The Westerns You Should Be Watching on Relay

Nearly 500 westerns stream free on Relay right now. Some are genuinely great films most people have never heard of. Others star the biggest names in Hollywood doing things you wouldn't expect. One is 53 minutes long and involves a man named The Shadow.

Here are five to start with.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

The only film Marlon Brando ever directed. He fired Stanley Kubrick two weeks before production. He shot over a million feet of film. He made the entire crew wait for the right waves to crash on the Monterey coast. He delivered a five-hour cut. Paramount took the film away from him, changed the ending, cut it to 141 minutes. He never directed again.

What survived is extraordinary. Brando and Karl Malden, reuniting after A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, play former partners in a bank robbery. Malden betrayed Brando. Took the money. Reinvented himself as a respectable sheriff. Five years later, Brando shows up. The tension is suffocating.

Shot in VistaVision on the California coast, Pebble Beach to Big Sur, the film looks like nothing else in the genre. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg later spearheaded a 4K restoration. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 2018.

Drama

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McLintock! (1963)

John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in a western comedy that plays like Shakespeare wrote a cattle ranch screwball. Wayne is G.W. McLintock, a wealthy rancher trying to keep peace between farmers, land-grabbers, a corrupt government. Meanwhile his estranged wife shows up to take their daughter away. She intends to burn everything down.

This was their fifth film together. The chemistry is volcanic.

The mud fight scene alone is worth the runtime. It's 126 minutes, it's big, it's loud. The most fun you will have watching a western this week.

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Angel and the Badman (1947)

The John Wayne movie that Wayne fans don't talk about enough. Wayne plays Quirt Evans, a famous gunslinger who collapses from a wound on a Quaker family's doorstep. Penelope Worth (Gail Russell) nurses him back to health. She wants to save his soul. He's not sure he has one.

What makes it unusual is the quiet. This is not a shootout movie. It's a film about whether a violent man can choose to be something else when someone believes he can. Russell and Wayne share a tenderness on screen that Wayne rarely allowed himself. Love actually wins here. It earns it.

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Flaming Star (1960)

Elvis Presley wanted to be taken seriously as an actor. For most of his film career, Hollywood wouldn't let him. Then Don Siegel, who would later direct Dirty Harry, gave him a western with no songs. No comedy. No safety net.

Elvis plays Pacer Burton, a mixed-blood rancher caught between two communities when racial violence erupts in West Texas. The role was originally developed for Marlon Brando. Elvis got it instead. Critics have called it the best dramatic performance of his career. The Elvis movie that proves what could have been.

Drama

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The Star Packer (1934)

Now for something completely different. A 54-minute John Wayne B-western from 1934. The deep cuts of the deep cuts. Wayne is John Travers, a man who decides to become sheriff to take down a mysterious villain known as The Shadow.

Shot in a week. The budget was nothing. The Shadow communicates through a secret panel behind a painting. Wayne was 27, five years away from Stagecoach making him a star.

There's a genuine charm to watching the man who would become the biggest movie star in the world doing absolutely anything to stay employed in a 54-minute western about a guy named The Shadow.

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Streaming now on Relay.