http://realmofryan.blogspot.com/2008/05/man-of-west-is-here.html
I received my
newly released DVD copy of 1958’s
Man of the West on Tuesday and sat down to watch it last night. Because it hasn’t been available on any digital format until now, this is the first chance I’ve had in many years to re-watch one of my favorite Westerns. (I refused to see it viciously cropped on VHS. You just
do not do that to a CinemaScope film. That would be like sawing off both ends of Picasso’s
Guernica.)
The film did not disappoint my grand memories of it. I’ve seen many more classic Westerns since my last viewing of
Man of the West, and this has further deepened my appreciation for the form and the remarkable feats that director Anthony Mann executes with it here. Mann had directed a string of superb Westerns during the 1950s, usually with his favorite star Jimmy Stewart. This was his last film in the genre, and although Stewart wasn’t around for it, it’s not only his best foray into the Western, but his best film, period. When you consider that he also directed
El Cid,
Winchester ’73,
The Naked Spur,
The Man from Laramie,
Railroaded, and
The T-Men, that’s an impressive statement.
This was also the last great role for Gary Cooper, who steps into Jimmy Stewart’s place as the lead. Coop plays Link Jones, a quiet and mysterious man whom we first see riding across the plains like any classic Western hero. But when Link reaches the nearest town, he stables his horse, dresses up in classy city-slicker duds, and boards a train for civilization. Our tough-looking hombre is really riding to the big city to hire a school teacher for the small settlement where he lives.
The first twenty minutes of
Man of the West are a blind, a slick deception to get the viewer comfortable with the wrong ideas. The direction, photography, and performances indicate a staid, ordinary Western of the time period. Gambler and con-man Sam Beasley (Arthur O’Connell) cozies up to Link on the train, trying to find out how much money he’s carrying. He introduces Link to pretty singer Billie Ellis (Julie London), trying to sell her as school teacher possibility. Are we heading toward some kind of light comedy about Link hiring Billie, and then finding out Sam swindled him? Maybe a love story growing out of antagonism from the misunderstanding?
Then, at the twenty-minute mark, the film crawls into a cobwebby corner and goes utterly mad. Anthony Mann’s adoration of Shakespearean tragedy takes the reins, and results in the Western with the closest spiritual ties to the Bard’s most neurotic dramas. Mann had already approached overt Shakespearean elements in
The Man from Laramie and had tried for years to make a Western adaptation of
King Lear called
The King, but this is the closest he came to putting the spirit of Elizabethan stage onto the sagebrush screen.
The train gets held-up at a refueling depot, and Link, Sam, and Billie end up trapped in the wilderness after the train hauls off in the confusion. However, Link knows this land, and he leads them to a rotting ranch that belongs to Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), the insane patriarch of a clan of thieves, the same ones responsible for the train robbery. In the long ago, Link rode with these men. He was Dock’s favorite “son,” and when Link strides back through the door, Dock imagines that the good ol’ days have returned, and he can finally commit the huge bank robbery he’s always dreamed of. The rest of Dock’s gang, including hotshot psycho Coaley (a very young looking Jack Lord) and mature Claude (John Dehner), aren’t happy to have Link around getting all the attention and increasing Dock’s dementia. The situation for Link and his two companions in this family of murderers is extremely precarious. Link has to find a way out, but he also has to get his stolen money back from Dock—it’s his ticket back to his newer life that he used to shut out this diseased older one.
As good as Cooper’s performance is, the real star of the movie is Cobb as the delusional Dock Tobin. Cobb is ten years
younger than Gary Cooper, but looks far older on the screen in his character. Dock Tobin crosses the mad King Lear, searching for the right heir amongst his children to take over his ‘empire,’ with jovial rogue Falstaff, making one more stab at turning Prince Hal back into the good-time thieving rogue he once was. As Link observes, Tobin has ceased to be human and rotted into something foul. (“There’s a point where you either grow up and become a human being or you rot, like that bunch.”) He now lives in a perpetual fantasy of the a golden age where the booming town of Lasoo is waiting for him to come and plunder it. Actually, Lasoo is a ghost town, a lumber heap whose only inhabitants are a Hispanic couple living in the back room of the bank building. That sums up the reality of Dock Tobin’s universe. The movie charts the course of his mad plans that blossom into violence the more that Link tries to pull himself out.
The film’s most famous scene is the fight between Link and Coaley, which must count as one of the ugliest one-on-one confrontations in any film. No simple fisticuffs here, these fellows fight
dirty, gouging, choking, throttling, kicking, and wailin’ hell on each other until both hardly look human. You’ve seen classic films where the heroes never seem to get their hair mussed—this is the opposite extreme. Eventually, the fight reaches a level of pure hysteria, where Link forces Coaley to strip to complete his humiliation and get revenge on the crazed outlaw for making Billie strip to the night before. At this point, the dialogue turns into incoherent screeching and howling.
Man of the West will shock viewers who expect Westerns from the 1950s to be bland and pleasant, filled only with generic pleasures. It’s an ugly film, it’s the
King Lear of Westerns in the raw manner that it strips its characters to nothing. And, as I’ve pointed out,
it’s on DVD, so you have no excuse not to see it now.
If you’re interested in another excellent Western starring Gary Cooper from this era, check out Robert Aldrich’s
Vera Cruz, which had a large impact on the later Euro Westerns.
tired![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
wishweaver fell in love with it too, but that's a purchase for another day . . . way far away. I never saw her as a Mac user, but Microsoft Vista is definitely pushing her toward it. Let's just say, its unreliabiliity is only exceeded by its memory-hogging slowness. I have a feeling we'll be blowing Vista off of her desktop soon and replacing it with XP. Hell, I'm thinking about doing the same with this laptop. Vista was NOT a better idea, Bill.
sleepy
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productive
bowled over
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blah
1 (5.3%)
boobs!
somewhat sheepish
lazy
cheerful