Yes, they are excellent movies I think. They are not literary novels though.
Actually the watch is from For a Few Dollars More and it is El Indio who took the watch from Colonel Mortimer's sister. Ramon was in A Fistful of Dollars.The movies changed when Clint Eastwood showed up in those Italian jobs. Suddenly it was cool again, real believable tough guy westerns with great music and a bit of tongue in cheek ala Batman or other stuff around at the time. The graveyard scene in Good Bad n' Ugly is a great one. I've learned to play the little piece that the pocket watch plays, the gold watch/musicbox Ramone stole when he killed Angel Eye's wife.... and so far nobody has drawn down on me.
I'm not sure how literary it is, but I really love Owen Wister's The Virginian. I don't necessarily agree with its conclusions, but it asks some interesting questions about how American society can simultaneously value individualism and equality.
Ive read a few Western , Shane by Jack Shaffer, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey The Oxbow Incident by Walter van Tilburg Clark . For the most part I liked these books.
Hmm, the definition of a "Western novel", is likely to be as contentious as the definition of a SF novel, but I'm quite sure about it myself, so I'll set it down here (as my opinion): Westerns are novels that depict the stories and adventures of the men and women of the 'old west' of America in the time that it was being settled, i.e. before the time that it had become 'civilized'. I think this constrains the time period (approximately c. 1830 - c. 1900). This period of American history is unique in the western world, I think, as offering the backdrop of almost complete freedom to do as you will, while also providing ample opportunity for danger, violence and heartbreak.
I think any modern story including cowboys wrongly gets the moniker of "western". That is rather like saying anything with a spaceship is SF. But most agree that many space operas (of the Star Wars ilk) don't satisfy the SF definition (not being speculative or possible). Likewise, presence of a cow or two doesn't make it a western. Being set outside the time frame of the settling of the old west rules it out. So, I'd disagree that "Of Mice and Men" is a western - there's nothing very 'western' about it to my mind. "Brokeback Mountain" concerns cowboys, but its not a western as its not set in the right time frame at all. If that was a western, then so was "Dallas". Films such as "Dances with Wolves" are clearly westerns, I'm not sure why there would be debate about that one. "Last of the Mohicans" probably satisfies the criteria, despite being set in the East of the country, as I don't think the exact geography is necessarily important, although it is rather early in time frame which may well rule it out. ("Every which way but loose" is about a truck driver driving around the US with his pet monkey in the 1970's. It's about as close to being a Western as the next random movie. )
You beat me to it. I was going to ask who could watch The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and not be totally captivated by it. One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite.
Interesting question why a fan of pulp Space Opera would be averse to a little pulp Horse Opera. I, personally, never feared to dip into a little Louis L'amour; but I guess that would hardly qualify as "literary."
...I can't really speak for libraries at present, but 35 years ago the Western shelves were very busy places in libraries. However, the vast numbers of books being borrowed didn't seem very literary to me. Much of it looked like the same kind of pulp fiction as the pulp SFF that was around, and the Mills and Boon romance. If the genre is maligned then I think that would be the reason, much as it was with SFF at the same time. The main thing I noticed was that almost all of the people reading it were elderly men; men who will no longer be still around to read it today. So if you are looking as to why the genre has become unpopular you need to look much further back to the 1950's and 1960's, and ask why young people back then stopped reading it. And it is certainly true that the genre as a whole has become less popular. Western films have still been made, but there was clearly a spike in the 1940's and 1950's when all those John Wayne films were made, and a gradual fall off through the Spaghetti Westerns to the present day.
Now that clearly wasn't the same with SFF. I can't tell you why but young people were still borrowing that pulp SFF. I was reading it myself. I was also borrowing all the PK Dick anthologies I could find, long before Hollywood discovered him. And there were new young SFF writers too, producing fresh books. I think the whole Star Wars thing in 1977 might be partly responsible, because on the back of that success, SFF films were being produced on a scale they never had done. Then you had things like cyberpunk come along.