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Another Western haul on home video! 
Bend of the River (Anthony Mann / 1952)
The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann / 1953)
The Far Country (Anthony Mann / 1954)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt / 2010)
Finally, I've gotten to buying the Anthony Mann / James Stewart Westerns. Or as I like to refer to it, "The Winchester / Laramie Cycle"! I've already gotten 1955's The Man from Laramie on a bare-bones but still very nice DVD from Sony Video. (There is a Twilight Time Blu-ray version of that film, but unfortunately it's out of print and remaining copies verge on $150 and is thus cost-prohibitive for me. Other Blu-ray's are for other regions, and alas I don't have an all-region player. Here's hoping that another Blu-ray edition of The Man from Laramie gets released someday soon.) And on January 28, 2025, the Criterion Collection is releasing 1950's Winchester '73 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray! I've already pre-ordered a copy of that through Barnes & Noble.
I really like the Mann & Stewart "Winchester / Laramie Cycle" a lot. Audiences at the time had gotten a tougher, nervier and more volatile Jimmy Stewart than they had ever seen before. And only Alfred Hitchcock's work with Stewart around that same time has even come close to capturing that same sense of troubled neuroticism. I've got a good deal of affection for The Far Country - which tends to get overlooked by some people when discussing this cycle. That one's got John McIntire in a very entertaining performance as the villainous Judge Gannon. The Naked Spur is also a great film, a very gripping five-character drama that manages the paradoxical trick of being intensely claustrophobic even while being set entirely outdoors in the treacherous mountainous terrain of Colorado and California. Again, the character of the villain is a major standout here, in this case Robert Ryan's cheerily sociopathic Ben Vandergroat, whom Stewart's bounty hunter Howie Kemp is attempting to collect a $5,000 reward on. Ryan's got some really choice dialogue here. At one point he says: "Choosin' a way to die? What's the difference? Choosin' a way to live - that's the hard part." Words of wisdom, even when spoken by the story's antagonist, and they could almost serve as a motto or theme for the entire five-film cycle.
Half a century closer to our own time, 2010's Meek's Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt, is a very slow-moving yet absorbing indie Western about a group of settlers moving through the desolate desert terrain of Oregon, led by a fur trapper and guide named Stephen Meek (a personage from real life), whom they suspect might not be entirely up to the task. The movie has this disturbing sort of fly-on-the-wall quality to it, a sense that we're actually observing real life. It's got a sense of grit as well as a sense of arduousness and tedium associated with slowly trudging across a vast uncharted, unmapped country, not knowing - and fearing - what could be around the next corner or over the next hill. This isn't something like John Ford's 1950 Wagon Master, which - while a brilliant film and a masterpiece - has more of a sense of adventure and fun traditionally associated with the Western genre. In the hands of a revisionist such as Reichardt, we get to see the darker side of such a venture.
Bend of the River (Anthony Mann / 1952)
The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann / 1953)
The Far Country (Anthony Mann / 1954)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt / 2010)
Finally, I've gotten to buying the Anthony Mann / James Stewart Westerns. Or as I like to refer to it, "The Winchester / Laramie Cycle"! I've already gotten 1955's The Man from Laramie on a bare-bones but still very nice DVD from Sony Video. (There is a Twilight Time Blu-ray version of that film, but unfortunately it's out of print and remaining copies verge on $150 and is thus cost-prohibitive for me. Other Blu-ray's are for other regions, and alas I don't have an all-region player. Here's hoping that another Blu-ray edition of The Man from Laramie gets released someday soon.) And on January 28, 2025, the Criterion Collection is releasing 1950's Winchester '73 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray! I've already pre-ordered a copy of that through Barnes & Noble.
I really like the Mann & Stewart "Winchester / Laramie Cycle" a lot. Audiences at the time had gotten a tougher, nervier and more volatile Jimmy Stewart than they had ever seen before. And only Alfred Hitchcock's work with Stewart around that same time has even come close to capturing that same sense of troubled neuroticism. I've got a good deal of affection for The Far Country - which tends to get overlooked by some people when discussing this cycle. That one's got John McIntire in a very entertaining performance as the villainous Judge Gannon. The Naked Spur is also a great film, a very gripping five-character drama that manages the paradoxical trick of being intensely claustrophobic even while being set entirely outdoors in the treacherous mountainous terrain of Colorado and California. Again, the character of the villain is a major standout here, in this case Robert Ryan's cheerily sociopathic Ben Vandergroat, whom Stewart's bounty hunter Howie Kemp is attempting to collect a $5,000 reward on. Ryan's got some really choice dialogue here. At one point he says: "Choosin' a way to die? What's the difference? Choosin' a way to live - that's the hard part." Words of wisdom, even when spoken by the story's antagonist, and they could almost serve as a motto or theme for the entire five-film cycle.
Half a century closer to our own time, 2010's Meek's Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt, is a very slow-moving yet absorbing indie Western about a group of settlers moving through the desolate desert terrain of Oregon, led by a fur trapper and guide named Stephen Meek (a personage from real life), whom they suspect might not be entirely up to the task. The movie has this disturbing sort of fly-on-the-wall quality to it, a sense that we're actually observing real life. It's got a sense of grit as well as a sense of arduousness and tedium associated with slowly trudging across a vast uncharted, unmapped country, not knowing - and fearing - what could be around the next corner or over the next hill. This isn't something like John Ford's 1950 Wagon Master, which - while a brilliant film and a masterpiece - has more of a sense of adventure and fun traditionally associated with the Western genre. In the hands of a revisionist such as Reichardt, we get to see the darker side of such a venture.
__________________
"Well, it's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid" - Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, High Plains Drifter (1973)
"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours" - Bob Dylan, Talkin' World War III Blues (1963)
"Well, it's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid" - Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, High Plains Drifter (1973)
"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours" - Bob Dylan, Talkin' World War III Blues (1963)
