John Ford did more to invent the modern Western – and arguably the American dream that streamed through it – than any other film director, and he probably did more to test and warp that dream than anyone else as well. If he has any competition, however, it must be Anthony Mann, a director who knew beauty and pregnant pauses of weathered visual memory as well as Ford. However, he was also a director of profoundly small ego, never one to indulge in the opulence and gilded glory of Ford at his most boundless and operatic. Mann used color cinematography with appreciation for how its incomplete translation to full-blooming color could enhance cinema as much as bubbling, bursting color might. In Man of the West, color is not passionate; it is exhausted. Continue reading →