Movies - Man of the West

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Man of the West

	Movies - Man of the West

Man of the West is a 1958 western film directed by Anthony Mann in his last film of the genre. The screenplay, written by Reginald Rose, is based on the novel The Border Jumpers by Will C. Brown. When first released, the film was largely ignored by American critics, though renowned French critic Jean-Luc Godard regarded the film as the best released that year. In the decades since the film's release it has garnered a cult following as well as considerably greater acclaim from professional critics. Some, such as The Guardian's Derek Malcolm consider the film the best film directed by Mann and a landmark western in the western genre canon. Malcolm included the film in his 2000 list The Century of Film.

Plot

Heading east to Fort Worth to hire a schoolteacher for his frontier town home, Link Jones (Gary Cooper) is stranded with saloon singer Billie Ellis (Julie London) and gambler Sam Beasley (Arthur O'Connell) when the train they are riding is held up. For shelter, Jones leads the group to his nearby former home, where he was brought up an outlaw. Finding the gang still living in the shack--they were in fact the train robbers--Jones poses as having "come back" to a life of crime. Only the gang's crazed leader, "Uncle" Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), accepts Jones's story, and he decides to revive a long-planned robbery scheme. As Jones plays for time, he struggles with his background as a criminal, and the outlaws begin to lose patience.

Cast

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Man of the West ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Man of the West; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay