The Far Country

The Far Country (1954) runs a very close second to The Man from Laramie as the best Anthony Mann-James Stewart collaboration. An exceedingly cynical Western, it casts a decidedly harsh light on the genre's cult of individuality.

Cattleman Jeff Webster (James Stewart) narrowly survives a mutiny while taking his herd to Seattle. Accused of murder, he and sidekicks Ben (Walter Brennan) and Rube (Jay C. Flippen) hightail it to Alaska, then in the midst of the Yukon Gold Rush. Arriving in the boom town of Skagway, Webster finds it the private fiefdom of self-appointed lawman Gannon (John McIntire), who shakes Ben down for his cattle and threatens to hang him. Webster escapes into Canada with his herd, only to find Gannon setting up shop in Dawson, ready to corrupt a whole new country.

The Far Country boldly subverts the Western archetype of the loner-gunfighter. Jeff's self-reliance, so admirable in other oaters, comes off as petty and callous: Jeff ignores Gannon's cruelty except where it concerns him, and in one scene coldly watches his erstwhile friends get buried under an avalanche. Living outside the law suits him, as when he steals back his own herd from Gannon at gunpoint. With his distrust of others, resentment of "government" interference and dreams of hitting it big, Jeff seems more like an Old West entrepeneur than a gunfighter-hero.

Indeed, Mann plays the story as a vicious critique of capitalism. Alaska and the Yukon exemplify social Darwinism in action: the honest prospectors are no match for the wicked Gannon and greedy saloon madam Rhonda (Ruth Roman), who corner commodities, swindle through means fair and foul, hornswaggle rubes and employ brute force when necessary. With the land undeveloped and respectable authority beyond reach, Gannon runs the Yukon like a Mob boss.

The film softpedals its message towards the end. Jeff is pushed too far, Ronda has a change of heart and the finale becomes a predictable (if well-staged) good versus bad showdown. Writer Borden Chase hammers the theme home, making sure we know that sticking up for your fellow man is the right thing to do. It rings false, and we wonder if the studio (or Jimmy Stewart himself) had a hand in neutering a heretofore bleak film.



Even so, The Far Country's nastiness still bleeds through. Later films took this concept even further: John Wayne's Ethan Edwards used solitude to mask psychotic racism, Paul Newman's Hombre unloaded buckshot into an unarmed man's back, and Clint Eastwood made a whole career playing lone gunmen of doubtful virtue. Qualified though it is, Mann's cynicism is far ahead of the Western curve.

Mann can always be relied on for a beautiful film. William H. Daniels captures some striking Canadian locations, the frost-bitten Yukon and Alaska Territories providing a unique Western locale. Borden Chase's script is well-crafted and biting, making a sprawling story and large cast of characters engrossing.

James Stewart did his best work in Westerns, and The Far Country is another solid performance. Until his change of heart, Jeff makes a fine match for Stewart's equally amoral protagonist in Two Rode Together. Gorgeous Ruth Roman (Strangers on a Train) makes such a wonderful femme fatale that her eleventh hour redemption seems phony. Corinne Calvet (What Price Glory?) is cute, but her character is so slight we'd rather Jeff end up with Roman. A galaxy of Western character actors populate the supporting cast: Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo) as a crusty sidekick, Robert Wilkie (High Noon) and Jack Elam (Once Upon a Time in the West) as Gannon's thugs, Royal Dano (Man of the West) and Harry Morgan (The Shootist) as prospectors.

The show-stealer, however, is John McIntire (Elmer Gantry). Usually relegated to memorable bit parts, McIntire makes Gannon one of the all-time great Western villains. An embodiment of unbridled capitalism, Gannon is a perverse mixture of sleazy charm ("I'm going to hang you, but I'm going to like you!"), piratical opportunism and brute sadism. Knowingly evil characters are tough to make convincing, but McIntire nails it better than anyone this side of James Mason in Lord Jim.

The Far Country is another great Western from Anthony Mann. Aside from the openly pro-Indian Devil's Doorway, it might be his most provocative oater, crowd-pleasing finale or no. It's certainly among his two or three best.

The Tall Target

Anthony Mann returns to historical noir with The Tall Target (1951), an excellent thriller based on the 1861 Baltimore Plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. Presaging The Day of the Jackal and Valkyrie, Mann crafts an assassination film where the outcome is predetermined; the interest lies not with the assassins' chance of success, but how they'll be stopped.

New York Police Sergeant John Kennedy (Dick Powell) discovers that President-elect Abraham Lincoln is the target of an assassination plot by pro-Southern citizens of Baltimore. Unfortunately, Kennedy's superiors don't believe him, so he takes it upon himself to foil the plot. Kennedy boards a Baltimore and Ohio flyer full of suspicious characters: a shifty stranger (Leif Erickson) who tries to impersonate Kennedy, a Southern West Point dropout (Marshall Thompson) planning to join the Confederate Army, a Union Colonel (Adolphe Menjou) who's not what he seems. Kennedy himself is targeted by the assassins, who try to frame him for murder before the train reaches Baltimore - and before Lincoln can be warned.

The Tall Target is a taut little thriller that zips along at a brisk pace. The plot is riveting from the word go, with Kennedy facing a forbidding gallery of antagonists. Many of Kennedy's fellow passengers openly declare that they want Lincoln dead, and the Sergeant has his work cut out for him just determining the scope of the plot, let alone stopping it. Writers George Worthing Yates, Art Cohn and Geoffrey Cohn craft a twisting deliciously complex plot keeps the audience on the edge of their seat, with the biggest plot twist coming offscreen. Mann's typically stylish direction, Paul Vogel's forbidding photography and a vividly rendered cast bring this story to life.

