Into this beautiful but isolated land rides Will Lockhart (Stewart) and the wagon train of his freight company. He also has personal business in the territory and it has something to do with the charred remains of a wagon train they pass along the way. Stewart eases up on the neurotic edge he brought to earlier Mann films Winchester 73 and The Naked Spur and is even quite charming when he first arrives in town and meets Barbara (Cathy Downs) with his wagonloads of freight. When she offers him tea, he smiles at the thought of so civilized a break from the trail and watches her bustle about with an appreciation for the feminine presence in his life, no matter how fleeting. But he's a hard, driven man as the dark expression that passes over his face at the massacre graveyard communicates. "It reminds me of what I came here to do," he tells his scout, Charlie, played by Wallace Ford with an easy-going commitment and loyalty. "I'm a lonely man, Mr. Lockhart; so are you," Charlie tells Will as he pays off the crew. "I don't suppose we spoke ten words coming down here, but I feel that I know you and I like what I know."
It's not the Apaches who declare war on Will but Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol), the sadistic man-child son of cattle baron Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp) who all but runs the territory. In their first collision, Dave rides up with a veritable posse and has Will roped like livestock and dragged through a campfire. Vic (Arthur Kennedy), the ranch foreman, rides in too late to stop Dave from laying waste to Will's wagons but does interrupt the violence momentarily. Then he advises Will to keep on riding out of town. "This is the most unfriendly country I've ever been in," remarks Will with wry understatement after yet another local warns him to leave. Before the film is over, the violence escalates, becoming more brutal and personal.
Anthony Mann died before he was able to mount his dream project, an epic reworking of King Lear set on the frontier, but takes a dry run at it with The Man From Laramie, which recasts the aging king as despotic cattleman Alec Waggoman and substitutes sons for Lear's daughters: the spoiled bully of a man-child Dave, played by Alec Nicol as a juvenile gang leader in chaps, and Vic, the ranch foreman who is no blood relation but is as loyal and devoted as a son, which only makes Dave jealous and angry and act out with his fists and his guns. Will is the only man in the territory who refuses to kowtow to the overgrown kid and that's good enough to land a job as foreman to an independent rancher (Aline MacMahon) trying to hold off the Waggomans from swallowing them up or pushing them out.
Mann sets much of the film in the gently shadowy atmosphere of late evening and early dawn. You can see that he shot it day-for-night style, stopping down the aperture to cut down the light and darken the image--the shadows are clearly thrown by an afternoon or mid-morning sun--but the effect is lovely, the actors enveloped in the easy shadow of twilight against the deep blue sky. It suggests a peacefulness that is burned away in the hard light of day, which brings out the brutality of volatile figures. He also tends to longer takes and more full shots, which was common to the early CinemaScope movies, when filmmakers worried that editing would be more disorienting in the larger format. It gives the film a calmer surface than previous Mann films. A few jolts of violence aside, there's more tension than action as Mann bottles up the conflicts until they are primed to blow. Will is volatile element added to a system under pressure and Mann's measured rhythms help sustain the building tension and set off the violence with greater contrast. He consistently brought a perverse edge to the violence of his films, reminding us that killing is not a clean, simple act and matching the viciousness of the motivation with the cruelty of the act. Perhaps the most famous and easily the most memorable and visceral moment in The Man From Laramie is a gunshot to the hand, an act of pure sadism. Mann never lets us forget what's happening even as he moves the camera from the hand to a screen-filling close-up of Stewart's face in a slow, sustained take. He grimaces and contorts in pain but never cries out. It's as violent as anything in the films of Peckinpah, made all the more effective by remaining just off screen, close enough for the audience to feel.
This style also allows Mann to show us the physicality of men at work on the frontier, rounding up and branding cattle, riding easily but purposefully along ridge trails, climbing high mountain trails on horseback with the sureness of a veteran forntiersman. That kind of texture is common to westerns but is usually isolated to brief shots establishing a scene. Mann keeps the camera on the action instead of cutting into close-up, which adds to the sense of character and setting. One thing you can say about the Hollywood westerns of the forties and fifties is that the actors knew how to ride. Mann made sure his performers looked like they were born in the saddle.
Twilight Time presents the Blu-ray debut of The Man From Laramie in a beautiful 4K transfer mastered from the original negative and presented in the extra-wide 2.55:1 CinemaScope format. The image is crisp and clear and flawless and the colors are rich and vivid. The contrast between the bright daylight scenes and the early morning / falling evening scenes is especially noticeable thanks to the depth of color in this edition.
Supplements are limited to the original teaser and trailer and Twilight Time's trademark isolated musical score (which includes the effects track), plus an eight-page booklet with stills and an essay by Julie Kirgo. Limited to 3000 copies, available exclusively from Screen Archives and TCM.
by Sean Axmaker
