The Man from Laramie (1955)

Film: The Man from Laramie (1955)

Stars: James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O'Donnell, Alex Nicol

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Jimmy Stewart: click here to learn more about Mr. Stewart (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We've jumped about a bit with Stewart, last week discussing some of the films he made in the late-1950's with Alfred Hitchcock, attempting to escape in some respects the persona with which he'd long been associated.  This week, we're still in the mid-1950's, but I want to discuss a bit what happened in the latter half of Stewart's career.  Today's film was his last movie with Anthony Mann, but it was hardly his final western.  In the decades that followed, that was mostly what Stewart would make, but with less assured results.  The actor worked steadily throughout the 1960's & 1970's, but usually in cameos that traded on his star power.  More so, he appeared in flops, including an ill-fated eponymous television show (did you know there was a Jimmy Stewart sitcom in the 1970's?!?).  He made only two classics during this period, both of which starred John Wayne, both of which were westerns, and one of which is a personal favorite (hence why we aren't ending with it): The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Shootist.  Today, though, we're going to discuss Stewart's eighth and final film with Anthony Mann, The Man from Laramie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Will Lockhart (Stewart), who is delivering supplies from Laramie to Coronado, a desolate western town, while also trying to find the man who led to Apaches killing his brother by selling them guns.  Concurrently, we have a wealthy landowner named Alec Waggoman (Crisp) who is haunted by the thought that someone is going to kill his ne'er-do-well son Dave (Nicol), whom he loves but cannot control.  Dave after shooting many of Will's mules after he mistakenly takes salt from one of Alec's lakes, gets into a fist fight with him, and while most of the town wants Will to leave, he wants to find the gun runner who led to his brother's death.  He ends up in a course collision with much of the Waggoman family, including their attractive niece Barbara (O'Donnell) and a hired hand Vic Hansbro (Kennedy) who is jealous of Dave since Vic has been truly loyal to Alec.  As we continue, it becomes clear that Dave & Vic were the reasons for Will's brother dying, and both end up dead before the credits roll, though neither by the hand of Will Lockhart, who doesn't have the stomach for cold-blooded murder.

The movie is glorious, and that starts with the cinematography.  Shot by 18-time Oscar nominee Charles Lang, this was one of the first westerns shot on CinemaScope, the film is beautiful, desert shots (such as the gorgeous final shootout between Stewart & Kennedy), the movie looks sensational, and is a fitting end to Mann & Stewart's partnership.  Stewart is once again excellent in this mold, learning a bit from his previous iterations as a cowboy by leaning into the "last ride of a legend" motif.  You know from the opening scenes that he's going to end this standing tall, but also that he will never rest, a wandering spirit of the west.  The film suffers in its supporting actors, particularly with a miscast O'Donnell & Crisp, but Stewart's performance and all of the technical aspects are first rate, and I loved the title track.

Jimmy Stewart, as I mentioned above, continued making movies, some of them successfully, well into the late 1980's, though he worked sparingly.  The only really important movie of his post-1960 era was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is his best western and brought him face-to-face with John Wayne.  I wrote about this the first time I saw it ten years ago, and it's only grown in my estimation since then as one of the great movies of the year, and one of the bitterest endings in all of Classical Hollywood.  Next month, we're going to talk about another actor whose modern mythos is associated with a gentle, kind figure, one that Oscar also noticed, but whose fame throughout the 1950's came from wearing a cowboy hat.