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treywillwest

I tend to love anything that Anthony Mann touches, and this movie no exception. Mann's Noir films seem as much the work of DP John Alton as Mann, but with this western Mann proves himself a brilliant collaborator with big name DPs by teaming with vibrant color specialist Ernest Haller (of Gone With the Wind fame). The film's primary color is green- unspoiled, like the grass of the landscapes of nineteenth-century north Texas, but also bringing to mind all that is least reassuring about nature, its capacity to engulf and disorient.

This is a very unconventional western. But unlike many films that adopt a western milieu but do not want to succumb to the genre's tired traditions Man of the West does not self-consciously invert or critique those conventions. It silently, yet almost defiantly, ignores them.

Throughout his career, Mann was brilliant at the subtle evocation of cruelty. But this film is his most potent portrayal of depravity. The scenes in the villains' layer reminded me of nothing less than those in Lynch's Blue Velvet that focus on Frank and his crew. The primary difference is that Frank is a kind of anti-God, his awfulness seems like a conduit of a cosmic menace. Mann's monsters are fully of this world. Indeed, they are depraved in the fullest sense of the word- violent and deranged, yet also degraded and debased.

Nor is the nameless (or is it multi-named?) protagonist, played by Gary Cooper whose "acting" doesn't drag this work down like it does in many of his movies, a true western hero. He is presented as a good man, or at least a vastly better person than are his opponents, yet the violence he uses to dispatch his enemies is not transcendental, heroic violence. He's just a more clever and sneaky, talented murderer than are his foes. This is not good triumphing over evil. It is the strong exterminating the weak, and this deflates any sense of the film's "happy" ending giving credence to any mythology of the west. This is not myth, this is a nasty little tale of people killing people, and it feels so much more profound for it.

Some of my favorite moments in art arise from what I might call accidental philosophizing- when a work, almost in spite of itself, describes something in a new way that forces one to abandon, if only for a second, preconceived notions of what that work, and maybe our world, can be. There is an exchange of dialogue in this film that is a prime example: "I used to live here." "Were you a boy then?" "I don't know what I was."

score 9/10

treywillwest 6 December 2016

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3593078/