Rent Man of the West (1958)

Hell's Grandpas - Man of the West review by Count Otto Black

Anthony Mann was, along with Budd Boetticher, one of the grittiest and most interesting directors of westerns in the fifties. Unfortunately, despite having all the right ingredients in the pot, he comes a little unstuck here. The setup is extremely formulaic, and you'll see it in lots of westerns from this period. The hero, a woman he doesn't know who will become his love interest, and the cowardly, annoying man she's initially with (who might as well have "DOOMED" tattooed on his forehead) are captured by a gang of utter degenerates, the leader of which for some reason decides not to immediately kill the hero when he knows he ought to, and you can guess how it plays out from there. The trick on the director's part is to make a predictable situation tense and interesting.

The basic idea of Gary Cooper being a good man with a dark past which suddenly pops up again, although it's another genre cliché, isn't a bad one, and the wrinkle that the nastiest outlaw in the territory is his adoptive father, who therefore has a very strong motive not to kill him when he obviously should, ought to work just fine. The elephant in the room is Lee J. Cobb as the oddly-named Dock Tobin (they actually spell it out so we know he isn't called "Doc" - I haven't the faintest idea why). His performance brings to mind both Robert Newton's archetypal Long John Silver and Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa, neither of whom has any business being in a western. It's true that he's playing a psychopath in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but even so there are times you wish he'd tone it down a bit. And given that most of his gang would nowadays qualify for some kind of incapacity benefit and even he repeatedly admits they're useless (a fact they demonstrate very early on), it's hard to see why they haven't been rounded up and hanged yet.

The script reunites our hero with these worthless excuses for human beings in ways that rely on outrageous coincidence, and sometimes make no sense at all. The woman is there to be maltreated to a degree that becomes gratuitously nasty. The hero is there to do what a man's gotta do. And everybody else who isn't an extra is there to be shot. It has its moments, and Gary Cooper really is rather good, but I didn't believe in the characters or the the set-up, and there's something pointlessly nasty about it all. And Lee J. Cobb is definitely in the wrong movie.

Classic Western - Man of the West review by GI

Rightly considered a classic western it is actually a bit of an oddity. Its narrative doesn't fully fit into the standard plots of westerns although it is clearly an 'outlaw' story. Gary Cooper, arguably much too old for the role, plays a reformed outlaw who happens to be on a train when his old bunch rob it and by a quirk of circumstances he finds himself stranded with a couple of other passengers, including romantic interest Julie London, and forced to rejoin the gang, led by psychopathic Lee J. Cobb, in order to survive. The dynamics between Cooper's former killer with a conscience and the clearly homicidal gang is what drives the narrative with London as the character he vows to protect. Indeed the sexual violence that is pervasive throughout was ahead of its time including a tense scene where London is forced to strip for the gang. There's a drawn out fist fight that is quite violent for its time and a climactic showdown in a desert ghost town. The film is marked by the tension that is ever present and never lets up as the characters all simmer on the edge of explosive violence and the director, Anthony Mann, never allows you to guess where and from whom its going to come. The seeds are here of the more grittier direction the genre took in the 1960s and beyond with directors such as Sam Peckinpah. Cooper is an interesting western anti-hero and much like his Will Kane in High Noon (1952) here he's a man of shades, some dark and some light, his gun skills are negligible and he lacks the dominance of, say, a John Wayne character. This makes for a more interesting, psychological edge to the narrative and a film of real interest as you never know if he's going to win or lose. This is a filmwell worth rediscovery and if you haven't seen it then it's worth your time.

Psycho-Killers - Man of the West review by Steve

Tough psychological western set around the time when the civilising of the west was threatening to end of the age of the outlaw. After many years of peaceful living, an ex-gunfighter (Gary Cooper) by chance runs into his ruthless former gang. He gets sucked into a bank job, while he tries to devise a plan to to extricate himself and co-travelling chanteuse (Julie London).

When the bandits stage the heist they discover the bank is now in a ghost town. They leave a few of their own bodies behind. It is an apt location for their futile shoot out. They are the phantoms of the old west, the anachronistic spirits of men who have outlived their ascendency with the arrival of law and order.

Cooper is 20 years too old, even for a reformed gunfighter. He looks unwell. Consequently Lee J.Cobb is buried under a heap of cosmetics in order to play his uncle. Julie London is for long stretches mostly employed as decoration. But they all still deliver memorable performances.

This is a bleak, brooding western. The family of outlaws are all vicious grotesques. There's some humour early on, but this becomes a bitter, violent experience, with an authentic look. Perhaps it was the film's brutality which meant it didn't find an audience at the time, but it has subsequently become a critics' favourite.