The Naked Spur

(1953)

If ever the thought occurred that it was impossible to do a chamber drama with characters roaming the Western frontier, THE NAKED SPUR will disabuse you of this notion. With the exception of a handful of Native Americans – who are still considered part of the scenery and wildlife in western cinema at this time – Mann’s film has five cast members, each of whom represent a different genre archetype with some combining a few. James Stewart is a rancher-turned-bounty hunter, Ralph Meeker a dishonorably discharged cavalryman, Millard Mitchell a gold prospector, Robert Ryan an outlaw fugitive, and Janet Leigh his bad girl made into a respectable wife and homemaker by the end of the narrative. Were it not for the naturalistic location shooting, it would feel like an absurdist play in the vein of Pirandello along the lines of “Five Westerners in Search of a Bounty.” The director excels in protagonists experiencing the throws of physical and mental anguish and Stewart cycles through all of these in the sparse ninety minutes of the film. In a rare act for the time of normalizing deviancy, we are informed that Meeker has been expelled from military service on pop-psychological grounds of being “morally unstable.” Yet he is the most recognizable everyman in the ensemble, neither too tolerant nor romanticized. Ryan wages psychological warfare on his captors and succeeds in appealing to the neurotic, obsessive, and paranoid impulses of those who seek to profit from his reapprehension. Martin and Leigh make genre ends meet.