Classic Movie Review: The Tin Star

The Tin Star (1957)
Directed by: Anthony Mann.
Written by: Dudley Nichols and Joel Kane and Barney Slater.
Starring: Henry Fonda (Morgan 'Morg' Hickman), Anthony Perkins (Sheriff Ben Owens), Betsy Palmer (Nona Mayfield), Michel Ray (Kip Mayfield), Neville Brand (Bart Bogardus), John McIntire (Dr. Joseph Jefferson 'Doc' McCord), Mary Webster (Millie Parker), Peter Baldwin (Zeke McGaffey), Richard Shannon (Buck Henderson), Lee Van Cleef (Ed McGaffey), James Bell (Judge Thatcher), Howard Petrie (Mayor Harvey King), Russell Simpson (Clem Hall), Hal K. Dawson (Andy Miller), Jack Kenny (Sam Hodges), Mickey Finn (McCall).

Anthony Mann directed many great Westerns in his day – but The Tin Star is not one of them. Mann directed five Western classics starring Jimmy Stewart – Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954 – which I still need to see) and The Man from Laramie (1955), alongside other films like The Furies (1950), with a great, characteristically strong performance by Barbara Stanwyck, and perhaps my favorite of his Westerns – Man of the West (1958) with a great performance by Gary Cooper as an iconic Western hero – the man with a violent past trying to do right (it’s the Western I think of when I recall David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence). I mention Mann’s other films because I do think he is one of the best directors of Westerns in cinema history – he ranks right alongside the likes of Ford, Hawks, Leone, Peckinpah and Eastwood. But his 1957 film, The Tin Star, while not horrible in any way, is nowhere near his best work. It’s rather bland and forgettable – even if moderately entertaining for 90 minutes or so.

The film stars Anthony Perkins as Sheriff Ben Owens, who got the job in his small town simply because no one else wanted it. The old Sheriff was killed, the bully Burt Bogardus (Neville Brand) pretty much does what he wants to – and dares the law to try and stop him. Perkins, in his patented Anthony Perkins way, stutters and stammers, is overly nervous, not very good with a gun and can barely stand up to his girlfriend – Millie (Mary Webster), the daughter of the old Sheriff who doesn’t want to see her man suffer the same fate.

Into town rides Morg Hickman (Henry Fonda), a bounty hunter there to collect his fee for killing a local man who was wanted for robbery. The locals don’t take too kindly to Morg – they liked the local man – but he’s stuck in town for a few days so Ben can do the paperwork and get him his money. But the hotel won’t rent him a room, and the stable is run by that bully Bogardus, who won’t put up his horse. Luckily he meets Kip (Michel Ray), a young boy who lives on the outskirts of town with his mother Nona (Betsy Palmer) – who is an outcast of sorts herself because she married a Native, who was later killed. She agrees to put him up. Morg, who tells Ben he used to be a Sheriff, then takes the younger man under his wing to teach him how to be a good sheriff – although a dark secret in his past makes him think Ben is an fool for wanting the job at all.

The screenplay for The Tin Star was written by Dudley Nichols – a frequent John Ford collaborator, and I cannot help but wonder if he wrote it with Ford in mind. The film certainly has a sentimental side – with Morg becoming a mentor to Ben, and a father figure to Kip – and Ford’s film often contained a lot of sentiment. Ford could pull it off – Mann, who by nature is more cynical, cannot quite do the same in The Tin Star. Too much of the dialogue in The Tin Star is on the nose – hammering its point into your head too much. Fonda was a great actor, capable of playing dark, brooding characters if called upon, and that is precisely what Morg should be. Therefore, it’s a curious decision for him to play it far lighter than that – when he finally delivers his speech revealing the dark secret in his past, it doesn’t feel right. A man who has gone through that shouldn’t be quite so cheery. Perkins acquits himself better as Ben – but, of course, it’s almost impossible to see Perkins and not see Norman Bates. In fact, Ben feels like Bates quite a bit – with the nervous, stuttering surface – the difference being this time, there is nothing deeper there. The rest of the cast isn’t quite up to snuff – especially Neville Brand as the man who is supposed to be the town’s Liberty Valance if you will. He seems like nothing more than a petulant child.

