Amazon.com reviews for
The Man from Laramie (1955) More at IMDbPro »

Man From Laramie (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: Combining elements of King Lear with Anthony Mann's favorite themes of splintered families and filial betrayal, The Man from Laramie was James Stewart's final collaboration with Mann and one of their best. Lanky Stewart plays his usual brooding loner, a former army scout searching for the man responsible for his brother's death. He rides into a town run by a cattle baron (Donald Crisp) with an irresponsible son (Alex Nicol) who despises him and a dutiful foreman (Arthur Kennedy) who desperately craves his father-figure's affection and respect. The complicated web of love, hate, and betrayal sprawls over the entire town, and Stewart, less psychologically haunted than in previous Mann collaborations, becomes a catalyst that pitches the conflict into violence, usually directed at him. Through the course of the film Stewart is dragged through a burning campfire, shot point-blank in the hand, beaten, ambushed, and generally made unwelcome. Mann's brutal violence reaches a new level of cruel glee in Nicol's sadistic delinquent with a six-shooter, and Kennedy provides the psychotic edge as the spurned son with a black secret. As usual Mann's landscapes are magnificent (though the glorious widescreen compositions are lost to some extent in the pan-and-scan tape) in country where beauty and danger lie in the same handsome wilderness. Also starring Cathy Downs as a Kennedy's long-suffering fiancée, googly-eyed Jack Elam as a shady informant, and Wallace Ford as a tracker who becomes Stewart's ally. --Sean Axmaker

The Man From Laramie (dvd):

Amazon.com video review: Only John Ford excelled Anthony Mann as a purveyor of eye-filling Western imagery, and Mann's best films are second to no one's when it comes to the fusion of dynamic action, rugged landscapes, and fierce psychological intensity. The Man from Laramie is the last of five remarkable Westerns the director made with James Stewart (starting with Winchester '73 and peaking with The Naked Spur). This collaboration marked virtually a whole new career for Stewart, whose characters are all haunted by the past and driven by obsession--here, to find whoever set his cavalry-officer brother in the path of warlike Indians.

The Man from Laramie aspires to an epic grandeur beyond its predecessors. It's the only one in CinemaScope, and Stewart's personal quest is subsumed in a larger drama--nothing less than a sagebrush version of King Lear, with a range baron on the verge of blindness (Donald Crisp), his weak and therefore vicious son (Alex Nicol), and another, apparently more solid "son," his Edmund-like foreman (Arthur Kennedy). There are a few too many subsidiary characters, and the reach for thematic complexity occasionally diminishes the impact. But no one will ever forget the scene on the salt flats between Nicol and Stewart--climaxing in the single most shocking act of violence in '50s cinema--or the final, mountaintop confrontation.

For decades, the film has been seen only in washed-out, pan-and-scan videos, with the characters playing visual hopscotch from one panel of the original composition to another. It's great to have this glorious DVD--razor-sharp, fully saturated (or as saturated as '50s Eastmancolor could be), and breathtaking in its CinemaScope sweep. --Richard T. Jameson