20 Greatest Final Shots In Movies Ever

6. The Searchers (1956)

The definitive western collaboration between John Ford and John Wayne features one of the most-homaged closing images in cinema history, and with damn good reason.

Our dubious hero Ethan Edwards (Wayne) spends many years tracking down his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), who has been kidnapped by a Comanche tribe, and at the end of the film finally succeeds in returning her home.

With everything tightly sewn up, however, Edwards is once again a restless relic of the mythic Old West, and the gorgeous, unforgettable final shot glimpses him departing from Debbie's homestead and back out into the uncertain wilderness in which Ethan feels truly at home.

It's a haunting paean to the dying myth of the West as Ford and Wayne knew it, and its pitch-perfect composition has been reproduced in countless movies of many genres over the years, perhaps most memorably in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, when Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) flees from Nazi Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) in the opening act.