(Anthony Mann, US 1958, 100 min., 35mm)

Gary Cooper delivers a magnetic portrayal in one of brilliant director Mann’s finest films. Link (Cooper) is a reformed outlaw now married with children who accidentally is reunited with the savage gang (led by Lee J. Cobb) he left years earlier. Link agrees to participate in a bank robbery in order to protect the gang’s two captives (played by Arthur O’Connell and singer Julie London). Beautifully filmed in CinemaScope™ and color, Mann’s fascination with psychologically complex heroes and villains, as well as his mastery of filming figures against a landscape, reaches the same intense levels of the director’s celebrated Westerns made with James Stewart (Winchester ’73, The Naked Spur, etc.).

This film appears as part of the Auteur Showdown series. Click here, To read more about auteur directors working in the western genre.