"You outlived your life, you outlived your kind"

IlyaMauter

Man of the West was the last Western directed by Anthony Mann, it also  stands as one of his best works in the genre. The film belongs to a  transition category of Westerns, it was released in a period when the  Western practically ceased to be a pure and innocent adventure of  cowboys and Indians, a conquering of the West by hopeful pioneers and  instead was substituted by a more pessimistic, somewhat more mature,  adult and even philosophical approach. The Man of the West is a clear  representation of that change, being one of the pioneers in the  category along with John Ford's The Searchers, which was made about the  same time, the change that was finalized in what is considered as a  symbolic death of the Western classical genre - John Ford's The Man Who  Shoot Liberty Valance.  With all its pessimism and extreme, almost sadistic violence, Man of  the West is also an undoubted predecessor to the Westerns made later in  the '60s by Sam Pekinpah, beginning with 1962 Ride the High Country and  culminating in what considered his best 1969 The Wild Bunch.  In Man of the West the transition, the change in the genre incarnates  itself 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 he  appears on the horizon of the classical Western's landscape, a figure  that looks like it had been moulded out of as much marked by the time  as the hero himself surrounding scenery. And when he enters the town in  a classical Western manner of a stranger sure of his strength, the  voyage to the past really begins, a past which starts to hunt the main  character in almost an exact proportion as it revealed to us. A past  that finds its threatening personification in a most evil character of  Dock Tobin, superbly played by Lee J. Cobb. An old outlaw who once was  Link's buddy and who somehow managed to survive all those years, still  remaining in action, outliving his kind, outliving his life,  representing no more nor less than a shadow of the classical Western  bad guy figure and opposing Link, his once best friend and now enemy of  equally phantomous nature. The confrontation reaches its peak and draws  to its conclusion in the phantom-town of Lassoo, left by its  inhabitants a long time ago and populated only by ghosts and aged  Mexican couple before our heroes' arrival. This is where the final duel  between the two parties takes place, a duel where again the deviation  from the classical Western style is so obvious, where actually the  classical duel scheme finds its end when the opponents breaking all the  codes and leaving all the moral preoccupations aside shoot each other  in pure struggle for survival motivated by the overwhelming hate and  the desire to erase the past. The final result is one of the most  tragic and pessimistic Westerns in the cinema's history. 9/10

score 9/10

IlyaMauter 3 June 2003

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0064935/