The Man From Laramie [DVD]

This is a dark, beautifully photographed western, and -as with all James Stewart movies- one can count on his solid, convincing and totally affable acting. The same could be said about most performances (Donald Crisp and Arthur Kennedy), however there is an evident miscast with the characters of Dave (the foreman) and Barbara (the dismal woman interest). Unlike most films of the genre, the "Man from Laramie" is at its best when filming the psychological tensions and conflicts between characters, rather than action sequences. Columbia did a fine job transferring the film to DVD format, while the extras are Ok, but nothing we haven't seen before. All in all a must buy for anyone who cares about westerns, Stewart, or both.

"The Man From Laramie" is a great example of the psychological westerns that were popular in the 1950s. Jimmy Stewart plays Will Lockhart, an army Captain who goes undercover to learn who sold rifles to the Apaches, which were then used to kill his brother when a cavalry patrol was ambushed. Lockhart delivers supplies to storekeeper Barbara Waggoman (Cathy O'Donnell) in the isolated town of Coronado, deep in Apache country in New Mexico. He also meets her uncle Alec (Donald Crisp), a wealthy, arrogant cattle baron who is basically a decent man and who loves his worthless son Dave (Alex Nicol). The old man is going blind and is worried that a man will come and kill his son. Trying to reign in the psychopathic Dave is the ranch foreman, Vic (Arthur Kennedy), who is sort of an adopted son to Alec and engaged to Barbara. Of course, the answer to Lockhart's quest is to be found in this tortured family and a lot of people are going to have to die before his obsession finally ends.

This 1955 film, the last Western Stewart did with directed Anthony Mann, owes as much to Shakespeare's King Lear as it does to Freudian psychology. It also features one of the most violent sequences you would find in a Western (for that time) when Dave and his ranch hands roust Lockhart's wagon train loaded with salt. They rope Lockhart, drag him through a fire, burn his wagons and start shooting his mules. Only the arrival of Vic stops Dave from killing Lockhart, setting the stage for his involvement with the Waggomans. The performances by the cast and excellent, with Stewart, Crip and Kennedy are especially good and the film has the additional virtue of having been filmed on location near Sante Fe. "The Man From Laramie" is one of the darkest Westerns, what you might consider the "Unforgiven" of its day.

The last of the collaborations between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann (unless you count the few days Mann worked on Night Passage before falling out with his star), The Man From Laramie is the most ambitious even if it isn't always completely successful. On one level it's a standard revenge Western, with Stewart looking for the gunrunners who caused his brother's death, but his hunt takes in rancher Donald Crisp's powerful but dysfunctional dynasty and its divisions as well, and its through them that the film moves into almost mythically tragic territory. With foreman and almost adopted son Arthur Kennedy devotedly but thanklessly running the ranch for him and constantly trying to protect the old man from the feckless stupidity and sadism of his natural son Alex Nicol it soon becomes clear that not all the bad guys are that bad. Indeed, everything Kennedy does wrong is done out of the best motives that are constantly thwarted, turning what could easily have been a stereotypical villain into a genuinely tragic figure as he realises the man he regards as a second father sees him only as a mere employee (interestingly, James Gray used this same character arc for Joaquin Phoenix's character in The Yards). Even Crisp's autocrat is tormented by recurring dreams of a stranger riding in to destroy his family as he slowly goes blind, believing Stewart to be a virtual horseman of the apocalypse.

Along with the tormented and frustrated characters it's also surprisingly violent for its day. While it wasn't unusual for Stewart's characters to carry their own stigmata in Mann's Westerns (in Bend of the River he even hides a scar on his neck from a botched lynching), here he really suffers as he's beaten up, dragged across salt flats and through a fire and then shot in the hand in one scene alone, all of which only serves to fuel his hatred more until the affable character we met at the film's beginning has become a distant memory. In many ways it reverses the usual journey Mann put Stewart through in their Westerns: rather than going from bitterness to reluctant hero, here he starts out `nice to everybody' (as the very out-of-keeping title song puts it) to end the film all but consumed by rage.

As usual, there's admirable economy in the writing - there's a lot of plot and several key characters but it manages bring them all over and incorporate an almost mystical sense of tragic destiny without seeming rushed or contrived, offering a satisfying Western with some substance. It's also the closest Mann ever got to his long cherished Western version of King Lear that he was finally preparing when he died during the shooting of A Dandy in Aspic. The only one of the Mann-Stewart films together to be shot in Scope, Mann uses it superbly, and not just in the mountain location shots. Check out the beautiful establishing shot of the town on Sunday evening, the Mexicans and Indians heading for church on one side of the frame while on the other the white townsfolk drink and gamble. Thankfully that's preserved in Columbia's widescreen DVD, though the only extra is a clumsily cropped trailer introduced by Stewart on the film's set.