The 50 Greatest Westerns

Author Barry Stone has served his apprenticeship as a western movie geek and aficionado. The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, Red River - for 50 years the western has been the only genre in a life that ''just ain''t big enough for two''. He has written on the history of cinema for the illustrated reference book Historica, is a regular attendee to western premieres for FOX Studios Australia, and was recently a guest of the Museum of Western Film History in Independence, California.Intrigued by the idea of frontier wilderness, of law and order vs lawlessness, and a firm belief that ''the better the bad guy, the better the film'', he goes beyond the American south-west to pay homage to the Italian and even Australian western - and, after much deliberation, he ranks them in order.