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"Man of the West"
HUGE thanks to 'UconJack' for putting me onto this.
Thoughts;
A big surprise!
The often excellent Director Anthony Mann's penultimate Western starts off like any old 'classic' Western, with an annoyingly cloying and jaunty score playing over shots of a town and it's population that all look like they fell off a 'pastel shades' colour chart.
Legend of the Western Gary Cooper appears at first to be doing a lightly comic turn as the initially dull, if likeable, Link Jones. Added to how the film opened, I was fearing the worst.
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 led by Dock Tobin (a brilliantly mad and scary Lee J. Cobb).
From here on in this goes from a jaunty pastel paradise to a bleak, unforgiving plummet into pitch blackness.
Cobb has played tough, strict, rock hard 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.
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also has a chance now to reveal another side of Link Jones, and suddenly the comic air about him has vanished and been replaced by shame, desperation and unleashed violence.
He bounces off Cobb just fine, but really gets his teeth into his scenes with a young Jack Lord as Coaley, the most unstable member of the gang.
Some good verbal sparring 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 a terrified Julie London strip down to her corset, as he holds a knife to the helpless Link's throat.
So even before this 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 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. Though she would have been stripped naked by then.
In "Man of the West" the striking (and excellent) Ms 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 "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.
Last edited by 42ndStreetFreak; 09-28-09 at 05:20 PM.
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