Dick Powell is excellent as the tough, grimly determined Kennedy. The supporting cast is equally solid. Adolphe Menjou (Paths of Glory) and Marshall Thompson (Battleground) are suitably devious as the plot's ringleaders, and Leif Erickson (On the Waterfront) gets a choice bit as a sleazy impostor. Ruby Dee (Cat People) shines as a helpful, quietly rebellious slave. Paula Raymond's (Devil's Doorway) feisty soldier's wife and Florence Bates's (Rebecca) arrogant abolitionist are also vividly rendered. Will Geer (In Cold Blood) and Victor Kilian (Abe Lincoln in Illinois) provide some light comic relief as the train's conductor and engineer.

The Tall Target is a superb historical thriller. It doesn't quite match the brilliance of Mann's earlier Reign of Terror, but it's still a solid film that's highly recommended.

God's Little Acre

Is there any way to review God's Little Acre (1958) without using profanity? Probably not, but I'll give it a try.

Anthony Mann adapts Erskine Caldwell's controversial novel of Southern perversity and hopelessness, and the result isn't pretty. I've never read the novel, so it's possible that something profound was lost (badly) in translation, but Mann completely botches the adaptation, creating a movie that's atrocious on every conceivable level.

Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) is a Georgia sharecropper who's devoted to finding a hidden cache of gold on his property. His single-minded, seemingly-endless quest makes him largely oblivious to his family's soap opera entanglements: daughter Rosamund's (Helen Westcott) marriage to Will Thompson (Aldo Ray), a union organizer, is faltering as Will sleeps with Griselda (Tina Louise). Local hick Pluto (Buddy Hackett) wants to run for Sheriff, and also desire's Ty Ty's hot-house tomato daughter, Darlin' Jill (Fay Spain). Throw in another son (Jack Lord), a union riot, heavy-handed religious imagery and an albino (Michael Landon) with dowsing powers and you've got one heck of a Gothic freakshow.

The overwrought, Southern-fried melodrama of God's Little Acre makes Peyton Place look like Brief Encounter. This is one of the most hideously-caricatured depictions of Southern life outside of The Chase, where everyone is stark raving mad, rock-stupid or sexually repressed. Wallowing with poor (if pretty) white trash is a guilty pleasure for some, and can even be art in the hands of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, but I reckon only masochists would draw pleasure from this film. It's watching unpleasant people do weird and pointless things for two hours, and I'd rather spend the time cutting my toenails or regrouting the bathroom.

God's Little Acre goes out of its way to fail. Scenes go on long after the point's sunk in, generating no tension or interest, merely incredulity or boredom. "Colorful" characters are given stupid dog names (Ty Ty, Pluto, Griselda?) and defined in the crudest possible terms: Ty Ty wants gold, the girls want sex, the Sheriff wants elected, Will wants justice. Skull-crushingly obvious "symbolism" (Ty Ty carting around a cross, the albino) makes things more obnoxious. The one area where Mann might be expected to excell - Will's battle with the mill-owner - comes off as rushed and perfunctory. This subplot is secondary to the beef-cake and bosom-heaving, and frankly Mann doesn't seem to know what he's doing. The racy content and "leftist" elements might have been controversial in 1958, but they seem laughably overripe at fifty years' distance.

Anthony Mann is still Anthony Mann, so the movie's not bad to look at. Ernest Haller has some nice black-and-white photography that perfectly emphasizes the seediness of the characters and setting, perhaps to an excessive degree. The movie crawls at a snail's pace, never generating more than momentary interest, with poorly-written, badly-acted scenes that drag on like a particularly-hormonal high school play. Elmer Bernstein's jazzy, upbeat score is completely wrong for the film.

Robert Ryan is one of this blog's favorite actors, but even he comes off badly. Given a poorly-written character who's obsession is taken for granted, never explained, Ryan compensates by chewing scenery and putting on the phoniest Southern accent in film history. It isn't pretty to see such a great actor reduced to spittle-flecked, corn-pone hamming.

The supporting cast is no better. Buddy Hackett (The Love Bug) is punchably obnoxious as a politically-ambitious hick. Tina Louise (Gilligan's Island) and Fay Spain (Al Capone) look great but their characters are as shallow as a kiddie pool. Aldo Ray's (Men in War) comes off as a suicidal twat rather than a force of righteous anger, and Jack Lord (Man of the West) is a non-entity. The rest of the cast just plain sucks.

God's Little Acre is an unbelievably bad film. Like, "fifty worst movies of all time" list bad. The fact that it's from the director of The Man from Laramie and Reign of Terror make it all the more inexplicable.

Bend of the River

Bend of the River (1952) is a fairly middling effort by Anthony Mann standards, which means it's still a pretty solid Western. His second collaboration with James Stewart, it gets few points for originality but succeeds on its own terms as a fine adventure tale.

Gunslinger Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) is escorting an Oregon-bound wagon train when he comes across Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) being lynched by a band of vigilantes. Glyn saves Cole and the two strike up a friendship, though they part ways when they arrive in Portland. Glyn returns to Portland after his pioneers fail to receive a shipment of food, finding that Cole is set up as a gambler, with pretty farmer's daughter Laura (Julia Adams) as his girl. Glyn, Cole and friendly cardsharp Trey (Rock Hudson) forcibly commendeer the supplies, but run into trouble from a crooked businessman's (Howard Petrie) gang of thugs and Glyn's own mutinous followers - including Cole.

Bend of the River was penned by Borden Chase, who also wrote Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), and it shares many similarities with the Hawks film. Some are generalities to be expected in a wagon train film; other scenes are lifted almost intact (the Indian fight early on, the mutiny). A Fordian element about building a new town in the wilderness is also integrated into the film. The most original element is the McLyntock-Cole dynamic, two "men with a past" who prove poles apart morally. The downside to this, however, is some corny moralizing about "bad apples" and changing a man's nature that Mann expresses only in the most obvious terms.

Despite this, Mann keeps things interesting with well-drawn lead characters, plenty of plot twists and a lot of action, and in fairness the film hangs together much better than Red River, with a climax that's actually cathartic. If the movie is closer to the all-action Winchester '73 than Mann's more sharply-drawn later films, this isn't a bad thing. His later (and superior) The Far Country (1954) would revisit some of the plot elements here, but this is a good trial run, and a fine movie in its own right.

As expected in a Mann film, the scenery is the high-point: Oregon's Mount Hood provides a gorgeous backdrop to most of the action, and Irving Glassberg's colorful cinematography makes the film a visual treat. The movie has some splendid action scenes, particularly the running gun battle through the saloons and streets of Portland, and the final fight between Glyn and Cole.

James Stewart is dependably James Stewart, with the usual Mann-infused edge of neuroses and violence. Arthur Kennedy gets the meatiest role: depth-wise, Emerson Cole isn't a patch on The Man From Laramie's Vic, but Kennedy excells at making Cole likeable yet subtly devious. Julia Adams and Rock Hudson, however, are shafted with worthless parts, and Jay C. Flippen is burdened with one too many speeches about bad apples. There's also a small role for Stepin' Fetchit, who's okay but seems out of place, and Mann regulars Harry Morgan and Royal Dano put in appearances.

Bend of the River is far from Mann's best work, and aside from The Naked Spur probably his weakest collaboration with Stewart. That said, it's still a solid Western with a lot to commend it.

Reign of Terror

This underseen gem is one of Anthony Mann's best films. Reign of Terror (1949), aka The Black Book is essentially a film noir set in Revolutionary France. Perhaps not as ambitious as his Westerns or historical epics, it's nonetheless a unique and interesting film.

France, 1794. The Reign of Terror is in full swing, with the Committee of Public Safety sanctioning mass executions in the name of "the People." Maximillian Robespierre (Richard Basehart) plans to seize power, hoping to be made Dictator of France. His political rival, Francois Barat (Richard Hart), enlists Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings) to pose as a pro-Terror leader and retrieve his "black book," which contains the names of Robespierre's enemies sentenced to death.

Reign of Terror is a remarkably oppressive and bleak film. John Alton's striking photography creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, with extreme use of shadows and close-ups out of Eisenstein; even outdoor scenes seem nightmarish and unreal. Violence lurks around every corner, from state-sanctioned murder and assassination to mob lynching to petty thieves. And needless to say, no one can be trusted. A few blips of black humor (many involving Robespierre's dog) do little to alleviate the atmosphere.

The vagaries of the plot are almost incidental to the portrayal of Revolutionary France, where death is casual and the country hovers between complete anarchy and fascist dictatorship. The movie is filled with extreme violence, some shockingly casual for a film of that era: two characters are shot in the face at close range, almost as a joke. It perfectly reflects the violence and anarchy of the Terror, and even the happy ending is qualified at best. Despite the hopeful speeches of various characters, we know that Napoleon is waiting in the wings, and France had at least eighty more years of tyranny before becoming free.

Robert Cummings (Dial M For Murder) is superb: he's likeable enough but the film makes him as cunning and slippery as his adversaries. Arlene Dahl makes a perfect femme fatale. Not surprisingly, the villains are the main attraction: Richard Basehart provides the mixture of cold-bloodedness and fanaticism he would later use to portray Adolf Hitler; Arnold Moss's slimy enforcer is a wonderfully devious character, changing sides at every opportunity. The ubiquitous Charles McGraw (Border Incident) shows up as a thuggish soldier and Beulah Bondi (The Furies) shines in a small role.

Reign of Terror is a great film that has been inexplicably overlooked. It may be Hollywood's best depiction of Revolutionary France, and it's certainly one of Anthony Mann's finest films.

Border Incident

Before directing a plethora of classic Westerns, Anthony Mann cut his teeth on several modest but striking films noir. Border Incident (1949) is a stark, uncompromising look at illegal immigration in the Southwest, a docudrama before its time that hasn't significantly dated. If it weren't for the slow pace and occasionally clunky plot, it would be a great film.

In the American Southwest, a multi-national gang of crooks are helping Mexican farmworkers illegally enter the US, only to exploit, rob and ultimately kill them. American and Mexican law enforcement team up to put a stop this ring: Mexican agent Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) poses as a would-be immigrant, while American INS Agent Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) infiltrates the gang of crooked rancher Owen Parkson (Howard da Silva). It isn't long before their cover is blown, however, and both cops must try and stay alive while bringing Parkson and Co. to justice.

Border Incident is an interesting film on several levels. Not overtly political, it's nonetheless an angry, unsparing portrait of immigration, loosely based on real-life incidents. A brutal opening scene, with three aliens waylaid in a canyon and murdered, sets the tone immediately. Immigrants are cheated, murdered, left to die and generally abused: one of Parkson's thugs pointedly telling one that they have no rights as illegal aliens! The documentary feel adds a lot to the film, giving it a wonderful air of credibility. If anything, contemporary immigrant stories - especially those travelling longer distances than the Mexican border - are far more harrowing than what's depicted here.

Mann wonderfully subverts Hollywood conventions throughout. Rodriguez, the Mexican cop, is the hero, with Bearnes in a secondary role - odd enough today, let alone sixty years ago, when non-white leading men were almost unheard of. Buddy cliches are also avoided: despite equal billing and a common end, the two cops work independently and have only a few brief scenes together. When one cop is menaced by bad guys, the other is able only to watch them suffer. Trademark touches of Mann violence - a lengthy torture scene, a character crushed beneath a tractor, murder victims thrown into quicksand - are also quite striking.

Despite its virtues, Border Incident doesn't quite reach the level of great film. The richness of character found in Mann's best work is sacrificed for message and plot, which is understandable. The pace often flags in the middle third, as the movie becomes detail-heavy and weighed down in story. The movie is never hard to follow, but it's not always gripping or compelling, with slow and draggy passages. Further, the film's honesty is undercut by showing both the US and Mexican governments working hard to help the immigrants - an optimistic and naive view that, I fear, doesn't square with reality.

