The Naked Spur

• Directed by Anthony Mann
• February 1, 1953

A bounty hunter trying to capture a murderer must take the help of two strangers who are not quite trustworthy.

James Stewart was a great actor. One of the best to ever hit the big screen. He started out playing the nice guy everyman. He was no tough guy at the start of his career but eventually transitioned into harder edged parts. And he was good at both which is a credit to the talent of the man from Indiana, PA.

Enter The Naked Spur with Stewart as rancher-turned-bounty-hunter Howard Kemp. The story starts right in the middle of the action. You don’t get much background on Kemp or any of the other characters introduced but you do as the narrative progresses. You’re forced to take them at their word rather than have hard narrative evidence that they are who they say they are or their motivations are what they claim them to be.

Anthony Mann as director gets a great deal of mileage out of a story whose cast never expands beyond the count of five. Aside from Stewart as Kemp, we have Millard Mitchell as grizzled prospector Jesse Tate whom Kemp encounters and lets believe is a marshal. Ralph Meeker is former Union soldier Roy Anderson who was discharged for being “morally unstable” and is later revealed to have raped a Blackfoot chief’s daughter. All are in pursuit of accused murderer and bank robber Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) who has Lina Patch (Janet Leigh)-the daughter of his dead partner-in tow.

Each character comes in rather mysteriously and what amounts to a mystery occurs as you need to discern what is going on with each. As The Naked Spur progresses the mystery of who they are and what drives them is peeled away. Kemp is desperately trying to capture Vandergroat in order to get his ranch back by using the reward. Long story short, he trusted the wrong woman to tend to things while he was gone. Rather than care for his property she sold it and ran off with someone else. Ouch!

Though her exact age is never established, I am left thinking Leigh’s character of Lina is much younger than Leigh was at the time. She was 26 or so when this movie came out and I felt like her character in the story was barely an adult. Stewart himself was in his mid-40s here and it makes the eventual pairing of the two characters kinda icky. Anywho…

This is not a cowboys vs Indians story but rather a disparate group of personalities against each other. Vandergroat when caught begins to play each character against the other. His whole idea to secure an escape is manipulation. He probes them and sees what makes them tick and what could possibly get them to turn or even just cause a little bit of mistrust and doubt. And it is not as if these are a group that you could see ever getting along truly. The bits and pieces of this story are laid out then acted upon. This builds logically to a great finale with no real out of leftfield occurrences.

While I thoroughly enjoyed The Naked Spur, I didn’t think it was as tense as it should’ve or could’ve been. Vandergroat was a good villain, but he was not as subtle as he should have been. There was no mistaking what he was doing and that is where things fall a little short. It should not have been as obvious.

That’s not calling it a terrible movie but it’s not as good as it could have been. It just needed a little bit more of a tweak or push to make it something truly special here rather than something very entertaining. The acting is great and the direction is as well. And the cast is fantastic. It just needed a smidge more.

The Naked Spur isn’t a brilliant film, but it is a very good film. It’s a Western that focuses on the characters and less on the action. It’s a game of cat and mouse with a villain trying to manipulate those around him into doing most of his dirty work for him so he can escape. With a strong tough guy turn by Jimmy Stewart it’s a very worthwhile watch.