'The Naked Spur' (1953) Of the five westerns director Anthony Mann made with star James Stewart, this one's considered the best of the bunch......and I'm not disagreeing.
All five of the Mann-Stewart westerns are fine to varying degrees but this one, a simple, primal five character piece, earns its well deserved reputation as a near perfect, classic western.
In the Mann westerns, the good ole Jimmy Stewart that we all know and love, the stammering, stuttering, aw-shucks, Americana good guy.....he's nowhere to be found.
Stewart, literally battle-hardened from his World War 2 Air Force combat missions returned to Hollywood stardom ready for roles that would take him to the dark side. He more than fully embraced the raging, obsessive, quick-to-violence characters that Mann and his screenwriters devised for him.
In "Naked Spur" he's Howard Kemp, a grim bounty hunter on the trail of Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), a grinning, murdering outlaw with a $5000 price on his head. Kemp desperately wants the reward to buy back the ranch he lost while fighting in the Civil War......a ranch sold off by his duplicitous fiance who further betrayed him by running off with the cash and another man.
Kemp finally captures Vandergroat, who'd taken along young Lina Patch (Janet Leigh) the daughter of one of his cohorts. But the capture's only made with the help of two unwanted allies he met along the trail, old prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) and dishonorably discharged cavalryman Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker). Roy affects the personality of a cheerful rogue, but in reality, he's a rapist with an Indian war party hunting him down for assaulting one of their women.
With Kemp, Jesse and Roy now forced to divide up the reward three ways, the sly, devilish Vandergroat seizes every opportunity to pit the three men against each other.....and as this suspicious unhappy group make their way through the spectacular, picture-postcard landscapes of the Colorado Rockies, violence and major reversals-of-fortune befall them.
Stewart excels as always in the icy single-mindedness of his character, with the glimmers of humanity sometimes seeping through the hard shell he's build around himself. . But by far the true acting honors here go hands down to Ryan,,,, delivering a skilled portrait in sociopathic evil that 1950's audiences rarely saw depicted in traditional Hollywood westerns of the era. (another plum role that Ryan added to his already growing gallery of hiss-worthy movie villains).
You can trust cinema historians and BQ on this one, it's a genuine, bona fide, must see classic..... a 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS. And today's crop of filmmakers, with their bloated 150 to 180 minute long movies, would do well to study the lean, mean 91 minutes of "The Naked Spur".....and maybe maybe learn something about swift, concise storytelling.......
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