Mann's direction is wonderful. With cinematographer John Alton, Mann creates a wonderfully stark and desolate atmosphere, mixing moody, expressive black-and-white with imposing Southwestern landscapes - most impressively in the canyon climax, a truly remarkable scene. The use of deep-focus in interior scenes is also quite impressive. If nothing else, it's certainly a great-looking film.

Ricardo Montalban (Battleground) gives a charismatic, well-rounded performance, easily carrying the film. George Murphy (also of Battleground) gets the weaker part but does well-enough. Alfonso Bedoya (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and noir regular Charles McGraw (Spartacus) stand out among the supporting cast.

Even if not entirely successful, Border Incident is still a worthwhile film, and an interesting exploration of an issue that remains pertinent today.

The Naked Spur/The Tin Star: Anthony Mann's Bounty Hunters

Two more Anthony Mann flicks to review today, the bounty hunter-oriented films The Naked Spur (1953) and The Tin Star (1957). Both are middle-of-the-pack Westerns, and certainly not on a par with Mann's best work (The Man From Laramie, Devil's Doorway), though each has its merits. Two things you can generally count on from Mann are great photography and great performances, and both of these films have that, even if other departments are lacking.

The Naked Spur (1953)



The Naked Spur is Mann's third collaboration with James Stewart, and probably his weakest. It's worth watching mainly for some gorgeous Technicolor scenery and an excellent turn by Stewart; other elements - plot and supporting characters in particular - are lacking.

Bounty hunter Howie Kemp (James Stewart) tracks outlaw Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) and his gal pal Lina (Janet Leigh) all the way from Abilene, Kansas to Colorado Territory. He enlists the reluctant help of prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) and Army deserter Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker) to bring Ben in, neglecting to mention the $5,000 reward on Ben's head. Ben exploits the tension between Howie and his colleagues, trying to turn them against each other to affect his escape. Things are complicated when a group of Indians arrive looking for Roy, and Lina starts to fall for Howie.

The Naked Spur has a fairly simple story, with only five speaking parts, that is jammed with action and conflict. It crams a lot into 91 minutes, including a shootout with Indians, a romance, Howie's inner torment and the interplay of his four colleagues. Not all of it works, however. Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom's script lacks the marvellous economy of Winchester '73 (1950), and aside from Howie the characters remain rote archetypes, making their conflicts less than interesting. The movie succeeds when focusing on the tormented and bitter Howie, but the pseudo-happy ending somehow seems wrong.

As to be expected, Mann's photographic eye is on-target. Using William Mellor's gorgeous Technicolor photography, he films beautiful yet foreboding Rocky Mountain landscapes, making the Mountains a character in their own right. (It's fudged a bit, however, by a sadly-deficient DVD.) The Indian attack scene is by-the-numbers, but the climactic shootout among the rapids is expertly staged. The movie contains trademark touches of Mann violence; Howie gets shot in the leg and rope-burned, and during the final showdown, Ben gets a spur jabbed in his face. Bronislau Kaper contributes a good but not exceptional score.

James Stewart plays the most negative character of his career, with the possible exception of Vertigo. His Mann protagonists were always edgy, violent and neurotic, but Howie is close to a full-blown psychopath: obsessive in his pursuit of Ben, greedy, and unfailingly rude towards his "partners." The movie gives him a motivation (he lost his wife and farm during the Civil War) but he remains violent and mostly unlikeable until the ending. Stewart pulls off this difficult role wonderfully, and it's definitely among his best performances.

The rest of the cast doesn't fare so well. Groggy favorite Robert Ryan (The Wild Bunch) is good but a bit hammy; he's so obviously a sleaze that it's hard to see why Howie's colleagues fall for his BS. He comes off badly compared to Glenn Ford's similar but much more subdued villain in 3:10 to Yuma (1957). Janet Leigh's (Psycho) change of heart towards Stewart seems rushed and unconvincing. Millard Mitchell (Winchester '73) and Ralph Meeker (The Dirty Dozen) are one-note stock characters.

The Tin Star (1957)



The Tin Star is a horse of a different color. It's a remarkably conventional, even generic Western, made all the more remarkable that such an un-conventional director as Mann would direct it. Mann deserves credit for making such cliched material as enjoyable as it is.

Bounty hunter Morg Hickman (Henry Fonda) rides into a small town hoping to collect the reward on an outlaw. He finds that the Sheriff has been murdered, and the Sheriff's son Ben Owens (Anthony Perkins) is minding the store. Morg reluctantly takes Ben under his wing, teaching him the tricks of the trade, all the while falling for a local widow (Betsy Palmer) and her "half-breed" son Kip (Michel Ray). Things come to a head when the beloved Doctor McCord (John McIntire) is murdered by two outlaw brothers (Lee Van Cleef and Peter Baldwin), and local bully Bogardis (Neville Brand) leads a posse to lynch them. Ben must take the outlaws in alive, and face Bogardis in a final showdown.

Every Western cliche imaginable is present here: the tenderfoot Sheriff learning the trade; the embittered gunslinger looking for a home; the kindly widow and kid who need a father; the mean, racist bad guy. This sounds like a script for Gunsmoke, not Anthony Mann, but Mann and screenwriter Dudley Nichols play the cliches for all they're worth. The movie is endearing for all its earnestness, and the talent behind and in front of the camera makes it all work.

Mann takes elements from previous films and neuters them. The tormented characters of Mann's usual films are replaced by formula archetypes. Far from Stewart's neurotic Howie Kemp, Fonda's Morg Hickman is a nice guy, bitter though he is. Bogardis is like a playground bully, who only needs someone to stand up to him. The movie makes a big deal about the town's racism towards Kip and other Indians, the only unconventional element of a thoroughly square oater.

Mann delivers another visually-striking film. The movie is fairly limited in scope, but Loyal Grigg's black-and-white photography is no less striking. Nichols' script is fairly schematic, but Mann gets some nice scenes out of it, particularly the lengthy siege of the outlaw brothers. Elmer Bernstein delivers a fine, rather restrained score.

Henry Fonda plays Morg as a typical Henry Fonda character: tough but wise. Fonda could play this role in his sleep, but to his credit, he makes the character likeable and compelling. Anthony Perkins fairs less well; he's mostly stiff until the finale. Betsy Palmer is sweet if unremarkable. Neville Brand makes a fine bad guy, and John McIntire is excellent in an uncharacteristically-likeable role. Lee Van Cleef (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) turns up as a second-tier bad guy. Kip is played by Michel Ray, a talented child actor who would play Farraj in Lawrence of Arabia before starting a very successful business career.

PS: Check out this awesome Westerns blog, Decisions at Sundown, if you get the chance.

Devil's Doorway

An early effort by Anthony Mann, Devil's Doorway (1950) is a surprisingly strong and resentful revisionist Western. Released the same year as Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow, it's a far more caustic look at prejudice against Native Americans. Daves humanized Natives but expressed hope at reconciliation; Mann condemns this idealism as naive.

Lance Poole (Robert Taylor) is a Shoshone Indian living in Montana Territory. He returns from the Civil War as a decorated hero, and wants nothing more than to live in peace with his white neighbors. Unfortunately, an influx of sheep herders moves into the region, egged on by racist lawyer Coolan (Louis Calhern), and begin squatting on Poole's land. Poole tries every trick in the book to protect his land, enlisting a young woman lawyer (Paula Raymond) to defend him, but the situation inevitably explodes into violence, with tragic results for everyone involved.

Devil's Doorway is an angry film, a stark contrast to the conciliatory, conventionally-liberal Broken Arrow. Mann and writer Guy Trosper place the blame for the film's tragic events squarely on white settlers. Lance bends over backwards to accomodate white laws, but in a system which views him as having "the rights of a dog," he can get nowhere. The idealism gained in fighting alongside white men to liberate blacks from slavery is quickly dashed by bitter reality. Those sticking up for Lance are deemed as "Indian lovers" (Orrie, the bar tender); his best friend, Zeke (Edgar Buchannan), is made Marshal and forced to try and evict him. The bleakness carries through to the end, though the obvious "message" at the very end sounds like a leaden clunk.

The film is remarkably left-wing for 1950, when HUAC was on the prowl and the conservative Wayne-Ford view of the West still predominated. It echoes Mann's politically-charged noir Border Incident (1949), a saga about the plight of Mexican immigrants, and The Furies (1950), where Mexican squatters are ruthlessly lynched. Perhaps his teaming with arch-conservative Jimmy Stewart tampered his politics, but Mann's anger seemed to cool over time, perhaps channelling into the oft-sadistic violence of later efforts. Here, however, it's the dominating principle.

The movie is unconventional in other ways, too. It admirably avoids cliches: the putative romance between Lance and lawyer Orrie is muted, a child character (Henry Marco) avoids easy tragedy. Except for the final scene, Mann keeps from making noble speeches or stacking the deck, allowing the ugliness of the situation to speak for itself. It's a decidedly different experience from other Westerns.

Working with ace photographer John Alton, Mann helms a striking production, with lots of beautiful location work. The use of deep-focus is extraordinary, particularly the bar scenes, where Lance is framed by Coolan and other baddies, and creative shadow and lighting shows Lance's inner conflict and predicament. The action scenes are handled with aplomb, particularly the battle with dynamite thrown at sheep farmers. The fine score is penned by Daniele Amfitheatrof, who would infamously compose the beeping doorbells of Major Dundee.

Robert Taylor is fine, if a bit stiff, as the protagonist. Louis Calhern (Notorious) gives an excellent turn as the slimey Coolan, a truly digusting villain. Paula Raymond gives a strong performance. Edgar Buchanan (Ride the High Country) stands out as the spineless Marshal.

Devil's Doorway is a remarkable film, especially for its time and place. Its angry view of Manifest Destiny has been often echoed, but rarely if ever bettered.

Man of the West

Anthony Mann's penultimate Western, Man of the West (1958) is a divisive film. Some consider it an overlooked masterpiece, while others find it piffle. I fall in the latter category. Man of the West takes a talented cast, a potentially interesting story and gorgeous scenery, and turns it into a turgid, stagnant B Western.

Link Jones (Gary Cooper) is a reformed outlaw transporting money to hire a school teacher for his hometown. His train is robbed by a gang of outlaws, and Link is stranded with singer Billie (Julie London) and gambler Sam (Arthur O'Connell). It turns out that the gang is led by his old partner, the crazed Doc Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), and Link reluctantly rejoins them to try and save his friends. When Link is recruited into a bank robbery scheme, he is forced into a showdown with Doc and Company.

Man of the West is highly disappointing, especially from a director of Mann's caliber. Aside from Ernest Haller's gorgeous cinematography and some knock-out set pieces - particularly the long, brutal fistfight between Link and Coaley (Jack Lord) - it's largely hack work. The story is rushed and under-developed, characters are poorly-drawn ciphers, things drag at inopportune moments. Reginald Rose's terrible script culminates in Link telling Doc "I'm takin' you in!" like the star of a cheesy '30s serial. Even the shootouts seem anemic, and the final showdown is laughable. Mann somehow gets everything wrong, resulting in a film that feels like a shoddy B Western.

To be fair, one can see why many adore the film. It contains many themes which should be interesting: the death of the outlaw breed, a killer trying to go straight. Trouble is, they are badly handled. The Mann who brought us the tortured, fascinating characters of The Furies and The Man From Laramie is absent here: themes aren't so much explored as baldly asserted, and character conflicts remain puerile and one-note. That later Westerns - most notably The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven - cribbed a good deal from Man's plot only underscores its failure: they show that this story could be done well, and that Mann has no excuse.

The cast is equally ill-used. Gary Cooper fails to be convincing as a tough guy fighting back murderous rage. Julie London is pretty, but aside from a rather sadistic striptease, is wasted in a dopey romance. Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront) chews scenery like a starving Tasmanian Devil. The supporting cast fares slightly better, particularly Jack Lord and John Dahner as Doc's more devoted followers.

