The Naked Spur (1953)
Directed by Anthony Mann
A bounty hunter trying to bring a murderer to justice is forced to accept the help of two less-than-trustworthy strangers.
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What critics compared The Naked Spur to
The film’s centerpiece—a brilliant mountainside action sequence—utilizes terrain and directionality in ways reminiscent of Anthony Mann’s best work, and is just as intimately tense as the climax of The Naked Spur .
I keep coming back to Stewart and the hard, broken men he played in those remarkable Anthony Mann westerns — “Winchester ’73” (1950), “Bend of the River” (1952), “The Naked Spur” (1953) — and remain in awe of the nerve with which the actor dismantled his “aw-shucks-Jimmy” image.
But until “News of the World,” Hanks had not broached Stewart’s formidable Western filmography, such as “The Naked Spur,” “Winchester ’73,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and more.
Brolin's Chaney doesn't turn up until 80 minutes in and, when he does, the actor reminds forcibly of Robert Ryan's memorable villain in Anthony Mann's great “The Naked Spur.”
The movie is a revisionist Western; a genre that, depending on your perspective, started sometime in the '60s, '70s, or with this very motion picture, and which seeks to replace the frothy Romantic idea of a morally untroubled American frontier, as depicted in such undemanding matinee adventures as The Searchers and The Naked Spur and such * , with a grimmer, more consequential depiction of the violence and cruelty and muddy nastiness of a world inhabited by the men and women (but mostly men) who would hear stories of a lawless wilderness largely untouched by human society and the "civilization" of the east, and think that sounded like exactly the right place to be.