A Film Canon

This extraordinary film attempts to find some common denominator between the individualistic agency of the classical western protagonist, and the watchful caution of the suburban guardian, fusing sight and action into the preternatural autonomy that captured criminal Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) imparts to farmer Dan Evans (Van Heflin) as he transports him to the Yuma prison train; an ocular education whose most significant lesson is Wade's repeated, handcuffed injunction to Evans to place himself at the window around which the entire third act revolves, and whose graduation comes with an otherwise inexplicable conclusion that allows the two men to share a similarly expansive vantage point from the perspective of a moving freight carriage. It feels as if every character is constantly discussing seeing, watching, the sheer fact of keeping their eyes open, and the physiology and erotic appeal of the eyes themselves, while Daves' exquisite use of slow vertical pans commencing or concluding with extended high angle shots places the viewer in the position of self-conscious spectator, thereby identifying them with the cinematic expectations of Evans' sons. It also coalesces the various iconic scenarios that are briefly touched upon into a eulogy for the western itself, as if the entire film were extrapolated from the funeral procession in the second act, or its secular equivalent, the haunting, melancholy score, until the act of watching itself becomes inextricably haunting, inflected through a spectral spectatorship, or at least placed within one of the observation-networks in which the characters are constantly enmeshed. That said, the unusual proliferation of close-ups and extreme close-ups suggests that Daves is less interested in western topography than facial topography, gesturing towards the chambered neo-western; or, rather, that he is shooting the west as if it were a face, producing the paradoxical sublimity of a panoramic close-up.