From MGM
Written by Sam Rolfe
and Harold Jack Bloom
Directed by Anthony Mann
Starring
James Stewart
Janet Leigh
Robert Ryan
Ralph Meeker
Millard Mitchell
This story could have been utilized in any number of genres, like film noir, for one, but it certainly made for a skillful western and a decidedly different one. It is a psychological, character-driven, revenge thriller, tough and unforgiving.
It stars one of Hollywood's most popular and enduring actors whose career would hit another peak as he became a western star. In fact this is clearly one of his best films and directed by a man most familiar to the actor and the genre.
Stewart plays a rancher who has fallen on hard times since the Civil War has ended and who has taken up the life of a hard-bitten, self-loathing bounty hunter. He is after a man he has known in the past (Ryan) who has killed a man. There is a warrant out for Ryan's arrest, dead or alive. Stewart is determined to collect that money to buy his ranch back, lost during the war. He has a steely singleness of purpose and cannot be detoured.
Stewart first comes upon an old prospector (Mitchell), also down on his luck, who happens to ask Stewart if he was the man who had a campfire some miles back. When Stewart says no, he considers that it could have been Ryan's campfire. Stewart tells Mitchell he'll give him $20 if the old man will take him to the spot. Stewart doesn't mind allowing Mitchell to think Stewart's a sheriff and shows him a wanted posted. Off they go with high hopes.
As the pair rounds the lower edges of a mountain, boulders come raining down. It happens several times. They can't see anyone. As they are off to the side, discussing a possible climb, Meeker comes galloping up. Still dressed in his soldier duds, he turns out to have been dishonorably discharged over questionable moral character. He's also full of himself and obviously a lout but he does provide the film's only humor.
It is puzzling why he wanted to join up at this point and even more so that Stewart allowed it considering he was firm about working alone. But after Meeker, too, joins the discussion about a climb, up he goes. Stewart follows but Meeker gets there first and is able to sneak up on Ryan. As they wrestle, Leigh jumps on Meeker's back and Stewart arrives and corrals all of them.
Stewart expected Ryan to be alone. Leigh explains that she's just friends with Ryan, feels sorry for him and believes he has been falsely accused. He has promised to take her with him to California. Meeker immediately becomes fixated on her, much to her dismay. Stewart reluctantly sees he may need his newfound partners after all.
These scenes, on and around the mountain, are among the best. Very exciting stuff. Another one involves the only other 12 actors in the movie, those playing Native Americans who come upon the others on a trail. Meeker decides to run off and hide because he knows the Indians are after him. In a dazzlingly choreographed scene, an anxious Stewart and crowd are slowing moving on and some yards away the Indians are following. No one is sure what will happen. Suddenly, Meeker steps out from behind a fallen log and kills the chief which, of course, brings about an exciting battle. I love how this scene was staged... beautiful, tense, violent.
The drama intensifies when it appears to all that Leigh is falling for Stewart. At each stop along the way Ryan cooks up one devious plan after another. He would kill all of the men if he could and it's obvious he is simply lying to Leigh and is using her. At the same time, he uses psychological warfare as he pits them against one another. His machinations against Stewart send the bounty hunter into spasms of reckless anger. While there are just five main characters, we have no doubt they all won't be left standing at the film's exciting conclusion on another mountaintop, this one overlooking the raging Colorado River.
As fine of an actor that Stewart was, he spent a lot of screen time in lightweight fare... romantic comedies, happy biographies and the like. His career would change focus with his Hitchcock partnerships but the five westerns he made with director Mann made the moviegoing public really sit up and take notice. He was looking for something different, to play men who were as far from anything he'd done. He wanted to show anger, real anger and he didn't want to play such heroic parts. He wanted to play characters who were flawed, even amoral.
