Anthony Mann was one of the great chroniclers of American violence. His classic Winchester ’73 expresses that violence in an unholy object: a doomed gun that sidewinds through the hands of weary travelers of American life as it indexes a brutal cycle none of the men trapped in it could break from. Three years later, in The Naked Spur, he shifts from an object to a place, a cragged expanse that is a space of ostensible but illusory freedom that becomes an unexpected forum for the affectations of rugged masculine types and the afflictions of American society. The very raggedness that made the frontier a living thing was also a product of genocide and mass death and often spelled existential demise. The West in The Naked Spur is a fully three-dimensional hellscape, a place whose forbiddingly omnipresent physical nooks and crannies mirror the impossible ethical convolutions characters make within it. William C. Mellor’s cinematography is vivid but oddly neutered, intimating a vibrant geography concealing a festering moral sickness. It’s as though the spirit of the West no longer needs a corporeal object to attach to in order to unleash itself upon the world. When one character remarks that “it’s getting so I don’t know which way to point this thing anymore,” he’s talking about his gun, obviously, but he might as well be talking about the shared worldview its characters inhabit, one which invites them to join guns for a common cause just as easily as it coaxes them into turning their guns on one another.

In its cavalier, casual brutality, The Naked Spur feels like a definitive statement on the Wild West, but only because Mann’s film is so self-consciously un-definitive. That’s because everything is so double-sided. Take lead man Jimmy Stewart,  the consummate Janus-faced  Old Hollywood protagonist. There’s a reason Hitchcock famously quipped that he cast Stewart when he made movies about who he (Hitchcock) really was, a fundamentally ambivalent man capable of extreme nastiness when he summoned his darkest reserves of psychological frustration. In Stewart, Mann found a would-be scion of a moral American universe who was actually a cruelly  domineering figure harboring  unexpectedly violent urges. His character Howard Kemp begins the film an apparently noble man, but it isn’t long before we see how capable of using others he is, abusing their potential desires for his own momentary needs in a way that stops short of overt malevolence but certainly constitutes a kind of cruelty.

When we do first meet him though, the moral arc of the film’s universe seems clean, contained, and Manichean: Kemp is a sheriff hunting a murderous outlaw named Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan). The only problems are mechanical and pragmatic: Kemp doesn’t know where Ben is, and he’s going to need a little assistance on the path. When he encounters help in the form of an elderly prospector named Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell), the mechanical problem transforms into a transactional one.  When he gets some help he didn’t ask for in the name of ex-soldier Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker), transactional debt becomes a transfer of obligation, especially when Anderson proves the only one able to scale the cliff Ben is hiding atop, and no one man can really be said to have “captured” Vandergroat on their own. As if things weren’t complex enough, none of this unexpected posse were expecting to find this apparently ruthless and conniving man accompanied by an oddly empathetic potential lover, Lina Patch (Janet Leigh). And Tate and Anderson either weren’t expecting, or weren’t ready to admit that they were expecting, what Vandergroat very willingly reveals: Kemp is actually a bounty hunter, and his interest is self-inflation, not collective  justice.

These characters, the only named humans in the film, are very much five people in search of an exit, not only from their present predicament but potentially from themselves, from a way of life some of them begin to realize, and fear, comes all too easily to them. Their camaraderie is tetchy from the beginning, sidewinding stray pathways around one another while slowly sucking each other into a swamp of human consternation. The West was an “atomic” space, historian Frederick Jackson Turner once wrote, in that it separated and pulled people apart, diffusing them into an open field which they sought to conquer or master. For Turner, this was largely liberatory. The Naked Spur reminds just how unstable a particle these atoms formed: men and women not really united in anything other than a shared desire to not be in the moment they’re currently in, orbiting around a center of shared friction. When Ben begins to itch at their interpersonal scabs, hoping to turn them against one another, he is merely recognizing that the nucleus holding them together is actually a black hole. This singularly conniving man has self-centered motives, certainly, but that doesn’t make his exposure of their conniving self-centeredness any less relevant.

This is the West not as a united front, a holy harmony on a divine mission of Manifest Destiny, but as an unholy, many-headed hydra with each head regulating one another, investigating each other, inserting itself into the others’ souls and massaging what they want, or need, out of the cracks in their desires. The Naked Spur is downright fiendish in the way it exposes febrile nerves and momentary interests where solid types and generalized images once stood. The already uneasy affinity between the three would-be captors is increasingly strained by acknowledgements of its essentially dubious nature.

And Mann, the restless wanderer who turned “journeyman director” into an art of poetic errantry, is absolutely fiendish in his unblinking capacity to watch these characters destroy themselves. Mann’s patience is as paltry as his eye is prodigious, and where other directors would imagine a pasture of potential, he conjures an abyss. When a man is killed in an act of mutual selfishness, another can only offer the West’s nihilistic consolation: he’s “never gonna be hungry again, never want anything he can’t have.” The statement cuts so deep because it is both a truth everyone in the film would underscore and an entirely self-serving justification of the speaker’s will to do anything to survive. Mann exposes these harsh truths with his camera like he’s pointing a six-shooter at a man whose mask suddenly evaporates into a grim, fearful reality. He directs without any false grandiosity or moral sanctimoniousness. As one character in the film says, “if you’re going to murder me, don’t make it look like something else.” This marks Mann as a self-conscious inhabitant of the (a)moral universe he visualizes, a paradoxical artist taking a masculine, brutish perspective on masculine, brutish people. He was an artist doomed to use the tools of his subjects against them. His quiet fury at having to do so raises his artistic witness of this mental wilderness into a genuine act of principled philosophical outrage, one that slashes and burns in hope that mutual damnation is the only path to eventual redemption.

Score: 9/10