Ranking the 10 Greatest Western of BURT LANCASTER

[00:00:00]He was a circus acrobat before he was a movie star.

[00:00:03]And that athletic swagger made Burt Lancaster one of the definitive faces of the Western.

[00:00:09]Across three decades, he made only 14 of them. And the best are studies in grit, myth, and reinvention. From grinning villains to weary aging scouts staring down their own mortality.

[00:00:22]Today, we are counting down the 10 greatest Westerns of Burt Lancaster.

[00:00:27]Ranked from a solid start to his undisputed masterpiece. With a genuinely obscure story behind every single one.

[00:00:34]Stick around for number one. The film most agree is his finest hour in the saddle.

[00:00:39]Subscribe and drop a comment with your favorite Lancaster Western.

[00:00:43]All right, saddle up. Let's count them down. Number 10, Vengeance Valley, 1951.

[00:00:51]We begin with the film that started it all. Lancaster's very first Western.

[00:00:56]By 1951, the former acrobat was already a rising star thanks to film noir.

[00:01:02]But MGM decided to test him in the wide open spaces. Casting him as Owen Daybright, the loyal foreman of a Colorado cattle empire caught between two feuding foster brothers.

[00:01:14]Based on a novel by the prolific Western writer Luke Short, and directed by the reliable studio craftsman Richard Thorpe, it is a traditional handsomely mounted ranch drama of jealousy, betrayal, and family bloodshed.

[00:01:29]It lands at number 10 because it is the most conventional film on this list. A solid but unremarkable studio product that gives little hint of the daring complex Westerns Lancaster would later make.

[00:01:42]He is watchable and physically commanding, but the material is standard.

[00:01:47]What gives the film an unexpectedly somber footnote is its co-star.

[00:01:52]Robert Walker, who plays Lancaster's treacherous foster brother, was a gifted and troubled young actor who that same year gave his greatest performance as the charming psychopath in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

[00:02:06]Within months of these films reaching theaters, Walker was dead at just 32.

[00:02:12]Killed by a bad reaction to sedatives administered by his doctor during an emotional episode.

[00:02:18]The fresh-faced villain of Lancaster's first Western would not live to see the year out.

[00:02:24]It is a haunting shadow over an otherwise straightforward beginning to one of the genre's great careers.

[00:02:31]Shot amid the mountains of Colorado in rich MGM Technicolor, the film leans on Lancaster's sheer physical presence more than any depth of character.

[00:02:41]And you can sense a studio still working out exactly what it had in him.

[00:02:45]He would not truly master the genre until he began seizing creative control of his own productions later in the decade.

[00:02:53]Bending Westerns toward the complex, morally ambiguous shapes he preferred.

[00:02:58]But Vengeance Valley proved he belonged in the saddle.

[00:03:01]And it performed well enough to guarantee that Lancaster would ride back into the West again and again. Number nine, The Unforgiven, 1960.

[00:03:12]One of the most troubled productions in Western history earns its place through sheer ambition and the sheer disaster that surrounded it.

[00:03:21]Directed by the legendary John Huston, The Unforgiven casts Lancaster as Ben Zachary, the head of a frontier family thrown into crisis when a hateful stranger claims that their beloved adopted sister, played by Audrey Hepburn, is secretly a Kiowa by birth.

[00:03:38]It is a film about racism and belonging that wants to be important. And it is anchored by strong performances and gorgeous scale.

[00:03:47]It ranks in the middle of the pack because it is a fascinating, flawed, compromised film, and almost nobody involved was happy with it, least of all its director.

[00:03:57]Houston publicly disowned The Unforgiven, calling it among his least favorite films, feeling he had betrayed his intended statement against prejudice in favor of a big commercial Western.

[00:04:09]And the shoot was genuinely cursed.

[00:04:11]Audrey Hepburn was thrown from a horse and broke several vertebrae in her back, and being pregnant at the time, she later suffered a miscarriage, a tragedy that devastated her.

[00:04:22]The war hero turned actor Audie Murphy nearly drowned when his boat capsized during filming.

[00:04:28]Richard Burton was to play Lancaster's brother, but demanded equal billing and was refused, so the role went to Murphy instead.

