The Man from Laramie

The noirish, psychological westerns directed by Anthony Mann in the 1950s are some of the best the genre has to offer. Jimmy Stewart, here making his fifth western alongside Mann, stars as an ex-soldier who arrives in Laramie eager to find out who has been selling repeater rifles to the Apaches who murdered his brother. Upon arrival he clashes with the sadistic son of a local landowner (Alex Nicol) and an ambitious cowhand (Arthur Kennedy) with his eyes on the town.

Mann is an expert in communicating the detailed workings of the worlds he presents in his films. His westerns operate within particular physical spaces with specific social and mechanical orders. When Jimmy Stewart’s gun hand is deliberately shot – in the film's most famous scene – we are very aware of the insult and repercussions entailed. Similarly, the film clearly articulates other details such as the value of a particular type of gun, the nuances of the men’s individual codes and the relationships between the town’s complex network of characters.

This admirable attention to details adds a layer of verisimilitude, which compliments the high drama of the plotting – which is almost Shakespearean in its tangle of familial power-struggles. Add Stewart's brilliantly dark turn as the revenge-fueled outsider, and some grand-scale Technicolor CinemaScope photography, and you get a knotty, deeply idiosyncratic western that impresses on every front.

Extras

It’s great to see Anthony Mann get the Blu-ray treatment and this is the second of his westerns to make it to Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series. The disc includes a 20-minute conversation with Kim Newman who is affable and informative about the film's stars and its place in history. Australian critic Adrian Martin delivers a commentary track, while there is also a booklet featuring a new essay by Philip Kemp and an interview with Anthony Mann.