I don’t generally dislike Westerns, but they also, for some reason, are not my top picks for something to watch. But when I do go for one, I try to go for one of the good ones. I found The Naked Spur on TCM/Hulu, and what I didn’t know was that director Anthony Mann, when collaborating with actor Jimmy Stewart, made some rather morally complex movies, many of them Westerns. With that in mind, I was even more intrigued by a movie I really only knew the name of.
So, with five speaking parts, and a chance for both Jimmy Stewart and female lead Janet Leigh to play against their respective types, I figured I was in for a good time.
Howard Kemp (Stewart) is after suspected murderer Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan). Holed up on a mountain with Lina Patch, the daughter of a deceased friend of Vandergroat, he’s going to be tough to get. Kemp manages to recruit old prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) and discharged Indian fighter Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker) for help. Now he just needs to get Vandetgroat back to civilzation to collect the reward.
That sure sounds simple enough, but there’s a lot more to it than that. For one, Kemp isn’t a lawman like Tate initially assumed. He wants the reward to buy back the ranch he’d signed over to a woman he loved before he left to fight in the Civil War and that she sold before he came back when she ran off with another man. Kemp also kept quiet on how much the reward was worth to Tate and Anderson, though Anderson suspected something was up to begin with. Lina doesn’t believe Vandetgroat is the slightest bit guilty. Anderson was discharged from the Army for being morally unstable, a fact Kemp keeps to himself. Tate is fairly honest, but he really wants to hit it big with a gold strike. And Vandergroat is the kind of guy who can and will take advantage of other people’s weaknesses.
This was a tightly packed movie with a good bit of suspense. Though he’s got his hands bound for most of the movie, Vandergroat can’t really be trusted. Likewise, Anderson doesn’t quite let the others know that there’s a band of Native Americans looking for him, and he isn’t above starting more trouble for the group to advance his own interests. And for all Tate’s promises are good, his greed for gold could get the better of him under the right circumstances. It may not be so much of whether or not Kemp can get Vandergroat back for the reward so much as how many of the band will still be around when he does.
I really dug this. Apparently, this role was a case of casting-against-type for Leigh who was using it to leverage herself out of the ingenue roles she generally got and into more adult fare. Considering I know her best for Psycho, I’d say she succeeded. As for Stewart, though he’s still clearly one of the good guys, he’s in a much grayer moral area than he’s generally known for. If this is what happened when Stewart collaborated with Mann, I will have to see some of those other collaborations sometime soon.
Grade: A-
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