[00:04:36]By many accounts, a scripted moment where Lancaster had to strike Murphy so enraged the real-life war hero, who was armed at the time, that onlookers genuinely feared for Lancaster's safety.

[00:04:49]The chaos behind the camera nearly outstrips the drama in front of it.

[00:04:53]Houston had wanted to make a searing statement about racial hatred on the frontier, but the producers wanted a rousing commercial epic, and the finished film is caught uneasily between the two, which is precisely why it fascinates.

[00:05:07]It boasts the silent film legend Lillian Gish in a commanding late role and some of the most beautiful widescreen vistas of Lancaster's career.

[00:05:16]Houston later said he felt a kind of cosmic punishment for compromising his principles on the project.

[00:05:22]The result is a film reaching for greatness with one hand while the studio pulled it back with the other, and that tension, plus the sheer catalog of real-life catastrophe, makes it unforgettable, even in failure.

[00:05:36]Number eight, The Scalp Hunters, 1968.

[00:05:40]A genuinely underrated gem, The Scalp Hunters is a rowdy, funny, and quietly pointed comedy Western that deserves far more attention than it gets.

[00:05:50]Lancaster plays Joe Bass, an illiterate, cantankerous fur trapper who is robbed by a Kiowa war party and, in exchange for his stolen pelts, saddled with an unwanted companion, a brilliant, erudite escaped slave named Joseph Lee, played superbly by Ossie Davis.

[00:06:10]The two bicker their way across the wilderness in a story that uses laughs to smuggle in sharp commentary on race and dignity.

[00:06:18]It ranks here because it is a real hidden treasure that blends entertainment and social conscience with a light touch, marking the first Western by director Sydney And there is a wonderful truth behind its progressive heart.

[00:06:32]Lancaster and Ossie Davis, both committed activists, had actually met in person at the historic 1963 March on Washington, the very event where Martin Luther King delivered his most famous speech.

[00:06:44]Their real friendship and shared politics power the film.

[00:06:48]The movie's climax is a brutal mud pit brawl between the two men that ends with both so caked in identical brown muck that their skin color becomes indistinguishable, a deliberate visual statement about equality.

[00:07:01]Filming it was its own ordeal.

[00:07:04]The scene was shot on a mesa in blazing 110° heat, yet the water piped in to create the mud was so cold that Lancaster and Davis emerged shivering and had to be wrapped in blankets, freezing in the middle of a Mexican summer.

[00:07:19]There is more here than the mud, too.

[00:07:21]This was an audition of sorts.

[00:07:23]Lancaster was effectively testing the young Sydney on this modestly budgeted picture before entrusting him with the far more expensive Castle Keep the following year.

[00:07:33]And passed with flying colors, launching one of the great director careers.

[00:07:38]Ossie Davis was so good that he earned a Golden Globe nomination and by many reckonings, walks off with the entire film despite being billed fourth.

[00:07:48]It was also the last of Lancaster's truly athletic Western roles, made when he was 55. The acrobat's body still willing, but the era of the leaping, grinning young Adonis drawing to a close.

[00:08:01]A comedy on the surface, it is quietly one of his most humane films. Number seven. Apache, 1954.

[00:08:10]A landmark and a frustration in equal measure, Apache was one of the first major Hollywood Westerns to attempt genuine sympathy for a Native American protagonist, even if it did so by casting a blue-eyed white superstar in the role.

[00:08:24]Lancaster plays Massai, a proud Apache warrior who refuses to surrender or accept resettlement after Geronimo's defeat, waging a lonely one-man war to live free.

[00:08:35]Directed by Robert Aldrich, it is fierce, physical, and for its era, strikingly on the side of the man the cavalry calls a savage.

[00:08:45]It earns its place as a genuinely important early revisionist Western, held back only by a betrayal at its very end.

[00:08:53]Aldrich, and for a time, Lancaster, wanted the film to conclude honestly and tragically, with Massai shot down in the back just as he lays down his rifle to become a farmer.

[00:09:04]An ending that matched both the real Massai's fate and the tragic logic of the story.

[00:09:10]The studio, United Artists, refused, insisting on an upbeat ending in which Massai survives to live in peace.

