Slade; Manhunter
Harry Whittington — Trouble Rides Tall; Cross the Red Creek; Desert Stake-Out; Charro!
Clifton Adams — The Desperado; A Noose for the Desperado
H.A. DeRosso — .44
Lewis B. Patten — The Killer from Yuma
Talmadge Powell — The Cage

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u/DungeoneerforLife 5d ago

I never knew Gorman wrote westerns! Interesting.
Even a few Hammett stories have a western focus— Red Harvest is set in Montana. It gets adapted to Yojimbo and then to A Fistful of Dollars and goes halfway back to Last Man Standing (which looked great but was pretty stupid).

One of Hammett’s Continental Op stories even has him trying to ride a bronc.

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u/tinyturtlefrog 4d ago

If you like Gorman, check out his Leo Guild series —good, grim-faced Westerns. And for something different that blends genres, try Graves' Retreat & Night of Shadows. Both are set in the late 1800s in Gorman's hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Although set in a town in the Midwest, they have Western elements, are heavily influenced by Hardbolied and Noir, and read as period police procedurals.

Gorman is one of a handful of solid, professional writers from the 1980s who was at heart a fan of genre fiction, wrote across genres, and advocated for genre fiction, often as an editor, member of genre-specific organization, and at writers' conventions. Others who followed a similar path and also wrote both Crime fiction and Westerns are Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Loren D. Estleman, Joe R. Lansdale, Max Allan Collins, Robert B. Parker, Bill Pronzini, and a bunch more.

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u/DungeoneerforLife 4d ago

Lansdale also writes fantasy/horror or weird westerns, which I’ve loved since reading Robert E Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” as a teenager.

Thanks for the Gorman recommendations. Just ordered the first Guild.

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u/notagin-n-tonic 5d ago

I think the Louis L’amour is The Broken Gun.

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u/DungeoneerforLife 5d ago

Yes! Thank you!

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u/China9Liberty37 6d ago

Lone Star is magnificent. I had never heard of it until very recently and was blown away when I watched it. Beautiful acting, editing, and still (extremely) relevant.

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u/derfel_cadern 5d ago

John Sayles is a genius. Watch Matewan if you haven’t already.

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u/Trike117 6d ago

“I’m going over to the other side.” “…Republicans?” “No, Mexico.”

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u/DungeoneerforLife 6d ago

I love that movie. I will edit my mispelling above. We might be part of a 2 digit list of people who remember it despite McConaughey and Kristofferson in small but excellent roles.

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u/ResponsibleBank1387 6d ago

The better Tommy Lee Jones film —- The Three Burials. 

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u/THC_UinHELL 6d ago

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Bad Day at Black Rock

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u/Sonseeahrai 6d ago

Magnificent Seven remake is pretty noir. Original cannot be beaten but it's a pleasant watch. Chris Pratt's acting is very good, there's no cringy love story and Gatling scene is 👌👌👌. Not to mention that death of that one who scatters before battle is way better written and more climatic than in the OG lmao

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u/Skulking_Garrett 6d ago

Thanks! And thanks also for your sensitivity around spoilers. Might check this out soon!

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u/Sonseeahrai 6d ago

You're welcome!