Review of Man of the West

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