MAN OF THE WEST—outlaw chieftain ‘Dock Tobin’ (Lee J. Cobb) compliments nephew and former comrade ‘Link Jones’ (Gary Cooper), who’s just mounted his horse: “You look good up there, Link. That’s where you belong.” The script has one character talking to another, but the unspoken message relays collective audience appreciation of Gary Cooper. Fifty-six and weathered yet still tall in the saddle, 33 years after his first western (as an extra in 1925’s The Trail Rider); this 1958 outing was one of three dozen he made in the genre. His final two arrived the following year with They Came To Cordura and The Hanging Tree. Like those, it’s downbeat…well, nope, this one’s downright vicious. Speakin’ of hurt, the above statement from Coop’s scenery-devouring co-star is one of the few moments in Cobb’s performance where he doesn’t try to pierce the sound barrier with over-acting so strenuous it bushwhacks the movie, grueling enough as it is. *

A train is robbed in the Texas countryside. Departing in haste it strands Link Jones and two other passengers, sexy saloon singer ‘Billie Ellis’ (sexy saloon singer Julie London, 30) and ‘Sam Beasley’ (Arthur O’Connell), unctuous con man and blabbermouth. Shelter in a lonesome cabin brings inconvenient coincidence; not only are the train robbers there, they’re led by Link’s fearsome uncle Dock. Dock plans a bank robbery; Link, who once ran with the extra-bad crowd, acts like he’ll go along. Two of the gang are his cousins, sadistic cur ‘Coaley’ (Jack Lord) and cold-hearted ‘Claude’ (John Dehner); then there’s oafish brute ‘Ponch’ (Robert J. Wilke) and ‘Trout’ (Royal Dano), who’s mute, seemingly crazy, degenerate or likely both. Ain’t a’gonna end well.

It doesn’t (one of the movies problems is an abrupt cop-out final scene) and on the way to the expected extinguishing of the gross outlaws (hey, who doesn’t have at least one cousin they’d like to get even with?) there’s creepy voyeuristic humiliation (London is forced to strip as a prelude to certain gang rape), a brutal hand-to-hand fight between Link and Coaley with its own disrobing indignity, the casual murder of an innocent woman, a rape and beating (mercifully offscreen)—strong and uncomfortable stuff, especially for the time. Written by Reginald Rose (12 Angry Men), this was the tenth of director Anthony Mann’s eleven westerns. Expert with actors, mood and use of locations, Mann’s was a mostly impressive array, this one the darkest of a hard-bitten lot. Spare (made for $1,500,000) and grim, it wasn’t well received at the time and placed as 58’s 49th, grossing $5,000,000.

French critic Jean-Luc Goddard started the ball rolling on raising the profile of Mann’s Man: now cited as influencing the adaptive-to-the-times genre, which got progressively nastier with the spaghetti westerns (a few bona fide classics amid acres of lo sterco sufficient to fertilize the Spanish desert they were shot in), a surly feller named Peckinpah and a posse of less-thoughtful exploiters trailing in his Agua Verde wake. We’re in the minority (at least among blog blabbers) on this once-dismissed Mann entry that today draws reams of praise from reviewers. **

There are definitely elements to appreciate. Ernest Haller’s cinematography is a real plus: though set in Texas, it was shot in California (including Red Rock Canyon in the Mohave Desert) and Arizona and used one of same sets from the year’s major western, The Big Country, filmed by director William Wyler some months earlier around the same time and place as Mann’s leaner—definitely meaner—delve into family values in the untamed past. There’s an effective score from Leigh Harline. With one exception, the acting’s quite good. Lord (that year also in Mann’s unsung God’s Little Acre), Dehner, Dano and Wilke make a formidably scary crew of depraved, unrepentant killers. London and O’Connell excel as the ensnared, frightened hostages. Cooper gives one of his better late-career turns, even if it’s asking too much to readily accept him as someone who once would have ridden with scum like Coaley and Trout, let alone the domineering Dock, an uncle from leering-Lear hell. Alas, the horsefly in the buttermilk is Mr. Cobb, so far off the rez he may as well be in a Coney Island sideshow. His over-the-trough hog wallowing could be heard in Maine.

100 minutes, with Frank Ferguson, Chuck Roberson, Emory Parnell and J. Williams.

* The once-respected Lee J. Cobb blasting out Full Vocal Jacket seemingly started in On The Waterfront. Maybe it was his Oscar nomination for that classic that goaded release of his inner Kraken: he’d further crank decibel levels in 12 Angry Men, Party Girl, The Brothers Karamazov (also 1958, and another Oscar nomination), The Trap and Exodus but he’s off even his own mug-to-the-back-row charts in Man Of The West: it’s a lung-power self-contest between this Godzillian turn and the most baroque of his bellowthons which echoed thru Green Mansions and The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. Corn off the Cobb.

A little louder, Lee. Someone in Fiji might not hear ya.

** Anthony Mann’s West, no place for a tenderfoot or the tender-hearted: The Furies, Winchester ’73, Devil’s Doorway (all 1950), Bend Of The River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country, The Last Frontier, The Man From Laramie (all 1955), The Tin Star (1957), Man Of The West (’58), Cimarron (1960).