El hombre del Oeste

Due to his reputation as a 'genre' director, Anthony Mann's film-making skills are apt to be undervalued but his cycle of exemplary fifties Westerns of which 'Man of the West' is the capstone, marks him out as a master of his craft.

This is his penultimate Western as indeed it is for its star Gary Cooper and one wonders why the film fared badly at the box office. Perhaps audiences were perplexed by the absence of James Stewart whose professional partnership with Mann had already yielded eight films, five of which were Westerns. As it happened they had a falling out and alas never again worked together but for this viewer at any rate the casting of Cooper is better suited to this material. Stewart's persona in his Westerns with Mann reveal what one critic has termed an 'underlying hysteria' whereas Cooper's innate vulnerability, if anything deepened by age and ill-health, gives his performance as Link a gravitas which contrasts wonderfully with Lee J. Cobb's demented Dock Tobin and his assorted gang of misfits played Jack Lord, Royal Dano, Robert Wilkie and John Dehner. Cooper's softly-softly, low key approach makes his later acts of violence even more effective. Despite the age difference his cleverly lit scenes with sultry Julie London work really well and their simpatico is palpable.

Mann has had the courage here to make Miss London's forced striptease as slow as possible(who's complaining!) whilst the drawn out fight between Link and the Coley of Jack Lord is stunning in its rawness and brutality. He and his cinematographer Ernest Haller have given us dark and gloomy interiors as well as varying their palette in the changing landscapes whilst the final confrontation in the old ghost town is brilliantly staged. Leigh Harline provides another superlative score.

Time has treated this piece well and it is now rightly seen not just for the masterpiece it assuredly is but also as bridging the gap between the traditional and 'adult' Westerns that were to come.

I am loath to agree with Jean-Luc Godard but when he wrote that with this film Anthony Mann virtually 'reinvented the Western', he hit the nail on the head.