Starless man

With Kirk Douglas' death a few days ago, I went through the box sets I have looking for one of his movies that I haven't blogged about before. I wanted to so a post on Before I Forget, which is on the TCM four-movie box set, but it turns out that that box set is now out of print, so I was going to have to pick something else. With that in mind, I picked out Man Without a Star, a new-to-me western.

Douglas plays Dempsey Ray, who is riding the rails heading north from Texas to Wyoming in search of wide opwn spaces. Joining him on on the freight train is Jeff Jimson (William Campbell), a naïve young man who is conisistently in need of Dempsey's protection, as Dempsey saves him after a fight with a railroad guard and then gets him off a murder accusation.

Eventually the two wind up in Wyoming, where Dempsey meets old flame Idonee (Claire Trevor) and eventually gets a job working for Reed Bowman, who is coming from out east to run a giant spread with over 10,000 had of cattle. Wyoming is still open range, but some of the cattlemen have decided to put up barbed wire because they need to fence off some of the grass to save it for winter.

Although Dempsey doesn't like these ranchers for fening in land, they're really not bad guys because of their good reasoning for putting up the wire. It also doesn't help that Reed turns out to be a cattle queen (played by Jeanne Crain), who simply plans to bring in as many cattle as possible, before the land is no longer fit to support those cattle whereupon she'll move on to greener pastures. It's somewhere between slash-and-burn agriculture and the tragedy of the commons.

Dempsey gets named formean despite his skepticism for Reed's plans, and when Jimson gets in a scuffle with the ranchers putting up the barbed wire, there are people other than Dempsey to protect Reed's interests, those being the group of cowboys led by Steve Miles (Richard Boone) who brought another herd north.

Man Without a Star is a competent western, albeit one that isn't breaking any new ground. Douglas is good, of course, with the exception of his hairdo which seems all wrong. Campbell does his best despite being badly miscast; he made me think of Robert Walker Jr. for some reason. The supporting cast is good although Claire Trevor is underused.

All in all, Man Without a Star certainly isn't a bad way to spend a Saturday matinee, although I'm gladd I was able to get it in a box set. The set I picked up is now listed as being on backorder at the TCM Shop, although there's also a pricey standalone Blu-ray available.