The Most Underrated Performances in Westerns, Ranked

 Movieweb

By Molly Phlig

January 1, 2023

The Western film genre has continuously reinvented itself over nearly a century. Here are a few of the great underrated performances along the way.

The Western film genre has been a popular one since the silent film era, hitting its zenith in the 1950s with the help of stars like John Wayne and Gary Cooper. And for legions of viewers, that’s what they think of with Westerns: blockbusters like High Noon and Stagecoach, featuring tales of cowboys and Indians, with clear-cut heroes and villains and damsels in distress. It began as a quintessentially American genre, all about the frontier spirit and Manifest Destiny.

Later viewers became familiar with the spaghetti Westerns of the '60s and '70s like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Fistful of Dollars, and Once Upon a Time in the West, exporting the genre to Italy and beyond. Since then, numerous countries have given their own take on the Western, with intriguing offerings from South Korea (The Good, The Bad, The Weird), Mexico (El Mariachi), Australia (The Nightingale, True History of the Kelly Gang), a whole slew from India, and beyond. We’re taking a look at some of the more under-the-radar performances across the western genre, those that broke the classic mold with style.

10. Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton as Sally and Big George - Dead Man (1995).

To say that Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is a different kind of Western is an understatement. Johnny Depp’s William Blake is on the run through a postmodern black and white world to a Neil Young soundtrack, with a Native American companion who calls himself Nobody and a quirky cast including everyone from Crispin Glover to Robert Mitchum. Like in most Jarmusch films, sometimes it is the side characters whose stories you really want to know, and this time it’s Billy Bob Thornton as a gruff mountain man with concerns about his hair, and Iggy Pop as a cross-dressing fur trader with a penchant for the Bible who could have (should have?) had their own film.

9. Everyone - Sukiyaki Western Django (2007).

8 Katharine Ross as Etta Place - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

7. Guy Pearce as Second Lieutenant John Boyd - Ravenous (1999).

Guy Pearce gives a subtle, conflicted performance as Second Lieutenant John Boyd, a somewhat cowardly Civil War veteran whose great moment in battle only comes because he is hiding in a pile of corpses. Exiled to a remote garrison with other outcasts, Boyd thinks all he will have to wrestle with is his conscience; that is, until Robert Carlyle’s Colonel Ives comes along with a hideous tale of cannibalism. Carlyle takes up a lot of the screen, chewing, swallowing, and spitting out scenery, but Pearce is captivating as his options narrow, forced decide whether to become a cannibal like Carlyle’s mad Colonel Ives (it does have a few perks) or kill Ives and himself before things get even farther out of hand.

6. John Hurt as Jellon Lamb - The Proposition (2005).

5. Pina Pellicer as Louisa Longworth - One-Eyed Jacks (1961).

4. Ben Foster as Charlie Prince - 3:10 to Yuma (2007).

3. Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins - Little Big Man (1970).

2. Patricia Neal as Alma - Hud (1963).

1Jean-Louis Trintignant as Gordon or Silence - The Great Silence (1968).

You’d better have a knack for being subtle if you’re acting against someone like Klaus Kinski, and Jean-Louis Trintignant does just that. Add the fact that his character is a mute and the feat of acting he pulls off is even more stunning. Kinski is a bounty killer named Loco who killed Silence’s parents and sliced his vocal cords when he was a child. Grown up now, Silence joins forces with the bandits that Loco hunts through a snowy mountain range, preceded by his reputation for manipulating his enemies into drawing their weapons first, so he technically only kills in self-defense. Perhaps Silence’s sensitivity and vulnerability are automatically assumed by the audience due to his muteness and the loss of his parents, but Trintignant is able to express multitudes through just a flick of the eyes while Kinski’s Loco thrashes about in this wintry spaghetti Western.

[Why I hate lists. No mention of the greatest performance which has to be Eli Wallach in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”] TB.