Over at Movie Mezzanine, I wrote some thoughts about Anthony Mann's stirring 1958 masterpiece, Man of the West, starring a perfectly cast Gary Cooper as a man whose attempts to leave behind a life of crime will only bring him back from whence he came. It is a harrowing film, one of the bleakest in a viciously bleak filmography, a vision of violence as a self-perpetuating cycle that consumes all who fall in it and offers escape only in a bloody death. One of the greatest Westerns of all time.
My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.