[00:09:18]Aldrich reportedly fought it bitterly, warning that if you shoot two endings, they will always use the safe one, which is exactly what happened.

[00:09:28]Lancaster, who was also the producer, ultimately sided with the studio, and the tacked-on happy ending has frustrated critics for 70 years as a compromise that blunts the film's power.

[00:09:40]The movie Aldrich wanted to make is visible everywhere except its final minute.

[00:09:44]It matters historically because it was among the very first films from Hecht and Lancaster's newly independent production setup at United Artists. The beginning of Lancaster using his star power to make bolder, riskier pictures than the studios would have allowed.

[00:10:00]And the real Messiah was a genuine Apache who did escape captivity and vanished into the mountains. His ultimate fate unknown.

[00:10:08]Which makes the studios insistence on a tidy survival all the more galling.

[00:10:13]Aldrich, for his part, would spend the next two decades proving he could handle exactly this kind of hard, unsentimental material. And he and Lancaster would reunite near the end of the actor's Western career to make something far bleaker and far greater with no studio forcing a smile onto the ending.

[00:10:33]Number six. Valdez is Coming, 1971.

[00:10:38]Here the countdown enters the extraordinary late period when an aging Lancaster reinvented himself as the definitive weary Western everyman.

[00:10:48]In Valdez is Coming, adapted from a novel by the great crime writer Elmore Leonard, Lancaster plays Bob Valdez, a soft-spoken, aging Mexican-American constable who is tricked into killing an innocent man.

[00:11:02]When he tries to collect a small sum for the and is humiliated and brutalized by a powerful rancher, the gentle lawman transforms into an implacable, terrifying force of vengeance.

[00:11:15]It ranks strongly because it is a lean, morally serious, and quietly powerful film driven by one of Lancaster's most controlled performances, moving from meekness to menace without ever raising his voice.

[00:11:29]It was the directorial debut of theater director Edwin Sherin, whose bold, unshowy work here was so uncommercial that he was only permitted to direct one more feature film.

[00:11:41]The movie is also the first chapter of an unofficial trilogy.

[00:11:45]Between 1971 and 1972, Lancaster made three thematically linked Westerns: this film, Law Man, and Ulzana's Raid.

[00:11:55]Each one widely read as an allegory for the Vietnam War then raging.

[00:12:00]Each one obsessed with law, justice, and the terrible cost of violence.

[00:12:05]In Valdez, the image of the humiliated lawman forced to stagger through the desert lashed to a makeshift cross, gives the revenge that follows a near biblical weight.

[00:12:16]The casting was, admittedly, of its time.

[00:12:19]Lancaster plays the Mexican-American Valdez in darkened makeup and a put-on accent, a choice that draws winces today much as his blue-eyed Apache did in 1954.

[00:12:31]Yet his sheer commitment carries it.

[00:12:34]There is a lovely piece of hidden Western lore in the source, too.

[00:12:38]Elmore Leonard, who wrote the novel, was then known only as a paperback Western writer, decades away from the fame that would come when Hollywood turned his crime novels into hits like Get Shorty and Jackie Brown.

[00:12:51]And watch for the moment Valdez retrieves the tool of his transformation from beneath his bed, an old long-range buffalo rifle made by the Sharps company, the very weapon whose name gave the world the word sharpshooter.

[00:13:06]In that instant, the meek constable becomes the deadliest man in the territory.

[00:13:11]>> Number five, Law Man, 1971.

[00:13:15]The second film in that early '70s trilogy, Law Man is the coldest and most uncompromising of the three.

[00:13:22]Lancaster plays Marshal Jared Maddox, a rigid, humorless lawman who rides into the town of Sabbath to arrest a group of cattlemen whose drunken spree the year before accidentally killed an old man.

[00:13:35]What begins as a routine duty becomes a moral siege as the entire town, led by a powerful rancher and a broken, compromised local sheriff, closes ranks to protect its own.

[00:13:47]And Maddox's absolute inflexibility drives everyone toward a bloodbath that satisfies no one.

[00:13:54]It ranks in the top five because of its bleak power and a superb supporting cast, including the great Robert Ryan as the town's defeated sheriff, and Lee J.

