"You outlived your life, you outlived your kind"
Man of the West was the last Western directed by Anthony Mann, it alsostands as one of his best works in the genre. The film belongs to atransition category of Westerns, it was released in a period when theWestern practically ceased to be a pure and innocent adventure ofcowboys and Indians, a conquering of the West by hopeful pioneers andinstead was substituted by a more pessimistic, somewhat more mature,adult and even philosophical approach. The Man of the West is a clearrepresentation of that change, being one of the pioneers in thecategory along with John Ford's The Searchers, which was made about thesame time, the change that was finalized in what is considered as asymbolic death of the Western classical genre - John Ford's The Man WhoShoot Liberty Valance.With all its pessimism and extreme, almost sadistic violence, Man ofthe West is also an undoubted predecessor to the Westerns made later inthe '60s by Sam Pekinpah, beginning with 1962 Ride the High Country andculminating in what considered his best 1969 The Wild Bunch.In Man of the West the transition, the change in the genre incarnatesitself in a figure of Link Jones wonderfully played by Gary Cooper.Right from the opening scene of the film we are introduced to him as heappears on the horizon of the classical Western's landscape, a figurethat looks like it had been moulded out of as much marked by the timeas the hero himself surrounding scenery. And when he enters the town ina classical Western manner of a stranger sure of his strength, thevoyage to the past really begins, a past which starts to hunt the maincharacter in almost an exact proportion as it revealed to us. A pastthat finds its threatening personification in a most evil character ofDock Tobin, superbly played by Lee J. Cobb. An old outlaw who once wasLink's buddy and who somehow managed to survive all those years, stillremaining in action, outliving his kind, outliving his life,representing no more nor less than a shadow of the classical Westernbad guy figure and opposing Link, his once best friend and now enemy ofequally phantomous nature. The confrontation reaches its peak and drawsto its conclusion in the phantom-town of Lassoo, left by itsinhabitants a long time ago and populated only by ghosts and agedMexican couple before our heroes' arrival. This is where the final duelbetween the two parties takes place, a duel where again the deviationfrom the classical Western style is so obvious, where actually theclassical duel scheme finds its end when the opponents breaking all thecodes and leaving all the moral preoccupations aside shoot each otherin pure struggle for survival motivated by the overwhelming hate andthe desire to erase the past. The final result is one of the mosttragic and pessimistic Westerns in the cinema's history. 9/10score 9/10
IlyaMauter 3 June 2003
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0064935/35090
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