Five sen­sa­tion­al old-school west­erns that rein­vent­ed the genre

The test of any good script is whether it can be turned into a west­ern. This is because west­erns sup­pos­ed­ly cov­er all the basic plots: boy meets girl; stranger comes to town; the hero’s quest; com­e­dy; tragedy; and rebirth. Occa­sion­al­ly they high­light the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the genre by not real­ly being west­erns at all.

Case in point is Craig Zahler’s upcom­ing Bone Tom­a­hawk, which sees Kurt Rus­sell round up a posse out­laws in order to res­cue a kid­napped woman – so far, so wild west, except in the final act the film nim­bly switch­es gear and becomes a can­ni­bal hor­ror film. Here are some more west­erns that might look like straight-up cow­boy flicks but in fact are any­thing but.

Direct­ed by Oater vet­er­an Hen­ry Hath­away (who went on to make True Grit in 1969), this under-appre­ci­at­ed film for­goes the lan­guid, wide open spaces com­mon in the west­ern genre in favour of claus­tro­pho­bic, nerve-shred­ding ten­sion in what is effec­tive­ly a hostage thriller along the lines of The Des­per­ate Hours. Tyrone Pow­er plays a helper at a stage­coach stop that is ran­sacked by cut­throat rob­bers who want things to seem ​‘busi­ness as usu­al’ until a ship­ment of gold arrives. Char­ac­ter actor Jack Elam is mem­o­rable as the sort of trig­ger-hap­py psy­chopath you might expect to find in a Quentin Taran­ti­no movie.

Before Mel Brooks realised the innate humour in the cow­boy film in his 1974 pas­tiche, Blaz­ing Sad­dles, Jane Fon­da starred in this com­e­dy-west­ern romp as the tit­u­lar woman seek­ing revenge for her father’s death. She hires a leg­endary gun­fight­er only to find out that he is con­stant­ly ine­bri­at­ed, a role which pre­sum­ably wasn’t too much of a stretch for the great Lee Marvin.

This gold rush west­ern musi­cal, based on Alan Jay Lerner’s stage play, was an unlike­ly project all round – star­ring Clint East­wood and Lee Mar­vin (who was report­ed­ly drunk every day on set) and with a screen­play by Pad­dy Chafesky, best known for scathing, award win­ning scripts like Net­work and The Hos­pi­tal. In spite of its trou­bled pro­duc­tion his­to­ry and bloat­ed bud­get, Paint Your Wag­on has proved an endur­ing favourite among west­ern purists, and Mar­vin even had a UK num­ber-one sin­gle with his mov­ing ren­di­tion of ​‘Wan­derin’ Star’.

Direc­tor Richard Brooks’ clas­sic 1966 west­ern The Pro­fes­sion­als starts out like a heist film; here he turned his atten­tion to what is essen­tial­ly The Can­non­ball Run with hors­es, based on a real-life turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry event – a 700 mile horse race across hos­tile ter­rain. All the usu­al sus­pects are present – the cocky young­ster (Jan Michael Vin­cent), the arro­gant pro­fes­sion­al (James Coburn), the plucky out­sider (Ian Ban­nen), the unlike­ly hero­ine (Can­dice Bergen) and, of course, our hero Gene Hack­man; too vir­tu­ous, sure­ly, to win the darn thing. It’s a belter.

In his final film, John Wayne plays noto­ri­ous gun­slinger JB Book, who after being diag­nosed with can­cer decides he wants to die in peace, but is dogged by his vio­lent and leg­endary rep­u­ta­tion. Direct­ed by Don Siegel and based on an extra­or­di­nary book by cult nov­el­ist Glen­don Swarthout, this is the melan­choly sto­ry of man seek­ing redemp­tion after a life of sin; less a west­ern than a poignant med­i­ta­tion on mortality.

Bone Tom­a­hawk is in cin­e­mas from 19 February.