[00:14:03]Cobb as the rancher.

[00:14:06]Directed by the British filmmaker Michael Winner, who would soon make Death Wish, it is a downbeat, morally complex meditation on whether the letter of the law is worth the blood it spills.

[00:14:18]Curiously, although Lawman reached theaters before Valdez Is Coming, it was actually filmed afterward. And the young actor Richard Jordan appears memorably in both.

[00:14:28]Lancaster's Maddox is a genuinely unsettling creation, a man so certain he is right that his righteousness becomes a kind of villainy.

[00:14:37]And the film refuses to let him or the audience off the hook.

[00:14:42]It is the sound of the classic Western being interrogated and found wanting.

[00:14:48]Robert Ryan, playing a once-proud lawman who long ago traded his badge for a comfortable life and now despises himself for it, gives the film its aching moral center.

[00:14:59]And many critics argue he quietly out-acts everyone around him.

[00:15:04]Director Michael Winner was a divisive figure, a fast-working commercial filmmaker whose Westerns some dismissed as brutal pulp with little feeling for the genre.

[00:15:14]And he would soon channel exactly that hard-edged sensibility into the vigilante hit Death Wish.

[00:15:21]Whatever one makes of Winner, Lawman lingers because it denies the audience the catharsis the genre trained them to expect.

[00:15:28]There is no triumphant showdown that sets things right.

[00:15:32]Only the grim arithmetic of a rigid man and the bodies his certainty leaves behind.

[00:15:39]Number four, Ulzana's Raid, 1972.

[00:15:44]The final and finest entry in the Vietnam trilogy is, for many, one of the greatest Westerns of the entire decade.

[00:15:52]Ulzana's Raid reunited Lancaster with director Robert Aldrich 18 years after Apache and cast him as McIntosh, a grizzled, world-weary cavalry scout tasked with guiding an idealistic young lieutenant on the trail of a small band of Apaches who have left the reservation on a savage, terrifying raid.

[00:16:14]Grim, morally unflinching, and brutally violent, it stares directly into the horror of frontier warfare and refuses to offer easy heroes or villains.

[00:16:26]It ranks this high because it is a revisionist masterpiece and the role Lancaster himself felt closest to his own soul, once saying McIntosh was a man who reflected his own feelings about life.

[00:16:39]He also named its screenplay one of only two first drafts he ever truly loved in his whole career.

[00:16:46]But here is the strange, obscure twist that makes the film a genuine curiosity.

[00:16:52]Lancaster and Aldrich disagreed so fundamentally about the finished movie that they created two entirely different versions of it.

[00:17:01]Aldrich supervised the American cut, while Lancaster personally oversaw a separate European cut in which he removed nearly every scene featuring McIntosh's Apache lover.

[00:17:14]Over the years, the interference multiplied, and today it is believed that around six different versions of Ulzana's Raid exist.

[00:17:22]With no single definitive cut of this masterpiece agreed upon anywhere in the world.

[00:17:28]The film about a hunt with no clean resolution has, fittingly, no clean final form.

[00:17:35]Aldrich, badly needing a hit after a run of flops, shot the entire picture in just 4 weeks for around $1.2 million dollars.

[00:17:45]And made no concessions to comfort.

[00:17:47]Filling it with a level of frontier savagery, including mutilation and unflinching cruelty from every side.

[00:17:55]They'd got it cut by censors in multiple countries. And left audiences of 1972 deeply unsettled.

[00:18:03]It flopped on release. Too honest and too brutal for a mass audience.

[00:18:08]Yet its reputation has only grown.

[00:18:11]And filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino onward have championed it as one of the greatest and most morally serious westerns ever made.

[00:18:20]Aldrich openly described it as an allegory for the madness of Vietnam.

[00:18:25]A story in which no one out on the killing ground has any real power to stop the horror.

[00:18:30]Only to endure it.

[00:18:33]In Lancaster's weathered, unsentimental scout, watching the young lieutenant learn that white men and Apaches alike are capable of atrocity.

[00:18:43]The film finds its devastating heart.

[00:18:45]>> Number three, Vera Cruz, 1954.

