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Nature of the badge, "man pins it on, he can't take it off." The bounty hunter (Henry Fonda) rides into town, the lifeless hand dangling out of a bag is not lost on the populace—horizontal tracks across a dusty street lined with vertical posts, a lesson in filmic cogency. The sheriff is dead, his "temporary" replacement (Anthony Perkins) scarcely impresses the wanderer. "You're more temporary than you think." The younger man has a fiancée (Mary Webster) who wants him out of the trade, the older man takes up with a local widow (Betsy Palmer) living in semi-ostracization with her mixed-race son (Michael Ray). "To a Pupil," as Whitman would say, a mentorship that begins so the greenhorn can stay alive to sign the paperwork for the tracker's reward. "A decent man doesn't want to kill, but if you're gonna shoot, shoot to kill." Cramped by the sermonic Dudley Nichols screenplay, Anthony Mann accentuates the formalism of the Western burg, often framing through the windows of the sheriff's office for multiple planes of activity. The lawman toughens as the gunslinger softens, halves of a man whole at the close. A cash-for-flesh business, "dead or alive. Which means dead." My Darling Clementine and The Ox-Bow Incident come and go, a proximity to 3:10 to Yuma is to be observed. The murder of the doctor (John McIntire) on the eve of his birthday means a crowd singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" to a corpse in a carriage, the culprits (Lee Van Cleef and Peter Baldwin) are smoked out of their rocky hideout and promptly targeted for lynching. "Got a big white man's jury here," booms the burly bully (Neville Brand), last seen bumping into the camera following the showdown. Hathaway reworks the formulation in Nevada Smith, Mann's off to the culmination of Man of the West. Cinematography by Loyal Griggs. With Richard Shannon, Howard Petrie, Jack Kenney and Russell Simpson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |