MAN OF THE WEST (1958) The white sheep in a family of black ones

James Stewart and director Anthony Mann made five classic "adult" Westerns together in the ‘50s. But after a quarrel they never teamed again, and the plum role of Link Jones went to Gary Cooper, another of Mann's trademark flawed heroes, in MAN OF THE WEST. I can't imagine better casting. A respectable husband and father with a checkered past, Link is headed to Fort Worth (my home town!) toting the town's savings to hire a school teacher. His train is held up by the Dock Tobin gang, and though Link temporarily alludes them, he and his two fellow passengers later run into the outlaws holed up in a cabin. The unsavory quintet turn out to be his former compatriots in crime – and not just that, his family. From Link’s bellowing, half-mad uncle Dock (Lee J. Cobb) to his mute, murdering cousin Trout (Dano Royal), the Tobins are the Bizarro World opposites of Bonanza's Cartwights, and despite Dock's best efforts to draw Link back in, the latter resists - gently at first, later with necessary violence. The film is littered with memorable scenes and images, as when Jones whups one of his cousins and then forces him to strip down to his longjohns, humiliating him back for having done similar to the woman he's taken under his wing, Billie (the splendidly endowed Julie London); and when Trout, after being plugged by Link in self defense, staggers along a dusty street, mortally wounded and howling like an animal. By film's end, Link's black sheep uncle and cousins are all dead, and as he and Billie ride toward the sunset in a covered wagon, she declares both her love for him and resignation that he belongs to another. As stories go, a downer; as a noir Western, a great film, with stunning widescreen landscape photography (also a Mann trademark) such as when Uncle Dock, standing on a peak above the gang's camp watching for Link, is silhouetted against the sky.