The Man of the West “Man from the West” is the last western of E. Mann, the director who, like no other, artistically and conceptually enriched this genre. From the very first scenes, Mann sets the parameters of a monumental, heavy-weight, mythological narrative, built on a sequence of long, detailed plans, actively using the deep mise-en-scene, including for a symbolic representation of the return of the past.
With a minimum of characters and events of great importance, for the first time in the genre of Western, acquires a landscape that becomes a photogram of the internal state of the characters, which brings Mann and Herzog together – a fact amazing for Hollywood. Dialogues are full of pauses, the performers seem to freeze in archetypal grandeur, when expressive silence changes words. G. Cooper and L. D. Cobb as almost indistinguishable doubles, people with similar characters, form a tandem of father and son, giving the picture not only a baroque sound, but also biblical symbolism.
A. Bazin in his legendary article devoted to the Western, for the first time noted the strong Old Testament pathos of many films of the genre: severe moralism, the poetics of crime / retribution, the archetypal nature of the confrontation between brothers and fathers and sons. E. Mann, using situations common to the genre, sums up a powerful evidence base for this thesis, it was he who first openly visualized the mythology of the Western, which served as a source of inspiration for S. Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the Wild West, a kind of postscript to the history of the genre.
G. Cooper, like D. Wayne, is one of the most representative Western performers, photogenic and colorful looking in a generalized image of a person with a dark past, tormented by contradictions. This character-symbol carries a boundless sense of national guilt before the land of the United States and its indigenous population, hidden in the American character.
The trail of crimes that mark the past of this hero is personified in the image of a savage clan, anarchic barbarism that turned the Wild West into a lawless desert marked by genocide and total violence. Mann does not expose the myth of this time, but shows its background - the monstrous scale of crimes committed by real geniuses of evil.
By mythologizing, archetyping evil, Mann reveals its eternal character, freeing it from social and political stratifications - it is the Bible, a sacred book for Protestant America, that becomes the key to understanding the nature of those conflicts that stood at the origins of the national character.
Achieving from the performers of almost statuesque majesty, immobility, inscribing them in a wild, uninhabited landscape, Mann gives their actions primordial, non-historical. The picture is incredibly difficult to watch - it is difficult to get used to its contemplative rhythm, rich mise-en-scene, which is constantly having to look at, trying to catch the symbolic meanings of the movements of characters subject to complex, calculated geometry.
The camerainess of the story itself and long dialogues fragmented by silence turn the tape into an intellectual meditation, not devoid of emotions, but emphatically generalized, taken beyond social specifics into a timeless field. The rougher and more schematic looks the final duel, a kind of ballet of bullets, heavenly punishment for the criminal past.
The Western man, changing names and places in every scene, becomes the forerunner of all American marginal fugitives, an expression of the obsession marked in their national character with expensive, metaphysical homelessness, flight from themselves, their national identity, which they left behind overseas, having first come to a wild country to satisfy their existential thirst for adventure and life from scratch.
Mann’s latest western is a deep reflection on the ontological throws that shaped the American national character, the vast breadth of traits and traits that threaten to turn into emptiness and absorb its bearers, which is equally behind countercultural escapism and the irrational craving for success and self-realization against all odds.