All this probably sounds like I hated The Tin Star. I didn’t – not really. Mann knows how to direct an action sequence, and the movie has quite a few good ones coming down the stretch. But the film is merely an average Western – they made a lot of those in the 1950s. Normally, an Anthony Mann Western is something to treasure, something head and shoulders above most films in the genre. Not The Tin Star.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: The Naked Spur (1953)

The Naked Spur (1953) *** ½

Directed by: Anthony Mann.

Written by: Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom.

Starring:  James Stewart (Howard Kemp), Janet Leigh (Lina Patch), Robert Ryan (Ben Vandergroat), Ralph Meeker (Roy Anderson), Millard Mitchell (Jesse Tate).

I have heard the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns of the 1950s described as “revenge films”, but that is not exactly accurate. True, in Winchester 73, Stewart is trying to track down his brother, who killed their father, but he’s only one part of a larger story. And in The Man from Laramie, Stewart is seeking revenge for his brother’s murder, but his motives, and in fact his character, are largely outside the family melodrama at the heart of the film. What is true is that the movies are morally complex – and that Stewart may not always be the good guy – he may never actually be the good guy in these films. I think Mann liked using Stewart for a similar reason that Hitchcock liked the actor – he had such a wholesome image, that audiences would follow Stewart into darker places than they would many other actors.

The Naked Spur (1953) is no exception. In the film, Stewart plays Howard Kemp, a man who has been tracking fugitive Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) for months, in the hopes of catching him and getting the $5,000 reward. He knows that if he does catch Ben, it will mean he gets hanged, but he doesn’t care. He wants the money. But just as he’s closing in on Ben, he unwittingly gets two partners – the wily old Jesse (Millard Mitchell), and the dishonorably discharged soldier Roy (Ralph Meeker). They catch Ben, but things get further complicated because he was travelling with Lina (Janet Leigh), a beautiful young woman, who is the daughter of a dead associate of Ben’s. Things get even more complicated, when Ben reveals to everyone the bounty on his head, which Howard had failed to mention. So now, these three “bounty hunters”, who don’t know each other, have to find a way to trust one another. Ben hopes to drive a wedge between them, and perhaps that wedge could be Lina.

The Naked Spur is odd for a Western, in that it is almost a chamber piece. These are the only five characters we see in the movie, and although the mountains and the scenery are fantastic (as we expect from Mann), this certainly a film with more talk than action. Stewart did some of his best work with Mann, and here is no exception – he is a bitter, angry man just trying to get back his land, and sees everyone as in his way. And yet, he is also a moral man – or at least likes to think of himself as one. Robert Ryan, who was a wonderful character actor, and often played terrific villains roles, is in top form here as Ben, who slowly tries to pick this “alliance” apart. He isn’t a nice man, but he doesn’t seem unrepentantly evil either. No one, it seems, except Howard really care if he is ever caught – no one else is pursuing him anyway – and he’s fighting for his life. Although the roles played by Leigh (part damsel in distress, part innocent girl in over her head), Meeker (slimy skeezeball) and Mitchell (old coot) are more standard issue Western tropes, they play them well – and round out the cast.

The filmmaking by Mann is, as always, top notch. He loves the shots of the mountains in the distance – another hill to climb – and also loves the idea of “higher ground”. The few gun battles in The Naked Spur – like Winchester 73 and The Man from Laramie as well – all involved someone getting the upper hand, by getting the higher ground. The scenery in The Naked Spur is beautiful, but it’s also ominous.

If I think The Naked Spur is perhaps not quite as good as Winchester 73 or The Man from Laramie (on the same level of Bend of the River – and I still need to see The Far Country), it’s because this time, I didn’t see much wrong with Stewart’s moral position. A lot is made of the fact that he is going to making money off of another man’s death. But Ryan is hardly an innocent – he is a murderer after all – and in the Old West, the death penalty was something no one questioned. Perhaps looking back through modern eyes his position seems slightly suspect, but not really. If he was a Sheriff chasing down Ryan to be hanged, would anyone have a problem with it?

But that’s really just a small quibble, with what is otherwise a top notch Western. Anthony Mann was one of the masters of the genre, and The Naked Spur is a good example of why.