[00:18:50]Few films on this list were as influential as Vera Cruz. A stylish, cynical, endlessly entertaining adventure that helped change the western forever.

[00:19:00]Set during the Mexican Revolution, it teams Lancaster with the legendary Gary Cooper as two American mercenaries.

[00:19:07]Uneasy partners scheming to steal a fortune in gold while surrounded by revolutionaries, aristocrats, and each other's treachery.

[00:19:16]And in a defining career choice, Lancaster chose not to play the noble hero, but the flashing, grinning, gleefully amoral villain, Joe Erin, all teeth and charm and danger.

[00:19:29]It ranks near the summit because of that influence and that grin.

[00:19:33]Vera Cruz is frequently cited as a crucial ancestor of the spaghetti western. It's morally gray anti-heroes and operatic cynicism directly inspiring Sergio Leone and a generation of filmmakers who would remake the genre in the 1960s.

[00:19:49]There are two remarkable stories behind it.

[00:19:52]Clark Gable reportedly warned Gary Cooper that the young magnetic Lancaster would blow him off the screen.

[00:19:59]And Cooper is said to have demanded rewrites to keep his own character heroic in response.

[00:20:05]Even wilder is the film's real-world legacy.

[00:20:08]The Mexican government was so offended by the movie's unflattering portrayal of Mexicans that it began strictly overseeing how Hollywood depicted the country in films shot there.

[00:20:19]According to film historians, this is the very reason that a few years later the poor villagers in The Magnificent Seven are dressed in spotless, pristine white. A direct result of the fallout from Vera Cruz.

[00:20:34]The cast alone is a western treasure hunt, featuring a young Charles Bronson, still billed under his birth name Buchinsky, alongside Ernest Borgnine and the gloriously craggy Jack Elam as members of the mercenary rebel.

[00:20:49]Directed by Robert Aldrich in the same year as Apache, it crackles with a cynicism that was genuinely ahead of its time, presenting a west with no clean heroes, only degrees of greed.

[00:21:02]Lancaster's Joe Erin, flashing that enormous predatory grin as he betrays and reconsiders and betrays again is one of his most purely entertaining creations.

[00:21:13]And you can draw a straight line from that grin to Clint Eastwood squinting through a Leone close-up a decade later.

[00:21:21]Vera Cruz did not just entertain audiences.

[00:21:24]It quietly handed the next generation of filmmakers a whole new way to make a Western.

[00:21:30]Number two, Gunfight at the OK Corral, 1957.

[00:21:36]At number two sits the towering Hollywood classic. The film that cemented Lancaster as a Western icon.

[00:21:43]Directed by John Sturges, Gunfight at the OK Corral cast Lancaster as the stoic upright lawman Wyatt Earp opposite his frequent partner and friendly rival Kirk Douglas as the tubercular self-destructive gambler Doc Holliday.

[00:22:00]Their electric chemistry backed by Dimitri Tiomkin's score and Frankie Laine's unforgettable booming theme song drives one of the most beloved retellings of the West's most famous shootout.

[00:22:13]It ranks just below the top because it is a grand, hugely popular, definitive star Western.

[00:22:19]Even if it is also gloriously inaccurate.

[00:22:23]The real gunfight lasted around 30 seconds and happened in a cramped lot, not the open corral.

[00:22:29]Yet the film stages a sprawling shootout that runs about 5 minutes on screen and reportedly took four days to shoot.

[00:22:37]The chemistry between the two leads was so real it caused problems.

[00:22:42]During one scene, Lancaster and Douglas got so tickled by the sheer macho absurdity of their own dialogue that they dissolved into helpless laughter take after take until an exasperated Sturges finally sent them home for the day.

[00:22:57]And the film's cultural reach is wonderfully unexpected.

[00:23:01]Its earnest booming theme sung by Frankie Laine, so amused Mel Brooks that when he made his Western spoof, Blazing Saddles, he deliberately hired Frankie Laine to sing its title song, too.

[00:23:14]A straight-faced tribute to the very movie he was parodying.

[00:23:18]The production is full of such gems.

[00:23:21]Kirk Douglas, playing the consumptive Doc Holliday, was so meticulous that he planned out in advance exactly how many coughs he would give in each scene, so the editors would not run into continuity problems.

