Anthony Mann, 1953
Reparto: James Stewart (Howard Kemp), Janet Leigh (Lina Patch), Robert Ryan (Ben Vandergroat), Ralph Meeker (Roy Anderson), Millard Mitchell (Jesse Tate).
Guión: Sam Rolfe, Harold Jack Bloom.
* * *
¿Por qué cambia Kemp?Reparto: James Stewart (Howard Kemp), Janet Leigh (Lina Patch), Robert Ryan (Ben Vandergroat), Ralph Meeker (Roy Anderson), Millard Mitchell (Jesse Tate).
Guión: Sam Rolfe, Harold Jack Bloom.
* * *
Howard Kemp busca por las montañas de Colorado a un asesino de Kansas para cobrar la recompensa. Un buscador de oro algo avariento y un soldado expulsado del ejército por su mala conducta le ayudan a capturar al delincuente en el risco en el que se ha guarecido con una chica, y cuando descubren la recompensa se niegan a irse sin cobrar su parte. El camino a Kansas es muy largo y el delincuente utiliza las debilidades de sus captores para intentar la huida siempre que puede.
Como en todas las películas de Mann aparece una variedad de temas como los indios, los desfiladeros, el buscador de oro y el rancho. El espacio físico es uno de los protagonistas, la película se inicia con un tiroteo en un risco y se resuelve con otro. El río, como en “Bend of the river” es el gran elemento catártico.
La que, para muchos, es la mejor película de Anthony Mann tiene sus mayores logros en el retrato de los cinco personajes y en sus relaciones. El buscador de oro se pierde con su avaricia, el villano conoce esa debilidad, el punto flaco del militar son las mujeres. La chica toma cada una de sus decisiones, incluso la de ayudar al asesino, para evitar un sufrimiento mayor. El duelo es entre Kemp y Vandergroat. Kemp ha perdido su tierra por una mala jugada, es una víctima de la injusticia, pero aunque quiere recuperar lo perdido no es lo bastante canalla para matar al bandido. El bandido no es una víctima, sino un manipulador, y le sobra maldad y sangre fría.
Mann sabía que para entretener al espectador tenía que ofrecerle acción, y movimiento, y sabía que el protagonista tenía que evolucionar. Cumple con los cánones, pero sólo cumple. Las peripecias no están al servicio de esos cambios trascendentales en los personajes. Por eso una persecución o un tiroteo que podría ser emocionante, resultan más una distracción. Kemp cambia al final, pero no sabemos que lo ha llevado a dar ese paso.
Jeanine Basinger: The naked spurr es una película tan intense y de composición tan ajustada, que, con la salvedad de la partida de indios, está protagonizada únicamente sólo por esos cinco personajes. Las posibilidades de interacción entre ellos se exploran una y otra vez, de tal modo que las combinaciones de los personajes son más de cinco veces cinco.
Anthony Mann, Filmoteca Española.
Richard Armstrong (Senses of cinema): The Naked Spur was James Stewart and Anthony Mann's third western together and is widely regarded as their best collaboration. André Bazin thought it “the most beautifully true western of recent years.” Along with Winchester '73 (1950), Bend of the River (aka Where the River Bends, 1952) and The Man from Laramie (1955), The Naked Spur is now seen as marking a key moment in a joint output second only to that of Wayne and Ford in the annals of the genre. Consonant with Stewart's characteristic 1950s stance of psychotic determination – The Stratton Story (Sam Wood, 1949), The Spirit of St. Louis (Billy Wilder, 1957), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) – and Mann's perennial equation of fraught interiority with stark exteriors, The Naked Spur is, as Phil Hardy says, “an extraordinary Western.”
When Howie tells Lina the story of Mary, the woman who betrayed him, rain dripping on an assortment of metal plates and cups makes a strange melody in the night. Ultimately, The Naked Spur is driven by an absent, conniving woman. Immature, a little tomboyish, Lina is not yet a woman herself, making dubious her relationship with Vandergroat: “Sometimes I think you just like to be rubbed.” Driven to react to events rather than act on them, but eventually insufficient to his ethical degradation, Kemp becomes like the hunted hero of film noir, a genre in which powerful men are duped by women. Awaking from a nightmare, he shrieks in pain and delirium. Only Indians or women shriek like that in westerns, a genre in which white males embody traditional manliness. As in other Stewart-Mann westerns, the psychosis is symptomatic of masculine insufficiency, a malaise associated with film noir, in the '50s reaching its baroque phase. Indeed, film noir resonates here at the level of both content and iconography.
