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Man of the West (1958) - (minor ‘event’ spoilers)

Dir: Anthony Mann

On his way to hire a schoolteacher for his small town, homesteader Link Jones (Gary Cooper), saloon girl Billie Ellis (Julie London) and card sharp Sam Beasley (Arthur O'Connell) are left stranded when their train is attacked by an outlaw gang.

Link leads them to shelter nearby, an old homestead he used to live in, and there finds that the gang that tried to rob the train is holed up there.
It is the gang Link used to ride with. A gang partially made up of his own relatives.

The gang are a ragged bunch of virtual psychopaths led by the cruel patriarch figure Dock Tobin (a brilliantly mad and scary Lee J. Cobb), a man almost a Father figure to Link.
Link persuades the gang that he wants to rejoin them and although they don’t fully trust him Tobin insists that he can help them with one last bank job…..

 

The excellent Director Anthony Mann's penultimate Western, after a classic line-up of movies (many starring James Stewart, “Winchester ‘73”, “The Naked Spur”, “The Furies”), starts off like any old 'classic' era Western, with an annoyingly cloying and jaunty score playing over shots of a town and its population that all look like they fell off a 'pastel shades' colour chart.
Gary Cooper appears at first to be doing a lightly comic turn as the initially dull, if likeable, Link Jones. When this initial introduction is added to how the film opened, I was fearing the worst as I am not a big fan of many ‘Golden Era’ Westerns.
But it seems Mann was playing a naughty game with us.
Suddenly (after an enjoyably farcical train ride…those were the days) Mann lets rip with his twisted gang of robbers and from here on in this goes from a jaunty pastel paradise to a bleak, unforgiving plummet into pitch blackness.

The great Lee J. Cobb ("On the Waterfront", "12 Angry Men") has played tough, strict, rock hard and sometimes ruthless characters before, but I've never seen him essay a character so deranged and twisted as here.
Plastered in a grey old beard and ragged clothes Tobin lurches through the film dishing out spittle sprayed venom and ruthless violence.

Fine support comes from veteran Arthur O'Connell ("Anatomy of a Murder") whose gambler character certainly grows in scope as the film moves along and there is very nice work from John Dehner ("Fun with Dick and Jane") as Link's cousin Claude, who Link shared a close but dangerously unstable relitionship to when he rode with the outlaws.
Julie London (who mostly worked in TV after) does an excellent job as the initially sassy Billie and essays her character's change after she eest the gang with an astute eye. She may ultimately portray a 'damsel in distress' as the film goes on, but she does it with genuine strength as her character is subjected to cruel and often brutal treatment.

Cooper also has a chance now to reveal another side of Link Jones, and suddenly the comic air about him has vanished and been replaced by shame, desperation and seething violence.
He bounces off Cobb just fine, but really gets his teeth into his scenes with a young Jack Lord (TV's “Hawaii Five-O”) as Coaley, the most unstable member of the gang.Some good verbal sparring between the men leads into a devil of a fistfight as Cooper, Lord (and their stunt doubles) go through an unusually extended and bloody duel.



But it's not the fight itself that really shocks here, it's the sudden madness that overcomes Cooper's Link (we're a long way from "High Noon" here!) as he starts to literally (and very violently) rip the clothes off the bloodied, screaming Coaley until the man is reduced to a sobbing, blood caked wreck dressed now only in his long-johns!
Even today this brutal scene of frenzied retribution is strong stuff, especially coming from the likes of the normally clean cut and heroic Cooper.
This outstanding sequence's retribution happens because of an earlier sequence where Lord's leering gunman makes Julie London’s terrified Billie strip down to her corset, as he holds a knife to the helpless Link's throat.



So even before the clothes ripping fistfight shocker, Mann had started to walk us into a very dark place indeed. And not a place you would expect to be in during a 1950's Gary Cooper Western.
The entire sequence is an uncomfortable pre-cursor in fact to the same sort of scenes (of a brutal, leering gang of psychopaths normally invading someone's home) that would make up many a Grindhouse Exploitation film of the 70's/80's.
In "Man of the West" the striking Julie London only gets down to her corset, but this scene is amazingly close to the infamous 'strip the blonde girl' sequence in Ruggero Deodato's nasty "House on the Edge of the Park", a full 22 years later.

When we add the generally dark plot of inescapable pasts and destinies, deceit, multiple deaths (one involving a wailing, gut shot, man really sticks out) and much twisted sadism (the reveal of an off-screen event during the finale...rather thrown away during the very end though sadly...is stunningly bleak, nasty and unexpected) you have one of the darkest, tough and (for the time especially) uncompromising Westerns you will ever see from Hollywood.
Some of the 'Classic Western' styling is still rather dated for my tastes and the very end scene (though any romance is explicitly ruled out, which is unusual) lacks the punch of what came before, something not helped by that annoyingly cheesy and jaunty score appearing again.

Overall though this is excellent, surprising and hard as nails film-making done with a master's touch.

In fact "Man of the West" was heavily cut upon it's initial UK cinema release, and certainly earns it's uncut '12' DVD certificate today, and then some.