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The sense of geometry—a line from Dodge City to Tascosa, but really a circle—is inherited from Lang, though the ruthless dismantling of the Western's heroic veneer is Anthony Mann's own. "The gun that won the West" gets a sacramental close-up, top prize at a shooting competition presided over by a wry Wyatt Earp (Will Geer), feeling "undressed" without his tin star. The James Stewart who rides into town is the shadow side of the gangling prewar soprano, wrapped in leather and with brutal neuroses ready to flare. He wins the treasured rifle, which is seized by the gunslinger he's been hunting (Stephen McNally), then by a gunrunner (John McIntire), a Sioux chief (Rock Hudson), a reformed outlaw (Charles Drake) and an unreformed one (Dan Duryea). "That's too much gun for one man..." The genre's traditional gallantry withers in terrain as severe as Mann's, his cowboys are modern brooders negotiating the collapse of landscape, body, and mind. Sagebrush horizons bent by tight, volatile spatial arrangements: A trio of bushwackers and a wily trader crowding a poker table, framed against a mountain of rusty artillery. The battered desert floor on which Cavalry soldiers wait out the hours before a skirmish at dawn. A husband getting himself shot while trying to atone for an act of cowardice. Above all, the deformed cacti and jagged boulders of the Abel and Cain duel, where bullets ricochet inches away from the actors' faces. Stagecoach is the point of departure, Shelley Winters' resemblance to Simone Signoret points up the concurrence with La Ronde. The centennial erected on violence, "out here we play winner take all": The Winchester dangles from a weary hand at the close, just an instrument at the end of a trail of corpses. With Millard Mitchell, Jay C. Flippen, John Alexander, Steve Brodie, James Millican, Abner Biberman, and Tony Curtis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |