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The Anthony Mann hero in transition, into the outdoors yet still encircled by shadows. "That's a big horse you're riding. It's a long fall from it." The war never ends for the outsider, so realizes the Shoshone officer (Robert Taylor) riding home with a Gettysburg Medal of Honor and a "saddlebag full of dreams." The saloon that once welcomed him has hardened into a lattice of inhospitable diagonals, a detail from My Darling Clementine ("No liquor for Indians") leads to a scuffle so intense that the combatants' fists and grimaces appear to scratch at the edges of the screen. When his own land is taken from him, he sees justice split between the wheezing attorney (Louis Calhern) leading the homesteaders and a small-time counselor (Paula Raymond) who's nearly as powerless as him. "Under the law, you are not cast as an American citizen." "What am I?" "A ward of the government." Pride shades into wrath in the face of prejudice, the cracked quill of an aborted petition dissolves to the new battleground—a panning view of the once-fertile meadow turned into a gnarled slope. Mann's first Western is a good few decades ahead of the game, Ride the High Country is foretold in the grave farewell to the landscape and Little Big Man recalls the Cavalry's climactic ride on the wrong side. (In the middle of a shootout, the camera ventures inside a ruined cabin suffused with John Alton's side lighting and isolates Taylor's eminent profile in silhouette, a harrowed composition.) The weight of oppression, the fight against nullification, not just a criticism but a call to arms. Daves in Broken Arrow lights a candle, Aldrich in Apache takes up a flamethrower. With Marshall Thompson, James Mitchell, Edgar Buchanan, Rhys Williams, Spring Byington, and Chief John Big Tree. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |