The Naked Spur
by Anthony Mann
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert RyanDirector: Anthony Mann
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Color, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: Academy Ratio, 1.33:1
Running Time: 91 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-08-15
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 79246
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- "Plain arithmetic. Money splits better two ways instead of three," smooth-talking outlaw Ben Vandergroat reasons to his captors, three bounty hunters thrown together by chance. They're taking him to justice in Abilene, but Ben has other ideas. If he can set the men against each other play on their greed, their fears, their vanities, he may be able to make his break to freedom.In the third of his f
Movie Reviews of The Naked Spur
Movie Review: Savage, Elemental Western
Summary: 5 Stars
The Naked Spur was the third of five Westerns director Anthony Mann would make with Jimmy Stewart in the first half of the '50's. These works stand alongside Stewart's 50's films with Hitchcock as going along way to revise his "aw shucks," light comic persona. For Hitchcock, Stewart played obsessive, neurotic characters; for Mann he was that too, with an added capacity for violence that is as convincingly portrayed as is is unexpected. Looking at both ends of Stewart's emotional spectrum by watching The Naked Spur and Vertigo alongside Mr Smith Goes To Washington bears out fully Andrew Sarris' accolade -- Stewart was the most complete actor in classical Hollywood.
In Spur, Stewart plays Howie Kemp, once a normal farmer who probably had a moral compass; but a series of set-backs leading to the the loss of his ranch has left him at the end of his tether -- to get himself out of a financial hole, he has turned bounty hunter, stalking a former friend, a career criminal, who shot a sheriff and now has a substantial reward hanging over his head -- dead or alive.
At the film's start, Stewart is alone in the wilderness, and close to catching his quarry. But by the time he apprehends him, and has to make the long journey back to civilization, he had acquired unwillingly a couple of partners who facilitate the capture and now mean to share in the spoils: Ralph Meeker, as a sociopathic cavalry officer, dishonorably discharged for raping an Indian (and the tribe is on his trail, and hence on Stewart's as well); and a kindly but greedy old prospector (Millard Mitchell).
And the quarry? Robert Ryan, at his menacing best. Bound and immobile for most of the film, his barbed humor and disarming good nature disguise a truly dangerous man -- dangerous because he knows all of his captors weaknesses, and plays them off against each other, using his words as weapons only until he gets the chance to get his hands on an actual gun. When he is caught, he is accompanied by a semi-feral young woman, played by Janet Leigh, the daughter of one of his slain associates with whom Ryan has some sort of ambiguous relationship, somewhere between lover and surrogate father; when Ryan sees Stewart is attracted to her, he will use that too as a weapon.
Mann stages this journey employing the rocky barren landscape as another protagonists; he relishes having his actors climbing sheer rock faces, fording rapids, digging themselves into the earth to shield themselves from bullets. The extremity of the characters struggle with the landscape mirrors the emotional extremes they are subjected to.
Stewart plays here a paranoid, bitter, vindictive man, for whom the pursuit of blood money has become an obsession. The fact that this goal is at odds with the moral person he once was leads him to the edge of hysteria; he screams like a woman, rages, menaces, bullies. And he pulls it off beautifully. Mann once said at the end of any of his films, his heroes are more exhausted then exalted. As in The Wages of Fear, these movies, particularly Spur, are ordeals, and we and the characters are spared nothing. This movie,like the others in the cycle, is among the toughest, and darkest westerns to come out of Hollywood.
Summary of The Naked Spur
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