Decades of incredible Western movies have contributed to a long list of unforgettably epic shootouts. For a great Western, it's hard to imagine a better final act than a heated shootout between the hero and the villain.
Whether it's a standard battle of good versus evil, a bitter rivalry that finally came to a head, or a fight to become the fastest gun in the West, standout Westerns such as Unforgiven, Shane, and The Shootist have produced some of the greatest shootouts ever put to the screen.
10 Open Range
The final battle of Kevin Costner's critically acclaimed 2003 Western, Open Range, got off to a surprising start with one of the villains shot in the head at the onset, appropri ately kicking off an extremely violent shootout that winds up drawing nearly every able-bodied man around.
Open Range holds nothing back here, with characters on both sides of the conflict getting gunned down one right after another. The movie's ending mercilessly kills off multiple players in the story at a rapid pace, with all the moving parts in the scene helping it to be one of the most intense finales you'll see in a Western movie. It's no wonder Open Range is one of the best Westerns of the 21st century.
With the Gunfight at the OK Corral and an ensemble cast at its disposal, Tombstone had the building blocks for a long, epic battle between the heroes and the Clanton gang. But one particular segment of the battle stands out above the rest, and that's the duel that Doc Holliday has with Jimmy Ringo.
With help from two great, Oscar-worthy performances by Val Kilmer and Michael Biehn respectively, Tombstone is able to put together an edge-of-your seat fight between good and evil, with Holliday and Ringo facing off in the woods adding further to Tombstone' status as essential viewing for Western fans.
8 The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch's five-minute battle sequence at the end of the film was painstakingly crafted; it took 12 days of filming and a great deal of editing to complete the Battle of Bloody Porch, which is a testament to the level of detail that had to go into its most climactic scene. The product of all that work was a brilliantly directed gunfight on such an epic scale that it felt like a full-on war.
Although not as well-known as Tombstone, My Darling Clementine is most certainly one of the greatest movie adaptations of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. For the most part, the John Ford-directed Henry Fonda vehicle is less of an action film and more of a Western romance, but that approach actually lends itself well to the movie's efforts to build up to the much-anticipated gunfight that history dictates will happen.
The silence of the scene, with nothing but the wind blowing, creates a great atmosphere for Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp's final showdown with the Clanton gang. There's also the human element, given that both Earp and Holliday both having strong personal motivations to bring down the Clantons. All of this combines to set up a gripping battle scene that ends in the deaths of Holliday and the Clantons.
6 Ride The High Country
It seems only fitting that one of the greatest stars in the Western movie genre would end his career with an all-time great shootout. In 1962, Randolph Scott co-starred alongside fellow genre legend Joel McCrea in Ride the High Country, a Western where they two aging cowboys go against a family of thieves.
Their journey builds up to an exciting three-on-two showdown, with the two heroes having a gunfight with the surviving villains in one last battle to end the movie. It's a high-stakes shootout, and even with five players involved, only one walks away alive.
5 The Shootist
Randolph Scott wasn't the only Western icon to have his character die symbolically in his final Western. A similar scenario played out in The Shootist, which saw John Wayne's retired gunslinger – suffering from terminal cancer – lure the toughest outlaws for a showdown so that he could go down fighting.
The Shootist spends much of the film laying the groundwork for this moment, which brings together a small group of villains for a shootout, with John Wayne having to defend himself from multiple directions – only for the killing blow to come when it's least expected.
4 High Noon
The very premise of High Noon functions as the perfect setup for an epic shootout. Over the course of the film, Gary Cooper's Will Kane works to sway the townsfolk to his side as he gears up for a fight against an outlaw gang. But due to their cowardice, he has no choice but take on the role of a one-man army.
High Noon executes this idea to near perfection, via a final battle where Kane has to use both strategy and his elite skills as a gunslinger to methodically – and efficiently – bring down his foes one-by-one.
3 Unforgiven
Another Western that uses a long buildup to its advantage when it comes to assembling an epic shootout is Unforgiven, which takes Clint Eastwood's Will Munny on a story filled with all sorts of tragic twists and turns, capped off by the stunning moment where he finds out that his friend (played by Morgan Freeman) has been killed. Seeing him hanging outside the saloon only worsens his mood, and further sets up his ruthless killing spree at the end of the movie.
In taking this route, Unforgiven succeeds in putting the viewer in Will Munny's head, allowing them to understand the rage he feels when he enters the saloon and begins discriminately gunning down his enemies.
The steely gaze and intimidating demeanor that Clint Eastwood wore so well in the Dollars Trilogy and the Dirty Harry movies was present once again for this sequence, with Will Munny's violent backstory and desire for revenge adding an even greater sense of intensity to his performance this time around.
Arguably the greatest of all the saloon shootouts in the genre is the finale of Shane, the iconic 1956 Western that starred Alan Ladd as the titular mercenary gunslinger hired by a family of homesteaders to oppose the evil Rufus Ryker. Shane's work culminates in a tense sequence where he enters a bar, up against two villains (played by Jack Palance and Emile Meyer) and one unseen adversary.
There's a lot going at the beginning of this scene, all in the interest of setting the stone, whether it's the tough-talking banter between the three characters to the dog leaving the bar, seemingly have sensed the bloodshed that's about to unfold. Then there's Alan Ladd's deadpan delivery of the line that precedes the gunfight, "I've heard that you're a lowdown Yankee liar."
1 The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
No scene epitomizes the Spaghetti Western than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's long-awaited three-way showdown between Angel Eyes, Tuco, and Blondie whilst Ennio Morricone's epic score is playing.
All things considered, it doesn't even matter that The Good, the Bad, the Ugly's ending isn't at all accurate; the excitement of the scene makes any and all inaccuracies easy to look past.