The actor-director collaboration began with 1950's gritty Winchester 73. Then beginning in 1952, Mann's next seven films in a row all starred Stewart, four of them westerns. In 1952 there was the colorful Bend of the River. While that anger, even rage was apparent in these two characters, the actor had still not played someone so embittered and so amoral as in Spur. It was followed by two non-westerns, Thunder Bay (1953) and The Glenn Miller Story (1954). Then came The Far Country, a rare Stewart film that didn't bowl me over, and then Strategic Air Command (1955), a film Stewart held dear. Lastly, also in 1955, is The Man from Laramie, a film many fans of the actor and/or director may deem as their best.
Then came Night Passage in 1958 and it all fell apart for the pair. There have always been many different stories about what happened but the one I've seen or heard the most is that Mann refused to work with co-star Audie Murphy. Stewart had Mann fired and they never spoke or saw one another again.
Mann keeps Stewart boxed in for The Naked Spur. He is an amoral character who clearly doesn't want to say much more about himself than he absolutely has to. Mann keeps the character uncomfortable and on edge. We know he's torn about what he's doing. The goal is not to capture Ryan but to get the money. Leigh tries to tell Stewart that he's better than that.
Ryan, who would go on to work for Mann again in Men in War and God's Little Acre later in the decade, was a brilliant choice as the murderer who grins and laughs as he sets up others, preying on their vulnerabilities. While having his hands tied and forced to ride a burro, he still seems like the one who's in control. Few actors were better bad guys than Robert Ryan.
Meeker was a better actor than the opportunities offered to him but this role as the disgraced soldier stripped of his humanity is a very good one. Meeker had managed a few leading man roles but starting here he largely drifted into supporting roles. Too bad.
Mitchell, who had worked with Stewart and Mann in Winchester 73, was a character actor who played tough but wise roles in numerous films. Being cast as the grizzled, opinionated prospector is perfection. He never garnered the type of fame he may have wanted although audiences noticed him as the movie mogul in the prior year's Singin' in the Rain. Mitchell died shortly after making The Naked Spur.
Leigh desperately wanted the role. MGM was her home studio and she practically begged. She was tired of doing fluff and looking pretty and decorative in so-so pictures. Here she would get to cut her hair short, looking as if she did it herself, have little makeup and the promise of being in a big film. She had worked with Ryan in a good little noir, Act of Violence (1949) and welcomed the reunion. She was dying to do a film with Stewart whom she knew around the studio but hadn't worked with. Stewart was all for it but the decision would be left to the camera.
Her role is not as well-defined as the other four. She is decidedly here to serve as a conduit for Stewart's character to redeem himself. Through her shines a light that seems to compel Stewart to want to become a better man. She more than held her own in this ragtag group.
The Naked Spur is filmed entirely outdoors in the resplendent countryside surrounding Durango, Colorado. The effective use of the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River as seen through William Mellor's Technicolor cameras is something I have never forgotten. Gorgeous. I loved how in this big landscape there's a claustrophobic feeling as the five characters are photographed so tightly in scenes. They are jumpy and we feel it as well because of the way it's staged.
If there is such a thing as a trail movie, then this is one. More kudos on how these scenes, particularly on mountainsides, were filmed. Ah, with one slip of that horse's leg... No wonder each actor had his or her own stunt person.
Mann had a love affair with geography, not as just something beautiful to look at but to figure directly into the story. I credit him with something else, too. Westerns or other adventure films often are short on characterization. Heroes and villains are frequently cookie-cutter types. But Mann imbues his characters with blood and muscle, brains and emotions. I love most of Mann's films. His westerns with Stewart are simply irresistible.
I regard The Naked Spur as the best of their pairings and in the top ten of the best westerns ever made. Empire Magazine called it a masterpiece that's too easy to take for granted, the best of an outstanding run of westerns. Critic Leonard Maltin claimed it is one of the best westerns ever made. The U.S. National Film Registry added it as a film that is culturally, aesthetically or historically significant.
Here's a trailer:
Next posting:
a rare color film noir
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