10 Modern Westerns You've Probably Never Seen

The western is a genre of movies that are set in the American West in the 19th and early 20th centuries, prominently featuring cowboys, gunslingers, bandits, Native American tribe members, and other archetypal characters of western fiction. Although the genre's roots can be traced even earlier to 1903's The Great Train Robbery, director John Ford is usually considered to have shaped the Western into a distinct film form with films such as The Iron Horse (1924) and Stagecoach (1939), the latter of which ushered an era of extreme popularity for the genre. Westerns differed from most other early movies of the United States in their use of location photography. They also made liberal use of typecasting with actors such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clint Eastwood reprising essentially the same role in each of their movies and becoming iconic figures in the process.