The Best Movies I've Never Seen Before: The Man from Laramie (1955)

The Man from Laramie (1955) ****
Directed by: Anthony Mann.
Written by: Philip Jordan & Frank Burt based on the story by Thomas T. Flynn.
Starring: James Stewart (Will Lockhart), Arthur Kennedy (Vic Hansbro), Donald Crisp (Alec Waggoman), Cathy O'Donnell (Barbara Waggoman), Alex Nicol (Dave Waggoman), Aline MacMahon (Kate Canady), Wallace Ford (Charley O'Leary), Jack Elam (Chris Boldt).

Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart made five Westerns together from 1950 to 1955 – the excellent Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952) and The Man from Laramie (1955) among them. (The other two are The Far Country and The Naked Spur, which so far have eluded me – but I will get to them sooner or later). What stands out about all of these films is how the surface level of the films – which makes them seem like straightforward Westerns is always just a cover for something deeper and darker. (This was also true of Mann’s excellent 1958 Western Man of the West with Gary Cooper – which in my mind is better than these three Stewart movies). The Man from Laramie is a classic revenge Western, about a bitter former Calvary officer Will Lockhart (Stewart) travelling from the town of Laramie to a smaller town to try and find the man responsible for his brother’s death at the hand of the savage Apache Indians in the area. The film works on that level brilliantly well – who doesn’t love a good revenge Western? – but the film also bares resemblance to a Shakesperian tragedy – notably King Lear, as it features an aging, wealthy patriarch, obsessed with his legacy, and not realizing that everyone, his own son and adopted son included, hates him.

The movie starts out simply enough with Lockhart and his men on the trial between Laramie and the small town closest to the where the massacre happened. They are delivering goods to the local store, but the owner Barbara Waggonman (Cathy O’Donnell), seems disappointed when the goods arrive. She wants out of this small town, and without goods, she thought she could close the store her father left her and move on. Will wants to know if there is anything he can ship back to Laramie – to make his return journey profitable – and Barbara tells him of the local salt flats, where he can take all the salt he wants. Unfortunately, this turns out to be untrue. As Lockhart and his men are loading up their wagons, the psychotic Dave Waggonman (Barbara’s cousin” shows up and tells him that the salt belongs to his father Alec (Donald Crisp), as everything else in town seems to. Not wanting a fight, Will explains the misunderstanding, and offers to pay for the salt. But Dave will have none of it – he burns Will’s wagons, kills his mules, and gets his laughing henchmen to rope Will and drag him through the fire. He may well have killed Will if Vic (Arthur Kennedy) didn’t show up and tell Dave to knock it off. Vic is an orphan, who has essentially been raised by Alec, who trusts him more than Dave. Vic is also engaged to Barbara, and thinks that Alec will leave him part of the ranch when he dies.

From here, we get some great scenes – between Stewart and Vic, Stewart and Alec, Alec and Dave and Alec and Vic. Although Stewart is the center of the movie, he is in many ways the most straight forward, and at times even passive character in the film. He has to do very little except stay in town to stir up the Waggonman clan, and get them to come apart at the seams. When it’s available to him, and he knows who is responsible, he doesn’t even take his long sought after revenge – but allows the Apache to do it for him. His casual racism is ever present, yet not overtly stated.

What makes the film great is two wonderful performances – one by Donald Crisp and the other by Arthur Kennedy. A while ago, I reviewed another Arthur Kennedy movie, The Lusty Men, where he essentially played a good guy who gets in over his head. I prefer him like this – a man who has eaten crap his whole life, and has become bitter and angry and dangerous, yet still tries to keep an even keel. You slowly start to realize as the movie goes along that this character, who we thought was an upstanding guy, is really a louse underneath his calm exterior – and when push comes to shove, he’ll push you literally over the edge of a cliff. For Crisp, this is the best I have seen the Oscar winner (he was quite good in his Oscar winning role in Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but nothing compared to this). Here, he plays a proud man – a man who has built his life up from nothing in an attempt to leave something behind to his son. What he can never seem to realize is that his son hates him – everyone hates him – and when this finally dawns on him, he is left a broken, lonely old man.

This is one of the first Western shot in widescreen and Mann and his cinematographer make excellent use of the additional space. But the visual look isn’t just there to look pretty, but gives the films it’s dark tone and feel. Mann remains an underrated director – and The Man From Laramie is one of his best.