Man of the West

Another Intelligent Western from Anthony Mann.

Link Jones is on his way to Fort Worth to hire a schoolteacher, having left his wife and children behind, Link appears to be the epitome of the simple honest man. However, the train he is on is robbed by outlaws, thus meaning that Link's past and his dubious family ties are all careering towards a day of reckoning.

This was Anthony Mann's second to last foray into the Western genre, and perhaps his most clinical as regards a structured tale of men as complicated as they are conflicted? I always find with Mann's Westerns that a sense of doom hangs heavy, there are very few directors in Western cinema history who have this knack of filling the viewer with such a pervading feeling of unease....

This is a much grittier western than I am used to from Anthony Mann; giving Gary Cooper much more to get his teeth into than the usual, simple, gun-slinging fayre. He plays a reformed outlaw who is caught up in a train ambush. "Link" escapes with two other passengers and makes his way to an old homestead - only to find it occupied by the men who attacked the train; and that they are his former gang. His uncle "Dock" - Lee J. Cobb - is determined to lead him back down the path of violence. The psychological nature of this gives it a little more depth - sadly, though, neither Cobb, Cooper nor Julie London as "Billie" really gel together or engage convincingly, the dialogue is a bit stodgy and the ending, though quite violent, is poorly predic...