The third Western in a sequence of five innovative collaborations between director Anthony Mann and Hollywood legend James Stewart, 1953s The Naked Spur is arguably the leanest of them all if not quite the meanest (that honor goes to the slightly later and still shocking The Man From Laramie). With an excellent supporting cast of only four other players, Spur’s taught plot unwinds in the period directly after the Civil War and finds former Union soldier and rancher-turned-bounty hunter Howard Kemp (Stewart) looking to capture fugitive murderer Ben Vandergroat (a constantly laughing and manipulative Robert Ryan, one of the screen’s great neurotic villains) in order to claim the reward on his head and then buy back his lost ranch. Kemp is helped in his tawdry task first by no-luck prospector Jesse Tate (the always excellent character actor Millard Mitchell) and then a dishonorably discharged soldier-adventurer Roy Anderson (the underrated and wonderfully cynical Ralph Meeker), whose morals are definitely flexible. When the hastily assembled trio corner and capture Vandergroat, they discover he is traveling with the young daughter of one his slain gang, Lina Patch (a very lovely and pixieish Janet Leigh). Tate and Anderson also find out, courtesy of the always-plotting Vandergroat, that Kemp is no lawman and also that the reward on him is a staggering $5000. Confronted with this uncomfortable fact, Kemp reluctantly agrees to deal his other two “partners” in for equal shares of the reward. But shortly after the group heads out for Abilene to turn Vandergroat in, Kemp is shot in a needless confrontation with Blackfoot Indians pursuing the unreliable Anderson, leaving him wounded and ever more at the mercy of his dubious companions and the ever-scheming Vandergroat. With the reward payable dead or alive, and Vandergroat set to hang for his murder, the tension ratchets up as the three “good guys” debate whether they should even bother to keep the fugitive alive, Kemp and Lina begin to fall in love and Vandergroat shrewdly tries to manipulate the others so they will turn on each other and he can make his escape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nrXxIDK0Dc

The seminal films with Stewart marked a turning point in Mann’s career, his middle period really, as he graduated from very good black & white crime thrillers on tight RKO budgets to expansive location Westerns eventually shot in Technicolor. In his last period, Mann would move on to massive widescreen historical epics such as the remarkable El Cid and the sweeping The Fall of the Roman Empire. But Mann first brought his hard boiled noir sensibilities to the Western and as a result his heroes are much more flawed than John Ford’s prairie Galahads and Howard Hawks’ tough talkers with hearts of gold. Continue reading →