A Film Canon

If The Searchers feels like an amalgam of three films, then Man Of The West feels like a progression of three films, with the critical difference that each film is outstanding on its own terms, and contributes to a gradual intensification, rather than a rhythmic deflation, of brutality. The first act is a train western, in which various attempts to reclaim manual agency from machinery constellate around the robbery - or, rather, the personification - of a steam train by a small group of outlaws; an extension of the aggressive burst of smoke that affronts protagonist Link Jones (Gary Cooper) on the platform shortly beforehand. The second act is a chamber western, in which Jones and two other survivors unwittingly seek refuge with the same gang of outlaws, and takes place mainly inside, or at night, while the few outdoor scenes feel bounded by the small number of outlaws, as well as the claustrophobia of their prisoners - especially singer Billie Ellis (Julie London), who is constantly on the verge of being raped, and experiences a gaze that is sufficiently concentrated, obsessive and predatory to preclude the widescreen aesthetic of the first act; or, rather, to ensure that its disavowal of a traditional, mythological "West" - in its choice of the surrogate, mobile horizon of the locomotive - intensifies to the point where everything immediately outside this chamber becomes so much void, and mythology can only exist at the extreme, almost hypothetical distance of Link's small, wholesome home town. Finally, the third act is a sublime western in the tradition of My Darling Clementine, but substitutes Greek tragedy for Shakespearean tragedy, such that the distinction between immediate and mythical distance is translated into that between the amphitheatrical mountain against which Link's forced robbery of a ghost town bank takes place, and the disinterested, deified loftiness of Mann's spectacular vertical cranes and pans. At this point brutality, having reached its polymorphously perverse conclusion in the spectacular fist fight of the second act - the strongest of its kind in cinema to date - is forced into a purely ceremonial, extrinsic register, continuous with Cooper's self-effacing delivery, whose slightly contrived, almost theatrical curtness provides a compelling evocation of the struggle to reform and redeem himself that propels the narrative; or, alternatively, clarifies that his mind is the most agile thing about him, explaining the extraordinarily cerebral, logical tone of the final confrontation: "This is the moment...it's finally here, just like you knew it always would be."