JIMMY STEWART MANNS UP AGAIN
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The film’s been covered on this site twice before, once by the venerable Ed Howard in 2013 and once by Mr. Fish himself in his 2009 roundup of the fifty greatest ‘50s films. At number 38, Allan implicitly concedes it is average among the greats of that decade, yet calls The Naked Spur (in the comments of that entry) his favorite from among the five brilliant Westerns made by director Anthony Mann and his cowboy surrogate Jimmy Stewart. Together they blacksmithed out a cycle that parsed the actor’s apparently deep reservoir of anger and bitterness into a new trademark that made dark seem light in any of his previous popular performances (even the soulful misery of It’s a Wonderful Life) while sowing the ground quite generously for later dives into his vulgar darkness, mostly worked out by Hitchcock in Rear Window (1954) – which proved that Stewart did indeed have his perverse side – but of course expanded to its fullest by Hitch in ’58’s Vertigo. But that film’s revelation could not have had the all-consuming resonance it did had Stewart not already shown us his coiled – then uncoiled – rage in Mann’s string of down-and-dirty Westerns Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), this movie in ’53, The Far Country (1954), and The Man From Laramie (1955). These all combine to utterly re-mold our concept of Stewart from a pleasantly passionate rustic into a three-dimensional manifestation of sometimes not-so-righteous anger. In any case, Allan’s masterful breakdown of the movie, in his inimitably brief style, should be enough to christen it “covered”, but I’ve wanted to unpack it ever since it cantered its way into my personal top ten, some fifteen years ago. And this yearly tribute has given me the perfect (selfish) opportunity to figure out a few of the things that make me love it so much.
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Bronislau Kaper’s urgent opening trumpet music is like that of a high adventure story or even an urban thriller, but is set against the tranquil images of man on horse in the open country, forcing us to consider the possibly fractured peace of this cowboy’s ride. The picture of Stewart’s lone wanderer ka-lopping forward, unidentified, mysterious, small on screen, shrunk by his wilderness surroundings, is a common enough sight in the opening strains of classic Westerns that a short list of its kin comes readily to mind. To name a few: The Searchers (1956), The Tall T (1957), and most iconically, Shane, from the same year as this film. By then it’s already a trope… not that it doesn’t get even more mileage through the decades – there’s the introduction of Angel Eyes in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Eastwood’s own avenging angel in High Plains Drifter (1973), among many others. But evil or good, we’re conditioned by our own assumption of rugged individualism to self-flatter identification with the man who hacks out a life of solitude amongst the wild bramble and sloping hills and monolithic blue skies of unspoiled America as if he owns all of it. That presumption is the essence of the myth of how we got here and the even bigger myth of who we still think we are. We want to believe it, so we give ourselves over to the cowboy’s story.
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In this case, that story-myth is Howard Kemp’s, a bounty hunter tracking outlaw Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), who killed a marshal down in Kansas. Kemp (Stewart) now finds himself in Colorado country lurching along for clues on the trail to a generous bounty. Along the way his quiet resolve gets crowded out by nervous prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell), disgraced military opportunist Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker), Vandergroat himself, and the killer’s willing sidekick gal-pal Lina Patch (Janet Leigh), all of whom together form a menagerie of psychic extensions to Kemp’s roiling personal troubles: Tate’s nearly simple-minded trustworthiness is met by Kemp’s seeming disappointment that he’s not another criminal to impound, pointing early to Kemp’s bone-dry cynicism; Roy’s agility climbing up to Vandergroat’s cliffside hideout shows up Kemp’s relatively creaky age and physical lack; Lina’s gentleness, wrapped in scrappy toughness, breaks through Kemp’s battered heart; and Vandergroat’s laughing charm is a hard contrast to the grumpy solemnity that’s marked Kemp’s life since the war. Along the way, we learn that Kemp left a fiancée back at his ranch when he went off to fight for the Union, then returned to find she’d sold his land and run off with another man. Bitter romantic rebuke on top of post-war anxiety and fatigue are almost enough to justify his abject crankiness and shrill, carping protestations at all who’d get in his way of taking Vandergroat to justice alone. We see by the thirty-minute mark that the tranquil, lone cowboy of the opening credits is actually a broken and rage-filled cuckold, staring at the treetops and clouds wondering if there’s anything below the skyline left to depend on.
