by Allan Fish
(USA 1958 100m) DVD1/2
The Girl with the Golden Voice
p Walter R.Mirisch d Anthony Mann w Reginald Rose ph Ernest Haller ed Richard Heermance m Leigh Harline art Hillyard Brown
Gary Cooper (Link Jones), Lee J.Cobb (Dock Tobin), Julie London (Billie Ellis), Arthur O’Connell (Sam Beasley), Jack Lord (Coaley), John Dehner (Claude), Royal Dano (Trout), Robert Wilke (Ponch),
At the end of Anthony Mann’s profitable western partnership with Jimmy Stewart with The Man from Laramie in 1955, Mann would only make two more westerns of real note, both also starring Hollywood legends no stranger to the saddle. The first, The Tin Star, featured Henry Fonda in one of his first roles since returning to Hollywood after a spell on the stage. The second, Man of the West, was seemingly unconnected to The Tin Star in all but the director, but that isn’t entirely true. In the same year as Fonda made the Mann film, he also made the iconic Twelve Angry Men, which was written by Reginald Rose. Rose, and indeed Lee J.Cobb, would in turn collaborate with Mann on Man of the West. It would prove not only the effective farewell to the genre for Mann, but also for Gary Cooper.
Link Jones is making a journey by train to Fort Worth to try and engage a school-teacher for his burgeoning settlement back west. He’s cagy and somewhat anxious, an anxiety increased when a local sheriff seems to think he knows him from some place. He successfully fends him off, but when his train is ambushed by outlaws, though the train escapes, Jones and two passengers – saloon singer Billie Ellis and card shark Sam Beasley – are left stranded. They walk off to find the nearest settlement, come across a homestead, only to find that it’s the outlaws’ hideout. The ageing head of the band, Dock Tobin, knows Jones, and he knows him, for he was once his ‘right arm’ and fellow outlaw.
The staple of the man trying hard to shake off his past is one as old as the movie itself, and still utilised today – think of Cronenberg’s A History of Violence for one, genre classic Unforgiven for another. Yet if any summed up that notion, it’s Mann’s Man of the West. Whenever I hear that legendary cult line from The Godfather Part Three, as Michael Corleone frustratedly cries out “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”, I smile and remember Mann’s film. Coop’s Link is a man of the west, and he is a violent man, but as he says, as just because he wants to kill these outlaws, every single one of them, means he’s no better than they are. He’s angry then not just at bumping into them again, but about the result; namely his coming face to face with his baser nature.
Cooper is simply magnificent as Link, effortless as ever, belying his 56 years so that one mourns all the more in the recollection that it would soon be over for him. This is his Unforgiven, his The Shootist, his valedictory statement, and it’s a superb parting shot. He’s matched every step of the way by the fearsome Cobb, who makes Dock into one of the most memorable of all western villains, while London is quietly very effective as the girl who becomes little more than an object of sadism amongst the brutish outlaws, first forced into a semi strip in front of them all, before being brutally raped in a wagon by Dock as the ultimate affront to Link, who he sees as betrayer. And while Rose’s script is amongst the best of his career, don’t overlook the part played by Ernest Haller, who shows us a west both similar and otherwise to that with which we are accustomed. Note especially the prevalence of green in the film, the grass prairies, so rarely seen in the westerns of other directors, but not unfamiliar for Mann. Mann was painting on a new western canvas, and his baton would be picked up by Budd Boetticher and then by Sam Peckinpah, whose Ride the High Country would prove the crossroads from the world of Mann and Boetticher to the revisionist works of not only Peckinpah’s own later career, but those of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. Mann ensured that, simply in introducing moral ambiguity, the west would never be the same again.
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Yes I indeed was aware of the connection here with writer Reginald Rose, and I quite agree this masterwork is a valedictory statement for Cooper. The big gun fight at the end is one of the best ever of its kind, and it’s another example of how brilliant Mann uses landscape to comment on the mental state of his characters. This is a five-star masterpiece.
I’ve watched this film on TCM countless times, and it never loses a step. Cooper is more hard-bitten than Stewart, and Cobb is top-notch.
Without challenging the standing of this great film I’d like to challenge Alan’s describing it as Cooper’s “valedictory,” if only because I rather like Robert Rossen’s THEY CAME TO CORDURA from a year later and consider Cooper’s role in it one last strong performance.
Or The Hanging Tree, a brilliant western, from 1959. It was out of distribution for almost 15 years due to problems with Dorothy Johnson’s estate; when it became available for dvd release in 2007, turns out the negative was in need of a major restoration. WB has been promising a major, two-disc dvd of The Hanging tree for a couple of years. Nothing in the pipeline tey, alas.
Agree with you about Man Of The West, among the best westerns ever made. It was dismissed when it came out in 1958, too darkm too grim, too violent, and audiences didn’t want to see Cooper as a (one-time) killer. The scene in which Julie London is made to strip is so powerful, and in far too many films, that would be the end of it. But man Of The West turns it inside-out when Cooper starts stripping Jack Lord, as payback.
Cooper’s expression when he can’t find it in himself to strangle and kill Lord is acting of the highest order. Daniel Day-Lewis agrees, discussed it (and his admiration for Cooper in High Noon) in an interview with the NY Times a couple of years ago.
Couldn’t agree more, John. As for WBs promises of DVD releases, this is the same Warners who has promised a Vol 2 of Lon Chaney silents, a Jean Harlow Collection (pray for something next year for her centenary including Bombshell and Red Dust), silent classics like Greed, The Big Parade, The Crowd, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, Show People and The Wind, not forgetting Ambersons and, of course, Russell’s uncut The Devils, which they don’t so much not release as flat out REFUSE to release, leaving folks to patch up bootlegs from UK TV broadcasts and footage found by Mark Kermode.
But of course, there’s always room for another release of The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and The Great Escape. Waiting for WB is like waiting for the polar icecaps to melt.
The DVD of The Hanging Tree is the wrong aspect ratio too; the film is 1.85, not 1.33.
I must say I like the part of Allan’s (or anyone really) personality that is genuinely pissed off at companies, specifically WB here. It’s funny to me at the heart, but also very true on all accounts. With the technology out there and the money these companies have there is no reason for any film (let alone a masterpiece) to not be readily available to all who want to see it. No longer is the ‘it’s not economically viable’ excuse good enough, and the not releasing on moral grounds was never, and will never be OK.
We call it self-denying fascism. We have so much money we don’t need to sell the likes of The Devils and we enjoy the loss it gives devotees of said film.
Same with the silents. I mean, the lack of Greed and co is criminal. Some think they’re looking for the missing footage, and rumours have circulated for decades that there’s a stash of rarities in a vault deep within MGM that includes said footage – assumedly with the chopped two reels of 2001, Shergar, Elvis, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and the world’s supply of odd socks.
I honestly think even if they found the full Greed, they still wouldn’t release it. They’d get more pleasure denying us than they would in gaining from its release. They’re like demonic guardians of a sacred trust, as if they have the Scroll of Thoth in their possession, like the fanatics in Aronofsky’s Pi, with a WB executive balling out, like a demented rabbi, “you are carrying a Blu Ray that was meant for us…AND US ALONE!”