[00:23:35]His co-star, Jo Van Fleet, a fierce method actress, reportedly asked Douglas to actually slap her hard across the face to help her find the raw emotion of an abused woman, and he obliged.

[00:23:49]The screenplay came from Leon Uris, who would soon write the blockbuster novel Exodus.

[00:23:55]And keep an eye on the young actor playing Wyatt's brother, Morgan Earp, DeForest Kelley, who would go on to fame as Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, and who, in a delightful twist, would restage the OK Corral gunfight all over again years later in a famous episode of that series. Number one, The Professionals, 1966.

[00:24:18]And at the summit stands The Professionals, the film most widely regarded as Burt Lancaster's greatest and most purely enjoyable Western.

[00:24:28]Directed by Richard Brooks, it assembles a dream team of hardened experts.

[00:24:32]Lancaster's dynamite specialist, Lee Marvin's leader, Woody Strode's scout and archer, and Robert Ryan's horsemaster, hired by a rich man to rescue his kidnapped wife, played by Claudia Cardinale, from a Mexican revolutionary.

[00:24:48]What follows is a thrilling, gorgeous, wickedly smart adventure across stunning desert landscapes, crowned by one of the greatest closing lines in Western history.

[00:24:59]It takes the top spot because it is the total package. Exciting, beautiful, superbly acted, and endlessly rewatchable.

[00:25:08]Blessed with Oscar-nominated cinematography by the great Conrad Hall.

[00:25:13]And it's behind-the-scenes stories are as impressive as the film.

[00:25:18]Lancaster, then in his early 50s and a former acrobat, insisted on performing much of his own demanding stunt work.

[00:25:26]Hanging from cliffs and clambering across moving trains with the vigor of a man half his age.

[00:25:32]Claudia Cardinale, who had reportedly never ridden a horse before the production, ended up performing her own dangerous dynamite escape stunt after her stunt double was badly injured in an explosion during filming.

[00:25:45]It all builds to that famous final exchange when a wealthy man sneers at Lancaster's group by calling one of them a bastard. And Lee Marvin's character delivers the perfect reply.

[00:25:58]That in his case, an accident of birth made him one.

[00:26:01]But the rich man is a self-made bastard.

[00:26:05]It is the ideal ending to Lancaster's finest Western. Cynical, funny, and unforgettable.

[00:26:13]The film is a showcase of hard-bitten talent, giving the pioneering black actor and athlete Woody Strode a substantial, dignified role as the group's scout in an era when such parts were rare.

[00:26:26]Alongside Jack Palance as the charismatic revolutionary and Robert Ryan as the tender-hearted wrangler.

[00:26:33]Richard Brooks shot much of it in the brutal heat of the American desert standing in for Mexico.

[00:26:39]And Conrad Hall's camera work turns that punishing landscape into something painterly.

[00:26:45]All burnished golds and deep shadow.

[00:26:48]What truly sets the film apart is how smart it is. Treating its mercenaries as thinking professionals whose competence is its own pleasure to watch, a template countless later action films would borrow.

[00:27:02]More than half a century on, The Professionals remains the perfect distillation of everything Burt Lancaster brought to the Western.

[00:27:10]Physical grace, sly intelligence, moral weight, and that unmistakable dangerous charm.

[00:27:18]If you only ever watch one Lancaster Western, the consensus is nearly unanimous.

[00:27:24]Make it this one.

[00:27:27]So, there you have it, the 10 greatest Westerns of Burt Lancaster, ranked from his conventional first ride in Vengeance Valley to the glorious peak of The Professionals.

[00:27:38]Along the way, he grinned as a villain, reinvented himself as a weary old scout, survived a cursed Audrey Hepburn shoot, fought in freezing mud, and made two rival versions of the same masterpiece.

[00:27:53]He made only 14 Westerns, but the best of them stand with anyone's.

[00:27:59]Do you agree with the top spot, or does another Lancaster Western deserve the crown?

[00:28:05]Like, subscribe, and tell me your ranking in the comments.

[00:28:09]Until next time, keep your powder dry and watch the horizon.