Harvey’s: The film is quite striking visually. Cinematography by William Mellor tends not to emphasise the pictorial qualities of the Rocky mountain landscape, but keeps things crisp throughout. Mann directs with an eye for the hard surfaces which surround these hard characters, and without labouring the point, succeeds in creating a very organic blend of man and nature in which neither is particularly warm or inviting. Sometimes nature holds sway over these lost souls. One scene takes place in a dark cave where the characters have taken shelter during a rainstorm. Raindrops patter upon the cups and plates left at the entrance creating an eerie natural music which sets the tone for a tender scene between Stewart and Leigh.
It fails to convincingly resolve some story threads involving the secondary characters. It still has more than enough going on to make it well worthwhile for serious film viewers and western fans alike, and it is most especially interesting when viewed in the context of what went before it. Mann's willingness to delve deeper into the moral centre of characters previously easily employed for lazy thrills demonstrates a vision of the genre which transcends the limitations of exploitation. It lacks the grandeur of Ford's My Darling Clementine, but its viewpoint is so different that it forges an identity of its own distinctive to the artist behind it.
Rotten Tomatoes
Anthony Mann, Filmoteca Española.
Richard Armstrong (Senses of cinema): The Naked Spur was James Stewart and Anthony Mann's third western together and is widely regarded as their best collaboration. André Bazin thought it “the most beautifully true western of recent years.” Along with Winchester '73 (1950), Bend of the River (aka Where the River Bends, 1952) and The Man from Laramie (1955), The Naked Spur is now seen as marking a key moment in a joint output second only to that of Wayne and Ford in the annals of the genre. Consonant with Stewart's characteristic 1950s stance of psychotic determination – The Stratton Story (Sam Wood, 1949), The Spirit of St. Louis (Billy Wilder, 1957), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) – and Mann's perennial equation of fraught interiority with stark exteriors, The Naked Spur is, as Phil Hardy says, “an extraordinary Western.”
When Howie tells Lina the story of Mary, the woman who betrayed him, rain dripping on an assortment of metal plates and cups makes a strange melody in the night. Ultimately, The Naked Spur is driven by an absent, conniving woman. Immature, a little tomboyish, Lina is not yet a woman herself, making dubious her relationship with Vandergroat: “Sometimes I think you just like to be rubbed.” Driven to react to events rather than act on them, but eventually insufficient to his ethical degradation, Kemp becomes like the hunted hero of film noir, a genre in which powerful men are duped by women. Awaking from a nightmare, he shrieks in pain and delirium. Only Indians or women shriek like that in westerns, a genre in which white males embody traditional manliness. As in other Stewart-Mann westerns, the psychosis is symptomatic of masculine insufficiency, a malaise associated with film noir, in the '50s reaching its baroque phase. Indeed, film noir resonates here at the level of both content and iconography.
Harvey’s: The film is quite striking visually. Cinematography by William Mellor tends not to emphasise the pictorial qualities of the Rocky mountain landscape, but keeps things crisp throughout. Mann directs with an eye for the hard surfaces which surround these hard characters, and without labouring the point, succeeds in creating a very organic blend of man and nature in which neither is particularly warm or inviting. Sometimes nature holds sway over these lost souls. One scene takes place in a dark cave where the characters have taken shelter during a rainstorm. Raindrops patter upon the cups and plates left at the entrance creating an eerie natural music which sets the tone for a tender scene between Stewart and Leigh.
It fails to convincingly resolve some story threads involving the secondary characters. It still has more than enough going on to make it well worthwhile for serious film viewers and western fans alike, and it is most especially interesting when viewed in the context of what went before it. Mann's willingness to delve deeper into the moral centre of characters previously easily employed for lazy thrills demonstrates a vision of the genre which transcends the limitations of exploitation. It lacks the grandeur of Ford's My Darling Clementine, but its viewpoint is so different that it forges an identity of its own distinctive to the artist behind it.
Rotten Tomatoes
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