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Anthony Mann readily puts the CinemaScope to proper use, a mule train crosses the screen after the credits. (The salt flats provide another arresting horizontal line, the camera slowly pans left to take in riders thundering along a mountainside.) The titular character (James Stewart) comes to a New Mexico burg with mysterious matters to settle, "can't rightly say any place is my home," along the way he ponders the charred remains of a Cavalry patrol. "New country, hard country," the old rancher (Donald Crisp) treats it like his own private kingdom. The princeling (Alex Nicol) is a psychopath, the foreman (Arthur Kennedy) runs the spread as unofficial second son, both smuggle rifles to marauding Apaches. Shakespeare and Sophocles lurk in the sagebrush, the patriarch is going blind and experiences a recurring dream of a murderous stranger. "Hate's unbecoming on a man like you." The theme is a variation of The Furies, Eastwood's Pale Rider in particular benefits from the filming, with its earth tones and gradations of sunlight. In unwelcoming terrain ("everything here was built on greed and killing"), violence escalates like gunpowder lit—the protagonist gets lassoed and dragged through a campfire, a scuffle smashes right through fences and continues in the dust amid the hooves of spooked cattle. Sadistic pièce de résistance, Stewart in contorted close-up agonizing after his hand takes a bullet, as obscene as a castration. (The sheriff has mordant advice for him: "If you want a Christian funeral, leave some money with the undertaker.") Local storekeeper (Cathy O'Donnell) and headstrong rancher (Aline MacMahon) contemplate these masculine frenzies, finally revealed as matters of seeing or not seeing. The ideal note on which to end Mann's classical Westerns, with Man of the West inaugurating his curtailed baroque period. Cinematography by Charles Lang. With Wallace Ford, Jack Elam, John War Eagle, James Millican, Gregg Barton, Boyd Stockman, and Frank DeKova.
--- Fernando F. Croce |