Western Man

Gary Cooper was another of TCM's selections for Star of the Month in 2025, and once again I've got a couple of his films that I had to get through before they expired from the DVR, and then write up the posts on them to put up at a later date. Since it's been a while from the last time I scheduled a post on a western, I decided to watch Man of the West, it having turned out that I had not in fact seen the movie before.

Gary Cooper plays Link Jones, a man who, as the movie opens is acting like he might have a bit of a past. He shows up in the not-quite-so west Texas town of Crosscut, from the farther west town of Good Hope. The citizens of Good Hope need a teacher, and deputized Link to go to Forth Worth to get a teacher to sign a contract, and even gave him money to pay the signing bonus, not that they would have called it that back in the day. Crosscut is the town where the train to Fort Worth is caught, so that's why Link has come here.

He gets on a train and find as a fellow passenger Sam Beasley (Arthur O'Connell). Sam seems partly like the Roscoe Karns character in It Happened One Night, with some of Jack Carson's smooth operator types mixed in. Sam introduces Link to Billie Ellis (Julie London), a saloon singer who wants to leave Crosscut to make a better life for herself, with Sam suggesting she could make a good teacher.

Along the way, the train stops to pick up firewood, since this is a steam engine and they need fuel to keep the train going. All the able-bodied men are asked to get out of the train to help load firewood. Billie, having been bothered by some of the men on board, also gets off for a bit of fresh air and to get away from the older men still on board. One of those "older" men is really a decoy, however, as some of the men are part of a gang trying to rob the train. They do and make a successful getaway, and while the train tries to make its own getaway from the robbers, it leaves Link, Sam, and Billie behind.

Link is bright enough to know that staying by the rails isn't a good idea, since no train is going to come by soon and it's miles to the nearest town as the track goes. Instead, he has the three of them set off on foot, eventually coming to an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Link tells Sam and Billie to stay in the barn while he approaches the farm owner for assistance.

And that's where Link's past comes in. It just so happens that Link knew full well there ought to be a farmhouse here, because he used to live here. He was living with his uncle Dock (Lee J. Cobb), who was the leader of a gang of robbers of which Link was once a member. Also, wouldn't you know it, It's Dock's gang that robbed the train, including Coaley (Jack Lord) and Trout (Royal Dano). There's varying degrees of displeasure at seeing Link. Dock, for his part, would like Link to join the gang again since Link seems to have been the only other person who had a real aptitude for the work they were doing and the rest of the gang's proceeds haven't been so high.

The other gang members are rather more violent, as we see when Link is able to bring Billie and Sam to the house. If they were unhappy to see Link, they're really unhappy to see Sam. Billie on the other hand, is a woman which means someone for them to lust over even though Link has said she's his wife as a means of trying to protect her. Tensions rise until Dock announces he wants to use Link as part of his plan to rob the bank at Lassoo, which seems rather more west than where the farmhouse is based on the landscape and (lack of) vegetation. But don't worry about geography in a western like this.

Man of the West is a fairly good western of the late 1950s psychological western mold that was more in vogue than the older straightforward westerns. It was directed by Anthony Mann, who had had a fair bit of success in directing James Stewart in similarly psychological westerns. If there's a flaw, I think it's in the climax, as it seems unlikely the gang wouldn't have known what happened to Lassoo in the intervening years since Link left the gang. But that's a minor quiblle from what is an otherwise worthy movie.