Rent Lawman (1971)

Interesting 70s Western - Lawman review by GI

Lawman is not a particularly celebrated western nor is it that clever. Full of genre clichés and with a rather clumsy script it nevertheless has a distinguished cast. Burt Lancaster is the titular lawman, Jared Maddox, an uncompromising character who sees the law as the ultimate tamer of the west, Robert Ryan, as a burned out fellow lawman, Lee J. Cobb as a cattle baron used to paying off the law when it suits him and Joseph Wiseman as a saloon owner with a chequered history. All these characters are clichéd too and in the hands of director Michael Winner the film resorts to blood spurting violence and incorporates everything you can think of from the western genre. And yet it's great fun and Lancaster is superb as the dark (note the ever present use of shadow in case you don't get that he's a dark character!!!) 'killer of men'. It's a classic fiction narrative of a powerful force arriving to disrupt the peace and put things right and leave with the resultant changes on the remaining characters. The western has often used this basic story structure and here the lawman represents the force of change. It's a 'professional' western in the sense that the skilled gunfighter is the main protagonist but in here too is the seeds of the cattle baron narrative (in the form of Cobb's bigshot) and modern viewers may see a contemporary resonance to something like the TV series, Yellowstone. In the hands of a more subtle director, who loves his zoom shots, and a better screenplay this would have been possibly better celebrated. Looking at Winner's films today especially his westerns they are focused on death which is the predominant theme and scenes of death and decay litter this movie. Overall this is a solid modern western made in the early years of the revisionist period for the western. It hangs onto too many genre tropes to be up there with the films of directors Sam Peckinpah or Clint Eastwood but it has its merits and is worth checking out.

Middle Ranking Western. - Lawman review by Steve

Lancaster, Ryan and Cobb says you gotta watch this one. Michael Winner suggests otherwise. Very dense with dialogue, though the dialogue is decent, but not a lot of action. Very fine period costumes and sets. Worth seeing for the stars and a good support cast.

Another loser from Winner - Lawman review by Count Otto Black

When I saw the name "Michael Winner" I thought this might be bad, but it's got a pretty impressive cast, and plot sounded promising. Unfortunately it's downright dreary. Burt Lancaster, the titular lawman, is supposed to be Judge Dredd in a stetson, and a director like Sergio Corbucci (or absolutely any other Italian making westerns in 1971) could have turned this concept into a relentlessly gripping tale of excessive revenge, culminating in a spectacular gunfight between absolutely everybody who wasn't dead yet, probably involving dynamite, while managing to make precisely the same point - taking justice too far is sometimes worse than doing nothing at all, even if you're technically right. Michael Winner, not so much. If this is "action-packed" then so is "On Golden Pond"! "Angst-packed" more like. The very occasional gunplay is listless, the overall pace is leaden, and the inevitable final showdown is both nihilistic and dull.

Everybody looks miserable nearly all the time, except Robert Duvall, who looks roguishly cheerful because he usually does, unless told not to by a director who isn't asleep. Burt Lancaster, who always benefited from good direction, simply looks constipated. Character motivation is often opaque. The lawman seems to have no reason to mercilessly hunt down a group of men, all but one of whom are innocent, when everybody else is willing to compromise, beyond the fact that he's a stubborn badass. This is discussed endlessly by everybody, but all they succeed in doing is making each other even more angst-ridden. It's got a cast who pull it up to two stars, but some of them are wasted. Robert Ryan appears to have been told to play exactly the same character he did in "The Wild Bunch" in order to persuade the viewers they're watching something similar. Unsurprisingly, he does not succeed in doing this. Don't bother.