Hollywood, like the rest of the world, wasn’t feeling so hot about the United States in the 1970s. Faced with the relentless cruelty of the Vietnam War and the overt racism of President Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” dictates (plus his wanton abuse of power via the cover-up of the Watergate scandal), the most excitingly talented filmmakers of that era offered up “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” and “Nashville.” Even a rollicking mainstream comedy like “The Bad News Bears” carried an anti-establishment charge.
All of this was juxtaposed against the realization that John Wayne was dying. The quintessential American movie star who, alongside his frequent collaborator John Ford, transformed the Western into manifest-destiny mythmaking, was grasping for relevance in hoary oaters and toothless cop flicks while losing his second battle with cancer. Moviegoers were alternately hostile to and unsettled by this; the man they either dearly wanted or steadfastly did not want to be was out of fashion. Recognizably flawed human beings were all the rage, and Wayne simply couldn’t abide being anything other than the death’s doorstep version of what he’d always been (as he was in his final film, Don Siegel’s “The Shootist”). Once he was gone, his type and the genre he popularized would seemingly go with him.
This left a leading man like Kurt Russell in a predicament. The one-time Disney child star had grown up to be a charmingly handsome devil. Had the Western still been en vogue, Russell’s transition to adult stardom would’ve been remarkably smooth. Athletic, sexy, and self-deprecating, he was the genre’s next man up; alas, the genre up and died for a bit, right as he was entering his early prime.
We shed no tears for Russell, though. John Carpenter’s “Elvis” proved he could act, while “Escape from New York” established his badass bona fides. He also got to take the piss out of Wayne’s hyper-capable tough guy act in Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China.”
Yet, Russell didn’t get to make a Western full-stop until he saddled up as Wyatt Earp in 1993’s “Tombstone.” Unsurprisingly, he was a natural in the legendary lawman role, but it would be another 12 years before he got down and dusty again. To date, he’s only made three official Westerns. If this doesn’t feel like enough, you can at least say his efforts provoke strong reactions from audiences — good or bad. With this in mind, let’s rank ’em!