I’ll leave it to Ed and Allan’s two previous essays to unpack the unmistakable goodness of Mann’s direction and the everlastingly tense-to-taut screenplay by Oscar-nominated Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom. (I especially love how the story is bookended by cliff-climbing sequences.) But for me, it’s watching Stewart do what he does in this movie that’s undoubtedly the primary reason it’s sunk into my brain, watching him constantly roll out corrupted variations on his usual loyal, passionate, approachable persona. What keeps it so magnificently riveting is that it’s the one movie of his that gives us an almost wholly unlikable character – nearly every moment seems calculated to make us hate the guy almost as much as the rest of the characters do. It’s a kind of direct opposite of Stewart’s performance three years earlier as Elwood P. Dowd in Henry Koster’s Harvey, wherein Dowd is drawn from beginning to end as the most thoroughly lovable of Stewart’s characters, without a speck of darkness. If you’ll indulge me, here’s a regurgitation of a bit I wrote about that film some years back:
“Most Jimmy Stewart movies are some kind of balance between the two stammering halves of the brand JIMMY STEWART: the yearning, sweet-souled, righteous bumpkin who’s everybody’s earnest best friend, and the taciturn missionary, world-weary, trying to hang onto a shred of moral decency while screeching at Injustice with that patented righteous drawl and/or pounce-ready anger-panic – face like a big white knuckle. I believe we respond to the first because it’s who we want ourselves (or our nation) to be, and we respond to the second because we know how he feels and we wish we could airlift him out of the movie before he breaks into too many pieces. He’s both in most movies to some degree, often traveling the gamut from one to the other, as in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939) – and it’s the combo that makes him three-dimensional, time-proof. But in Harvey, he’s all-likable-all-the-time, without a single dark quiver from behind the rosy glasses…”
In The Naked Spur, Stewart is stuck at the other end of that spectrum, all-angry-all-the-time, with a couple of tiny exceptions given to him when he’s wistfully recalling the land he lost, the cultivation of it, the tending of the cattle. These moments, though, are few enough that they barely dent the overall impression we have of a man worn down to a curmudgeonly husk of grief, betrayal, bitterness, fury, and finally shame – sometimes all in the same scene, or even shot, as it is in this moment early on when Vandergroat goads Kemp over the way women have treated him:
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Stewart is so remarkably watchable not just because he’s so versatile from movie to movie, but from shot to shot inside the same movie. And this one is built to show the range of nuance he has inside a single, constantly raging heart.
And of course all of this intense deep-dive into the darker corners of Stewart’s psyche is meant to do one thing: make the ending work. If we don’t get mired down in a movie’s worth of Kemp’s trampled heart, then we’d never recognize the overwhelming power of a simple show of love and respect from the right woman. When Lina declares her desire to follow him into his new life, he can only scream “Why?” and then lay out the reasons she should turn and run: “I’m takin’ him back, I swear it. I’m gonna sell him for money.” It’s every man’s honest question for the woman in their life – with all the layers of guilt and shame built up over a lifetime of bad decisions, who would love us? We push the acceptance away, until finally we break down and accept the redemption. It’s one part roundabout happy Hollywood ending, and two parts irreducible truth. It’s in my personal top ten because I see myself in that broken man given a second chance.
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Another probing essay from you, Robert, and in appreciation of one of the cinema’s most renowned Westerns, perhaps from a psychological standpoint the most profound of all. Yes, Ed and Allan’s reviews are extraordinary and greatly add to the literature of a film that I consider (with THE MAN FROM LARAMIE) as Mann’s greatest. Still, you’ve explored Stewart’s character from a deeper context while never losing sight of the artistic components that made THE NAKED SPUR a seminal work in the cinema. William C. Mellor’s location cinematography and Bronislaw Kaper’s score complement the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom beautifully. As you note, the film and his character are driven by anger. This is quite a cerebral review, one I intend to read again. And I am more than tempted to watch THE NAKED SPUR again, too.
Thank you!! Of course I urge any and all to watch it again. For me it’s one of those movies I can’t watch enough, and always find something new in. I could watch it from any random point and be swallowed by its psychology and formal beauty – knowing especially I’ll get to experience that truly heartbreaking moment of acceptance at the end. It’s a masterpiece that transcends genre.
(I wasn’t sure who to address the above to…I know several of us are inside the WITD site working on stuff.)
Robert, it’s me, Sam.
If course! As always, thank you, Sam. I love participating in this yearly tribute.
Hi Robert, thanks for this wonderful selection and write-up. I finally got around to seeing this film as part of this site’s Best Western poll just over 10 years ago. When making my list, I realized I had a gap in some of my Anthony Mann features and gave this a go. I was floored as I wasn’t expecting Stewart’s character and performance (you nicely illustrate this). I ended up including this film in my list and I was happy that I got to see it before I made my list.
Thank you, Sachin! I agree, it definitely belongs on any list of greatest Westerns. Especially fun and instructive to watch it as a counter to Ford’s also beautiful but mostly desert-set Westerns. You wouldn’t think locations as beautiful as these would underscore anything as brutal as Kemp’s state of mind for most of the film – but it does, convincingly and expertly. Just a gorgeous movie in all ways.
For me, it is between this film and Winchester ’73 for Mann’s greatest Western, though I also love The Man from Laramie and Man of the West. Your scholarly treatment was a joy to read! I learned some aspects I had not thought about previously.
Thanks, Peter. The more I think about Mann’s Westerns the more I think it’s a fool’s errand to pick a fave. Too much greatness across the board.
I’m a big fan of later James Stewart. His WWII service really darkened his outlook on life and made possible the kinds of performances we would see in such films as The Naked Spur. I really like your look at this film, which only makes me appreciated him more.
Thank you, Marilyn! Exactly! I started to go into the parallel of Kemp’s dark post-Civil War service and Stewart’s own dive into darkness in his career. But I honestly don’t know much about his service beyond “he flew planes”, so felt out of my element there. Still, there can’t not be a cause and effect there, right?
The toll of his war service is well detailed here: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/jimmy-stewart-ww2-mission-air-force/
Thank you for this, Marilyn. What a story. And what a thing to be able to witness its power over one man through his art over decades.