There are many Western movies for people who are not fans of Yellowstone. Similar to the 1980s cult nighttime soap opera Dallas, Yellowstone is almost more soap than it is Western. The series follows the Dutton family, led by Kevin Costner’s patriarch, as they strive to gain more political power in Montana.
Even filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino refer to Yellowstone as “just a soap opera,” and while he enjoyed the original series, he said no one will remember it years from now like a good Western movie. For people turned off by the soap opera aspects of Yellowstone, there are plenty of great Western movies that deliver what fans of the same opinion really want.
Ride Lonesome (1959)
Ride Lonesome stars iconic Western actor Randolph Scott and was released in 1959. The film follows a bounty hunter who agrees to escort a killer who is set to stand trial for murder. Scott plays the bounty hunter while James Best plays the outlaw, Billy John.
Ride Lonesome features the film debut of James Coburn, a major Western star in his own right, with his most recognizable role being in The Magnificent Seven.
The plot sounds very similar to the more popular film, 3:10 to Yuma, but it deserves recognition on its own and is a great Western that plays very differently from a TV show like Yellowstone. There is no soap opera drama in this movie, as it tells the story of a bounty hunter staying alive to complete his mission.
The film is an edgy Western, featuring complex characters, including the bounty hunter’s morally ambiguous companions, and it is nothing like Yellowstone, instead full of action and betrayals.
Appaloosa (2008)
Directed by Ed Harris, Appaloosa is a 2008 Western film based on the novel by crime writer Robert B. Parker, best known for his Spenser novels and the TV show based on them. The movie has a similar story to those involving Wyatt Earp, with a man hired to bring law and order to a lawless town.
When a powerful rancher (Jeremy Irons) kills the town’s marshal and his deputies, the town’s leading citizens hire lawman Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and his deputy Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) to restore order. When the rancher is found guilty of murder, he is rescued before his execution, with Cole and Hitch setting out to catch him.
However, while it bears some similarities to Wyatt Earp’s story, this movie is significantly darker. It presents a lesson that evil men can sometimes get away with anything with the right connections, although the film does have a dark and satisfying ending.
Ulzana’s Raid (1972)
Released in 1972, Ulzana’s Raid stars Burt Lancaster in a story about a brutal raid carried out by Chiricahua Apaches against European settlers in Arizona during the 1880s. Joaquin Martinez stars as Ulzana, an Apache war chief and the brother of the famed Chokonen chief Chihuahua. This movie is based on a true story.
With only 11 Mogollon warriors by his side, Ulzana killed several people, including women and children. Lancaster stars as McIntosh, an aging U.S. Army scout tasked with bringing in Ulzana. In an interesting role for the time, Bruce Davison plays a lieutenant named DuBuin who refuses to let his men descend into barbarism in revenge.
The movie is historically inaccurate concerning the fate of Ulzana, but this is more about McIntosh and DuBuin and how this mission changes and destroys them. This is another dark story, and one that is nothing like shows like Yellowstone with its episodic nature.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Shows like Yellowstone are structured like a soap opera, with characters making decisions that lead to melodrama. Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight didn’t care about melodrama, instead infusing its story with great dialogue and intense violence, often coming from out of nowhere.
Tarantino has a great cast, with Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and more involved in the story about a group of less-desirabales, meeting up at a stagecoach stopover during a blizzard. This includes a bounty hunter bringing in a woman, who has admitted her gang will come to save her.
There is a lot of intrigue and twisting storylines involved in The Hateful Eight, but it never feels soapy or melodramatic; instead, it relies on violence and clever plot twists. While there were complaints about the language and violence, this is what Tarantino fans have come to expect from the director.
Unforgiven (1992)
While shows like Yellowstone take fans in wildly different directions, and people have no idea what could come next, thanks to its more soapy aspects, that is not the case for Unforgiven. Instead, Unforgiven has a straightforward story of revenge and betrayal and doesn’t pull any punches.
This is a neo-Western directed by Clint Eastwood, the former Man with No Name, who presents what might have been the last official Western, while also revitalizing the genre. Eastwood is a retired gunslinger who guns for a local lawman when his close friend is gunned down and mocked after his death.
Eastwood had a lot to say about the Western genre, and this movie simply showed a man who wanted out but finds himself pulled back in by numerous individuals. When Eastwood’s former outlaw sets out for revenge, it is quiet and brutal, and Eastwood delivers one of the best Western stories of the modern era.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Bone Tomahawk is nothing like Yellowstone and might be a shock to the mainstream Western fans who love the TV series. While Yellowstone has some shocking violence, it is usually by use of guns and, in many cases, sneak attacks. In Bone Tomahawk, the violence is shockingly graphic.
Bone Tomahawk is a Western movie, but it is more notably a horror film. Kurt Russell is a small-town sheriff who leads a posse to find three people from town who were abducted. The twist here is that the abductors are a cannibalistic clan of troglodytes. This is what leads to the most disturbing scenes from the movie.
High Plains Drifter (1973)
Yellowstone is a blend of the Western and crime drama genres. This means that regular people are fighting each other for power, betraying each other, putting knives in people’s backs, and murdering anyone who might threaten their position. If these people existed in the world of High Plains Drifter, they would all die.
When The Stranger comes to town in High Plains Drifter, his goal is to do one thing. He is there to kill anyone who is evil in the town, with the big twist that he might actually be a demon, or the risen specter of a man slain in the town by the corrupt individuals in control.
There is a supernatural slant to High Plains Drifter, and that makes it a very different experience to watch than any episode of Yellowstone ever was.
True Grit (1969)
True Grit was John Wayne’s last great movie and the only one in which he won an Oscar for his performance. In this movie, he plays an aging one-eyed marshal whom a young girl hires to capture the man who killed her father to bring him to justice. He teams with a Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell) to hunt down the killer.
Unlike Yellowstone, which is mostly a crime drama dressed up like a Western, this is a true-blue Western movie, with the marshal and Texas Ranger working with the young girl to find the killer and bring him to justice. There are numerous great scenes in the wilderness, and this is a genuine throwback to the Westerns of the Golden Age.
There is no melodrama on display here, and it is just a movie that features two men tracking down a killer with nothing thrown in that doesn’t need to be there. Anyone who wants to see a pure Western won’t find one much better than True Grit.
Rio Bravo (1959)
John Wayne starred in Rio Bravo to show the world what an American Western movie should look like, his response to a movie he hated in High Noon. This was also a movie that had a lot of imitators, including the John Carpenter action-thriller, į“ssault on Precinct 13.
Wayne is a lawman who arrests a man for murder and holds him in jail. When the man’s friends come to bust him out, the lawman has to fight to protect the jail and keep the prisoner captive with only a select number of allies.
This is a straightforward Western movie. While Yellowstone has a lot of things going on at once, Rio Bravo is a movie with good guys defending their station from bad guys, and that is all anyone needs to know to enjoy this film.
No Country For Old Men (2007)
No Country for Old Men is the only Western movie to win an Oscar in the 2000s, and it is well deserving. It is also as different from Yellowstone as a movie can be. Both the movie and TV show are crime thrillers, but in the case of No Country for Old Men, it is also a Western that has the Coen brothers’ dark humor spread throughout.
It is also brutal. While Yellowstone is a TV show that has betrayals and murder in every season, No Country for Old Men is a movie that is all about murder and the destruction of anyone who steps in the way of villain Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, who won an Oscar for his performance.
Yellowstone offers up the drama above all else in its soap opera-style television show. In No Country for Old Men, there is no drama. This just has a sense of dread and everyone who crosses Anton ends up destroyed and left į“ į“į“į“ in his wake.
