The Naked Spur
With James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, and Millard Mitchell.
With Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O’Connell, Jack Lord, John Dehmer, Royal Dano, and Robert Wilke.
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All four films collapse the usual distinctions between landscape and architecture, classicism and modernity, and even at times painting and drama–though Muri Romani has no landscape in any ordinary sense and The Naked Spur, shot entirely in natural exteriors (apart from a cave where the characters find shelter from the rain), has no architecture. In contrast, Where Is the Friend’s House? focuses for long stretches on an ancient village clinging to the side of a mountain, and Man of the West features a farmhouse at the bottom of a green valley and a ghost town surrounded by mountains; both movies have a kind of compositional power that’s inextricably tied to their views of human behavior and human destiny.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote a review of Man of the West when it came out, describing “the delightful farm nestling amid the greenery which George Eliot would have loved.” If he’d written his review two years later he might have no less aptly connected the ghost town to the modernism of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura. His view of Mann merged image and idea, classical and modern: “Just as the director of The Birth of a Nation gave one the impression that he was inventing the cinema with every shot, each shot of Man of the West gives one the impression that Anthony Mann is reinventing the western, exactly as Matisse’s portraits reinvent the features of Piero della Francesca….In other words, he both shows and demonstrates, innovates and copies, criticizes and creates.”