Overall, Man of the West is a huge disappointment. It's by far Mann's weakest Western, if not film (that would be Fall of the Roman Empire), and shows little sign of being the work of the auteur behind The Man From Laramie. Pity.

Winchester '73

Winchester '73 (1950) is Anthony Mann's first Western, and his first collaboration with James Stewart, with whom he would make a total of eight films. Far from the character-driven, pseudo-Shakespearean ambition of The Furies and The Man From Laramie, Winchester '73 is a fairly straightforward action spectacular, with an ingenious MacGuffin, intricate plotting and a lot of rousing shootouts.

Gunslinger Lin McAdam (James Stewart) wins a prized Winchester '73 rifle in a shooting contest in Dodge City, Kansas. Before he can enjoy his prize, he's jumped by Dutch Henry (Stephen McNally) and his gang of thugs, who make off with the weapon. The film follows the adventures of the gun, which ends up in the hands of a shady gunrunner (John McIntire), a bloodthirsty Indian chief (Rock Hudson), a wimpy homesteader (Charles Drake) and his pretty wife (Shelley Winters), psychotic outlaw Waco Dean (Dan Duryea), and back to Dutch Henry, leading to the final showdown between Lin and Dutch, who have an old score to settle.

Despite some slower passages early on (the shooting contest in Dodge seems to take forever), Winchester '73 is, for most of its length, a briskly-paced, perfectly-designed crowd pleaser. There are tough heroes, hateful bad guys, shootouts, cool guns, Indians, romance, Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) - everything a non-discerning film goer expects from a Western. The film is largely episodic in nature, with the titular weapon - a harbinger of Manifest Destiny, civilizing the frontier through violence - connecting vignettes of frontier life and mayhem. Characters are mostly sketched in: besides the brotherly competition between Lin and Dutch, a pale precursor of Mann's future, marginal characters - the psychotic Waco, the amusingly-shifty gun-runner - register the strongest.

Mann ties these vignettes together wonderfully, maintaining a mostly brisk pace throughout. He already shows a fine handle on the Western landscape, and deftly stages most of the film's set-pieces - particularly the final showdown, with bullets ricochetting off boulders. William H. Daniels' fine cinematography and a biting script by Robert L. Richards and Borden Chase help things along.

James Stewart had already hardened his pre-WWII "aw shucks" persona with It's a Wonderful Life and Rope, but his work with Mann provided the most radical departure. Lin is a basically good guy, albeit with a shady past and a tough side, but he presages Stewart's neurotic, violent characters in The Naked Spur and The Man From Laramie: Jefferson Smith would never beat a suspected accomplice for information, as Lin does here.

The supporting cast is mostly good: Dan Duryea (Night Passage) and Stephen McNally (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo) are hateful bad guys, Millard Mitchell (The Naked Spur) is solid as Lin's buddy, and John McIntire's (Psycho) gunrunner is amusingly cynical. Shelley Winters (Lolita) is pretty but mostly colorless. A young Rock Hudson (All That Heaven Allows) is amusingly cast as an Indian chief, and Tony Curtis (Spartacus) can be seen as a cavalry trooper.

Whatever thematic significance Jim Kitses wants to read into it, Winchester '73 is best appreciated as a well-crafted shoot-'em-up. It's not Mann's best or most interesting film, but as entertainment, it's a solid piece of work.

The Furies

Anthony Mann's second Western after Winchester '73, The Furies (1950) is a stark, character-driven Western that looks and feels like a film noir crossed with Shakespeare. Its complicated plot, strong female protagonist and complex characters and create a truly unique film. It isn't a complete masterpiece like The Man From Laramie, but it's a fine Western in its own right, one of the landmark "adult Westerns" of the early '50s.

T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) is a powerful New Mexico rancher who owns a large expanse of territory - The Furies. A widower, he finds himself henpecked by his bold, strong-willed daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck), who manipulates him at every turn. She's grimly determined to inherit T.C.'s land, but T.C. agrees only on the condition that she marry. Vance is torn between two undesirable suitors: Rip (Wendell Corey), a tough-minded gambler, and Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), a Mexican rancher whose family is squatting on The Furies. Father and daughter's battle of wills comes to a head, as T.C. engages scheming widow Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), and tries to forcibly evict the Herreras. Vance launches a complicated scheme to get revenge and take control of the Furies for good.

Perhaps what's most immediately noticeable about The Furies is its female protagonist, a rarity in the Western genre. Women were largely backgrounded as passive wives or sutiors, glorified mother figures or dirty whores, with an occasional tomboy character thrown in; the West (or at least Hollywood's traditional West) was a man's world, with little place for nice domesticities.

Vance is a wonderfully drawn character, alternately sympathetic and repulsive. T.C.'s impotent son Clay (John Bromfield) can't compete; he's left hanging there, a potential conflict that's quickly dropped. Vance is a domineering yet neurotic personality, which she undoubtedly inherited from her father; she simmers with resentment towards T.C., an awkward mixture of love and hate tinged with hints of incest. When she's betrayed by her father, she won't take it lying down, and gets back at him not with guns, but by using T.C.'s own arrogance against him. Vance is among the strongest female characters ever portrayed in a Western, and certainly the most interesting.

T.C. is a sheer megalomaniac who issues his own currency, keeps a bust of Napoleon in his study, manipulates seedy bankers (including Albert Dekker of The Wild Bunch) and keeps a private army led by El Tigre (Thomas Gomez), a semi-retired bandit. He loves his daughter, though he sees her as paling in comparison to his hallowed late wife, and ignores his hapless son. He uses brute force to deal with most of his problems, especially the Herreras - after a bloody siege, he convinces the Herreras to surrender, only to coldly lynch Juan afterwards. An old-fashioned brute, he finds himself unable to keep up with his scheming daughter, and is left out to dry in the abrupt climax.

