A favourite of Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Malcolm, Anthony Mann’s Man of the West has almost been relegated to also-ran status among many who would seek to create a list of canonical westerns. As a Gary Cooper vehicle, it doesn’t have the iconicity of High Noon, and as an Anthony Mann picture, it lacks Mann’s favorite star Jimmy Stewart and directly precedes Cimarron, maybe Mann’s worst western, in chronology.

But make no mistake - Man of the West is a great film, maybe Mann’s best.

Following an ex-con (Gary Cooper) who’s trying to procure a teacher for his small west Texas settlement, the film has, for fans of the genre, just about anything one could ever hope for - a railroad robbery, some brutal fisticuffs (Mann’s specialty, as anyone who’s seen the jaw-dropping fights in The Man from Laramie can attest), a creative twist on a Mexican standoff, and some delicately nuanced characters played by great actors - Cooper, Lee Cobb as Cooper’s crazed uncle, Arthur O’Connell as a con-man, and Jack Lord (Hawaii Five-O’s Steve McGarritt) as a pissant young robber with a thirst for blood.

But it’s also got a lot of unsettling effects - for all its Cinemascope beauty, much of the film is predicated upon a certain claustrophobia. Dark interiors, narrow passageways, and even empty town streets serve as exquisite settings for this claustrophobic mise-en-scene. And it features, as a major narrative vector, a constant threat of rape - Cooper, forced to take up with his old gang, must also protect a cabaret singer/schoolteacher (Julie London) from their brutal, lascivious advances. His two goals - destroying the gang and protecting London - are often at odds with one another, and it’s within this extraordinarily grey area that Mann finds the heart of his film, almost a moral treatise - wherein lies the duty of man? Is it to protect the forces/emblems of goodness, or is it to destroy the forces of wrong?

It’s not quite a death-of-the-west film, but it’s probably the closest one finds in Mann’s career. Late in the proceedings Cooper, back against a wall, tells Cobb that his time is over, and that the world is no longer suited for his types. But what of Cooper’s types? (Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country has a pretty solid answer to that question) Forgetting Cimarron, it’s a perfect end to Mann’s career as a director of westerns - here he rejects the oh-so-fifties manic anxiety of his earlier works (The Man from Laramie or The Naked Spur, for example) in favor of a certain troubled stoicism, a resignation toward the classical form. The film ends, as many great westerns do, with characters riding out into the great abandon, but with them they bring the promise of the educational/political infrastructure that would eventually render the West moot. The west isn’t dying here - but
it’s always darkest before the sun rises…

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