"Man of the West" is the last--and I'm tempted to say the least--of the string of westerns shot on location by Anthony Mann and bringing out dark sides of iconic Hollywood heroes.* I'm fairly certain that Mann's usual leading man, James Stewart, would have been better as the reformed gang member involuntarily resuming his criminal career than Gary Cooper was. If Cooper had a dark side, it was fear of cowardice (though I am aware that I am in a small minority in finding "They Came to Condura" interesting). Stewart could do homicidal rage and could seethe with resentment, even though he was often as laconic verbally as Cooper.
Besides lacking affect, Cooper was too old for the role of Link Jones, who had been the protégé of Dock Tobin, played with appropriate menace by Lee J. Cobb—who was a decade younger than Cooper. John Wayne was credible winning fistfights with men considerably younger than he was in part because he was bigger than they were, but Cooper could not loom over opponents that way.
The story is not terribly complicated. Link is taking a train to Fort Worth to recruit a school teacher for a small town of which he has become a leading citizen. As he is boarding the train, a sheriff thinks Mr. Jones looks familiar, but lets him pass. There is a botched robbery of the train. The train pulls out without Link, a hobbled gambler played by Arthur O'Connell and a saloon chanteuse played by Julie London. The train only runs once a week and it is a hundred miles to the next town. They set off with O'Connell limping and London in shoes that "won't last a day of walking."
From the dry terrain of the rest of the movie, Link leads his companions in misery over a hill to a verdant valley. It looks paradisical, but turns out to be a precinct of hell, because the gang that tried to rob the train, Link's old gang, is holed up in the farmhouse. It is immediately obvious to Link that the only way he and his dependents can survive is if he convincingly pretends to rejoin the gang. Dock has long nurtured the ambition to take the bank in Lasso and believes that, with Link back, the job can be done. Dock believes Link has regretted ever leaving. The younger gang members (calling each other "cousin," though I think their kinship is fictive) do not share that delusion and try in various ways to force Link to show that he is not really one of them anymore (including a knock-down, drag-out fist fight and forcing his woman to strip for the boys).
The best part of the movie is the raid on Lasso, about which a conscientious reviewer must reveal nothing. In 1958, a decade before Peckinpagh's "The Wild Bunch" and Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West," the movie was considered extremely violent. Although Jack Lord's "Coaley" is as brutish and sadistic as the villains of Leone, Peckinpagh, or Eastwood westerns, other than the fistfight the violence is mostly not shown. (OK, some of those who get shot stagger operatically around, but they are not shown bleeding.)
In my view there are no real dilemmas. Link does what he has to do. Stewart would have conveyed resentment, but Cooper only looks old and tired and unsure whether he can do what he needs to do. 1958 critics were mostly unimpressed and audiences stayed away. Jean-Luc Godard, who had not then made his first film, placed "Man of the West" sixth on his top-ten list for the year (just ahead of Welles's "Touch of Evil"; Mankewiecz's "The Quiet American" occupied the number-one place). Godard wrote that "I have seen nothing so completely new since—why not—Griffith. Just as the director of Birth of a Nation gave one the impression that he was inventing the cinema with every shot, each shot of Man of the West gives one the impression that Anthony Mann is reinventing the Western, exactly as Matisse's portraits reinvent the features of Piero della Francesca. It is, moreover, more than an impression. He does reinvent. I repeat, reinvent; in other words, he both shows and demonstrates, innovates and copies, criticizes and creates. Man of the West. in short, is both course and discourse, or both beautiful landscapes and the explanation of this beauty, both art and the theory of art of the Western, the most cinematographic genre in the cinema." (originally published in Cahiers de cinema translated in Godard on Godard, p. 117). I am not sure what all this rhetoric means, but he shore did admire the movie!
Perhaps having seen so much of what came later I fail to appreciate that "Man of the West" reinvented the western. My view is that Mann's James Stewart westerns made earlier in the 1950s brought complex, conflicted heroes to the genre (along with "The Gunfighter", "Shane" , "The Left-Handed Gun" and Howard Hawks's western films) and increased the realisticness of the violence involved. For outdoor cinematography, Mann's films are even more striking than John Ford's, though it seems that as much as half of "Man of the West" takes place indoors. Ernest Haller's exterior shots of the Mojave desert are less obtrusive than Conrad Hall's a decade later for "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here," but quite splendid.
*Mann directed the remake of "Cimarron" in 1960, but I see that and (the first half of) "Spartacus" as the start of his epic phase.
Recommended:
Yes
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age
Gary Cooper, in his last great role, portrays a former outlaw whose past returns to haunt him when he is forced by his old gang to participate in a tr...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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