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Originally Posted by mja345
Thought I'd leave a review for one of my favorite Westerns, "The Man From Laramie". After going through the Indicator Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott box set, which is awesome, I had a temptation to revisit this Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart collaboration.
Stewart plays Will Lockhart, who rides into a small town in New Mexico to deliver supplies, along with a rag-tag gang. He is an enigmatic man and only tells the attractive shop owner (Cathy O'Donnell) who he meets that he comes from Laramie. As he's planning on leaving town, he asks her if it's okay if he can collect salt for free and haul it away and she tells him it's no problem. With her advice, he goes down to the salt mines where local man-child enforcer Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol) confronts him and burns down his wagons and kills his mules. It turns out that Waggoman is the son of the local magnate Alec (Donald Crisp) and Will soons runs afoul of them, despite developing a begrudging respect for Alec and his right-hand man Vic (Arthur Kennedy).
This film is so fascinating for its time because the characters are so ambiguous. Stewart is supposed to be the hero, but it's completely unclear what his motivations are, as revenge is quickly an afterthought. O'Donnell's character is there to ostensibly be a love interest for Stewart, but she is engaged to Vic, so it's completely uncertain. Vic's role, in lesser Westerns, would to be an enemy of Lockhart, but he's quite neutral. Alec Waggoman, the town ruler, is actually a sympathetic character. This film is incredibly nuanced in how it views its characters, which makes for a fascinating watch. Jimmy Stewart, who could play nice, sympathetic guys as well as anyone, plays a character who is difficult to read. He's clearly not a bad man from the outset, but it's uncertain why he's sticking around in this small town with an entrenched power structure.
Another reason it's worth noting, within the genre, is that Stewart starts out as a man seemingly surrounded by supplies and manpower and ends up completely alone. It allows him to go from his "nice guy" persona to a man merely trying to survive. And what happens in the film is ultimately uncertain because nothing is defined in black and white terms. I can't say that I recommend just going out and picking this up because it's unfortunately OOP now (should've left this review when it was in print, I apologize), but seek it out, as this is one of the top Westerns of the 50s and I believe any fan of the genre will really enjoy it.
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Long a favorite of mine, but then Mann is my favorite director:
"This is the most unfriendly country I've ever been in."
The last of the collaborations between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann (unless you count the few days Mann worked on
Night Passage before falling out with his star),
The Man From Laramie is the most ambitious even if it isn't always completely successful. On one level it's a standard revenge Western, with Stewart looking for the gunrunners who caused his brother's death, but his hunt takes in rancher Donald Crisp's powerful but dysfunctional dynasty and its divisions as well, and its through them that the film moves into almost mythically tragic territory. With foreman and almost adopted son Arthur Kennedy devotedly but thanklessly running the ranch for him and constantly trying to protect the old man from the feckless stupidity and sadism of his natural son Alex Nicol it soon becomes clear that not all the bad guys are that bad. Indeed, everything Kennedy does wrong is done out of the best motives that are constantly thwarted, turning what could easily have been a stereotypical villain into a genuinely tragic figure as he realises the man he regards as a second father sees him only as a mere employee (interestingly, James Gray used this same character arc for Joaquin Phoenix's character in
The Yards). Even Crisp's autocrat is tormented by recurring dreams of a stranger riding in to destroy his family as he slowly goes blind, believing Stewart to be a virtual horseman of the apocalypse.
Along with the tormented and frustrated characters it's also surprisingly violent for its day. While it wasn't unusual for Stewart's characters to carry their own stigmata in Mann's Westerns (in
Bend of the River he even hides a scar on his neck from a botched lynching), here he really suffers as he's beaten up, dragged across salt flats and through a fire and then shot in the hand in one scene alone, all of which only serves to fuel his hatred more until the affable character we met at the film's beginning has become a distant memory. In many ways it reverses the usual journey Mann put Stewart through in their Westerns: rather than going from bitterness to reluctant hero, here he starts out `nice to everybody' (as the very out-of-keeping title song puts it) to end the film all but consumed by rage.
As usual, there's admirable economy in the writing - there's a lot of plot and several key characters but it manages bring them all over and incorporate an almost mystical sense of tragic destiny without seeming rushed or contrived, offering a satisfying Western with some substance. It's also the closest Mann ever got to his long cherished Western version of
King Lear that he was finally preparing when he died during the shooting of
A Dandy in Aspic. The only one of the Mann-Stewart films together to be shot in Scope, Mann uses it superbly, and not just in the mountain location shots. Check out the beautiful establishing shot of the town on Sunday evening, the Mexicans and Indians heading for church on one side of the frame while on the other the white townsfolk drink and gamble.
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