Man of the West

Anthony Mann – 1958 – USA 

A staggering achievement by the sadly under-recognized Anthony Mann, coming at the apex of a series of very strong genre films in the late 1940s and 50s, including a few other near masterpieces – such as Border Incident (1950), The Naked Spur (1953), Men in War (1957), among others.  My own suspicion is that Mann is frequently missed in surveys of the great directors of the 50s because he made so many westerns and in that genre, older masters like John Ford and Howard Hawks were still in their prime too.  Mann is clearly not in their class, but along with Budd Boetticher, Samuel Fuller, Andre de Toth a few others, he shares credit for the flowering of the golden age of mature westerns that took place in the 50s, which was not managed by Ford alone even though The Searchers remains its greatest testament.  What struck me most upon seeing Man of the West for the first time in many years was Mann’s use of the 2.35 widescreen frame as a canvas for arranging his elements.  The format had been used often for epics, of course, but this is one of the earliest CinemaScope films I’ve seen in which it is apparent that a thoughtful director deliberately composed for the frame, in a way that not even Ford really did until Cheyenne Autumn (1964).  I see the roots of John Carpenter’s style in Mann much more than in his professed idol Hawks, none of whose westerns are in 2.35, which is Carpenter’s preferred aspect ratio.  In the film, Gary Cooper is a retired gunman who is stranded on the plains after his train is robbed, and happens to be within walking distance to a house that once acted as his old gang’s hideaway.  Naturally, not only is the gang holed-up there when Cooper arrives with two companions from the train – a gambler (Arthur O’Connell) and a showgirl (Julie London) – but it turns out that they were the ones who stopped the train.  Cooper’s old mentor (Lee J. Cobb) is particularly happy to see him again and presumes that he is back for good.  Cobb’s gang is comprised of younger men who are either real sons or adopted ones, and they’re an unruly, not-very-bright lot, and it’s clear why Cobb is sorely in need of Cooper’s level-headed influence.  Cooper must keep his cool while calculating how to escape before the gang loses its patience with him and before they get their hands on London.  Dark and hard-edged for its time, the film is all about undercutting the mystique of western outlaws.  Despite his talk of honor and loyalty, Cobb is weak and lifts not a finger when his gang forces London to perform a striptease, prior to worse abuse.  Like the compromised patriarchs in several Mann films – especially The Man from Laramie (1955) – he is stuck in a reverie of the past and is dependent on little more than his former reputation to maintain order.  The film’s climax is as stark and desolate as any in a 50s western.  Luring the men into a ghost town one by one, Cooper dispatches them at his leisure, and then finds himself in a shouting match with Cobb at opposite ends of a rocky valley.  In Mann’s films, this is the real legacy of the Old West, not wholesome cowboys outwitting bandits, but two morally questionable middle-aged men alone in a vast, echoing landscape, in a pitiful struggle to the death.  Even its title, Man of the West, announces its director’s agenda to critique western heroism.  Assuming that Cooper is the titular ‘man of the west,’ he is shown to be laconic and slow to action for good reasons; he has a past that won’t bear much scrutiny and his aging hands may not be as a quick as a rugged gunman’s should.  And yet, as in Sam Peckinpah’s forthcoming movies, (and Walter Hill’s even later ones), the character’s obvious flaws and frailties don’t mean that he is incapable of making new choices as time goes on, which, if they don’t redeem him, at least may offset some of his past sins and give new generations a chance at a better future.