The film is full of moral ambiguities: no character, except perhaps Juan, emerges as really sympathetic, and all are constantly scheming against one another. Rip, a proud man determined to come out on top, matches wits with Vance in a love-hate relationship throughout the film. Juan is a fairly good man but his friendship (and unrequited love) comes with a price, as his family and T.C. are sworn enemies. Most amusing of all is Flo, who flatly admits to Vance that her only interest in T.C. is his money - leading to a rather ghastly disfigurement at Vance's hands. Except for Juan, who hangs out with a grotesque, gun-toting family anyway, the only nice characters are completely backgrounded; The Furies is a moral vacuum where only the most devious survive.

As usual, Mann's direction is wonderful. It has a distinct noir feel, with dark, moody cinematography by Victor Milner that seems to place the film's action at dusk; what might otherwise have been beauty post-card images of blue skies and beautiful ranges becomes foreboding, desolate, almost nightmarish. The large-scale shootout at the halfway point is rough, gritty, and visceral - one of the most intense and nasty scenes in any Western. Charles Schnee writes a script that is well-constructed but contains its share of groaner dialogue. The movie's biggest flaw is its climax, which begins on a reconcillatory note and ends with abrupt tragedy, both of which ring false. Franz Waxman's score is fairly rote and not always appropriate, but that's a minor flaw.

Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity) is one of my favorite actresses. I don't find her physically attractive as such, but she has an alluring je ne sais que in her best roles - and so it is here. Her Vance has some precedent in the femme fatales Stanwyck played in the '40s, but she emerges a distinct personage in her own right, warped into a neurotic, headstrong woman resentful at being out of step with her place and time. Stanwyck invests Vance with her usual fire, intelligence, wit and subtlety, making her a fascinating, believable character, even if she never quite becomes sympathetic.

Walter Huston, who won an Oscar and cinematic immortality for his hammy prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), gives his final performance here, and it's a wonderfully restrained yet energetic turn. Gilbert Roland (Cheyenne Autumn) gives a sympathetic performance as the doomed Juan, who manages to avoid the expected Latin lover stereotypes; Wendell Corey is a handsome but fairly wooden blank slate. Judith Anderson (Rebecca) has relatively little screen time but makes a strong impression; her character's amusing amorality and frankness make her very much deserving of the freakish violence visited upon her.

The Furies is an interesting film and a solid Western, despite its third-act improbabilities and inconsistencies, and is another fine piece of work from Anthony Mann. I've seen The Tin Star enough to dismiss it as pap, but maybe I'd ought to take another look at Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur. And Fall of the Roman Empire... well, maybe not that one.

The Man From Laramie

Until today I had seen several of Anthony Mann's renowned "adult Westerns" from the 1950's - Winchester '73 (1950), The Naked Spur (1953) and The Tin Star (1957). All were good movies but lacked that special something to make them great. Today I found Mann's masterpiece: The Man From Laramie (1955). The last of Mann's seven collaborations with James Stewart, Laramie is not only Mann's magnum opus, it makes a strong case for being among the best Westerns of all time. With its great cast, richly drawn characters, well-developed story, skillful direction and gorgeous Cinemascope photography, it's nothing short of a masterpiece.

Will Lockhart (James Stewart) arrives in the isolated farming village of Coronado. The town is run by Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp), an aging cattle baron, and his two lieutenants: his simple-minded, quick-tempered son Dave (Alex Nichol), and Vic (Arthur Kennedy), the fiercely loyal ranch foreman. Will's arrival puts a spanner into the works, intensifying the rivalry between Dave and Vic as they debate how to deal with the stranger. Will would just as soon stay out of the way, but he has a score to settle - his brother, a cavalryman, was killed by Indians carrying Winchester rifles, and he's determined to seek revenge on the man (or men) who sold them the guns.

The movie undoubtedly excells in its characters. Will's character is (by necessity) fairly elliptical; he's tough but not a bad-natured, amoral vigilante like, say, The Man With No Name. Mann parcels out Will's background carefully, leading inevitably to the final reveal of his motivation - and yet his righteous anger and vengeance is tempered by his morality, allowing Fate to wreak its own vengeance on the wrong-doers. Smaller parts, like Will's love interest (Cathy O'Donnell), the tough lady rancher with a thing for Waggoman (Aline MacMahon), Will's hard-drinking side-kick (Wallace Ford), the chatty Indian priest (Frank DeKova), and the town conman (Jack Elam) are also interesting personages.

The trio of villains is undoubtedly the best feature. Once a two-fisted tough guy in his own right, the older Alec Waggoman is well-meaning but increasingly ineffectual man. A Western Lear, he loves his son and right-hand man all too well, and is unable to to see the growing discord between thhem. Dave is a bit of a stereotype - the weak, hot-headed son living in the shadow of his father - but Vic makes up for it with a very well-rounded character, haunted by guilt and driven by a need to please his surrogate father. Even towards the end, he never degenerates to villainy or pathetic pleading; the scene where he guiltly visits his blinded boss is brilliant, humanizing him better than any other Western character I can think of. All three characters are flawed yet sympathetic, and the film doesn't make any of them evil, not even at the end when there's nothing to lose. The Wild Bunch is the only Western comparable in its depth of believable, engrossing characterization.

Mann's direction is nothing short of brilliant. As usual, he does a fantastic job of photography, capturing the gorgeous salt flats and forbidding deserts of the Southwest and making landscape a character in its own right. The film is full of striking individual set pieces, from Will's first encounter with Dave, the dusty fisticuffs with Vic, the shootout at the cattle range, and the final confrontation with the Apache. Phillip Yordan and Frank Burt's screenplay is sharply written, carefully developing story and characters while delivering a generous portion of quotable dialogue. George Duning provides a suitably dramatic score, marred only by the cornball title tune (that fortunately only crops up at the beginning and very end).

