Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, and Millard Mitchell have a lot of physical and psychological ground to cover in Anthony Mann’s THE NAKED SPUR
THE NAKED SPUR (Albert Mann, 1953)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, August 14, 2:50, 6:10, 9:40
Series continues through August 25
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Shortly after the Civil War, bounty hunter Howard Kemp (James Stewart) is determined to bring in wanted murderer Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) and claim the reward. Joined by grizzled old prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) and dishonorably discharged Union lieutenant Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker), Kemp gets his man, along with Ben’s companion, the young Lina Patch (Janet Leigh), the daughter of Ben’s dead best friend. They tie up Ben’s hands, put him on a burro, and head out on the long, arduous trail to turn him over to the federal marshals. But the smug, wisecracking outlaw has other plans, continually planting various seeds to try to set Howard, Roy, and Jesse against one another. Directed by Anthony Mann (Winchester ’73, The Man from Laramie) and shot in the Rocky Mountains, The Naked Spur is not just another Western; it is a multilayered exploration of lust and greed, love and sexuality, with Lina at the center of it all. When Ben needs his sore back rubbed, he asks her, “Can you do me?” Roy thinks he can do anything he wants with any woman. And Howard can’t get over a part of his past, suffering from nightmares that haunt him. Unfortunately, the complex story is dragged down by overly conventional music — “Beautiful Dreamer”? Really? — and some ridiculously staged, hard-to-believe action scenes, but it’s still worth saddling up your horse and going along for the ride. The Naked Spur is screening August 14 with John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) as part of Film Forum’s “Robert Ryan” series, which continues with such pairings as Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948) and Beware, My Lovely (Harry Horner, 1952); Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959) and Lonelyhearts (Vincent J. Donehue, 1958); Caught (Max Ophüls, 1948) and Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952); and such single presentations as The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), God’s Little Acre (Anthony Mann, 1958), and The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973), which taken as a whole display Ryan’s Jimmy Stewart-like ability to shift between genres with grace and ease. A Dartmouth grad who was born in Chicago, Ryan was an outspoken civil rights activist who made more than fifty films during his thirty-plus-year career, which ended when he died of lung cancer in 1973 at the age of sixty-four.