James Stewart gives a solid performance: his character here is less neurotic and obsessive than his earlier Mann protagonists, but still convincingly a two-fisted, grimly determined man of action. Arthur Kennedy (Lawrence of Arabia) gives a career-best turn. Vic is a conflicted, complex character who never turns into the expected sneering villain, and Kennedy perfectly captures the character's sense of guilt, anguish and desperation. Donald Crisp (Juarez) does equally well, making Alec a nice guy with an undertone of nastiness showing through. Alex Nicol is perhaps a bit too broad as Dave but perhaps the script can be blamed for that. Supporting parts are ably handled by the likes of Cathy O'Donnell, Aline McMahon, Jack Elam, James Millican, Frank DeKova, and John War Eagle.

The Man From Laramie is an unquestionable Western masterpiece, and an instant personal favorite. Perhaps the other Mann films above-named are due for a rewatch? Stay tuned...

El Cid

Today we take a gander at another Samuel Bronston super-epic, Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961). Of the three Bronston epics I have perused (55 Days at Peking and The Fall of the Roman Empire), it's by far the best, although not entirely free of the bloat and pomposity of the other films. These movies succeed well-enough as flashy spectacle, but they're largely lacking in depth that makes the best epics great.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (Charlton Heston) is a nobleman in a medeval Spain torn between Christians and Muslim Moors. The various provinces and factions of Spain are constantly at war with each other, which makes it an ideal time for bloodthirsty jihadist Ben Yussuf (Herbert Lom) to show up with plans of Muslim conquest. Diaz spares the lives of two Muslim noblemen (Massimo Serato and Frank Thring), and kills the King's right-hand man, Count Gormaz (Andrew Cruikshank), making his loyalty to Castillian King Ferdinand (Ralph Truman) highly suspect. He marries Jimena (Sophia Loren), the beautiful daughter of the late Count, only to find her love conflicted with thoughts of avenging her father. Nonetheless, while Spain hovers near civil war after the death of Ferdinand, Cid organizes an army of Christian and Muslim troops to oppose Yussuf's masses of holy warriors, leading to an epic confrontation outside the sea port of Valencia.

The problem with Bronston's epics is pretty easy to decipher. There are two major schools of historical epics: the bombastic specatcle epic of the Cecil B. DeMille school, where spectacle, set design, battle scenes and big stars are the attraction, and the "intimate epic", the province of Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, Spartacus and David Lean's best films (Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India), where story and characters are closely and carefully drawn and complement the purely cinematic aspects of the film. I generally prefer the second school, because it is much easier to become involved in a film whose story and characters. Bronston's work seems to fall in the former category - movies that are impressive as spectacle, but don't register on much any other level, leaving them curiously distant and empty, for all their superficial charm. This film's director is Anthony Mann, director of such Western character studies as The Tin Star and Winchester '73, and one might expect him to have the same character touches as a Lean or Wyler that came up through closely-observed dramas; but this movie suffers from the same flaws. Except for Heston's protagonists, the characters are broadly drawn and the narrative unimportant to the endless parade of swordfights, jousts, crowd scenes and battle sequences. This isn't in and of itself a flaw, but it prevents the film from achieving true greatness; it's good but fairly simple entertainment.

The film's conflict of Christians and secularists versus anti-intellectual Muslim fundamentalists is much more relevant today than in 1961. The film tries its best to avoid stereotyping either group, with some nice scenes as a campfire fraternization between Cid's Christian and Muslim followers - but again the film's seeming inability to be intimate handicaps such noble intentions. Brownfaced Herbert Lom and his faceless hordes are effectively fearsome, so perhaps it's pedantic to bemoan their simplistic portrayal. The Christian Spaniards, led ultimately by the dopish King Alfonso (John Fraser) are more than eager to slit Muslim throats at the drop of a hat, even when they pledge fealty to the crown; Cid's private army is a collection of peasants and outsiders who don't really fall under either category.

In its exploration of such themes, the movie clearly inspired many another epic, from Lawrence of Arabia and The Wind and the Lion (which used Herbert Lom's menacing black garb for Sean Connery's Raisuli and the impressive Moorish palace for the Bashaw's residence), to Ridley Scott's recent Kingdom of Heaven, which similarly posited religious extremists as the source of all the world's problems - a viewpoint which may please Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but is too simplistic to really take seriously. The real problem is culture as much as religion (though, to be fair, the two are not mutually exclusive), with politics, perfidy and selfish power hunger inevitably playing their part in creating trouble. Even if we all had the same religion, there would still be greed, corruption and self-interest in the world, just in a more concentrated form.

All that blather aside, the film largely succeeds at what it sets out to do, however. For sheer spectacle, it's very hard to beat; Robert Krasker's 70mm cinematography is gorgeous, the set design and art direction without peer. Mann's direction is good enough, but most of the credit for the film's big scene must fall on second-unit directors like Yakima Canutt. The film contains some of the best action scenes ever filmed, including Heston's joust with an Aragonian knight and the bloody final battle. And Miklos Rosza contributes his usual rousing, bombastic score that adds thundering emotion to the proceedings. I am torn, however, as to whether the film's final sequence, with a mortally wounded El Cid triumphantly dispersing the evil Muslim army whilst scarcely raising a sword, is really cool or hopelessly anticlimactic. For the most part, though, the movie succeeds on the level of huge-scale, swashbuckling entertainment.

Charlton Heston is a fine Cid; he's always at his best playing larger than life protagonists and is perfect. Sophia Loren is lovely and has more to do than in her other Bronston film, but her performance is rather bland after her initial revenge scheming peters out. The supporting cast is mostly bland: Herbert Lom is given only a few brief scenes and is never as menacing as he should be, Raf Vallone and John Fraser are stiff as Cid's Spanish rivals, and few of the other cast members have enough time to register.

I like El Cid enough to recommend it with some reservations. It has some great moments and some of the best battle scenes ever put on film. But its characters and story have something to be desired, and what could have been a great film is merely a very good one. I guess I shouldn't complain too much, though.

Rating: 7/10 - Recommended