The Naked Spur

The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953) Five desperate people in the Rocky Mountains. That's what Anthony Mann's 
The Naked Spur sears down to. Each one is flawed, if not down-right evil, and the twisted dynamics of their connections with each other are complicated and web-like. Isolated in the mountains, there is no Society or Civilization to get in their separate but intertwined ways or to pass judgement...or provide judgement. It's as if they're the last people on Earth, and (as the saying goes) it's not big enough for all of them.

Howard Kemp (James Stewart) is stalking prey in the mountains of Colorado. He runs into an old prospector, Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell, one of my favorite character actors) and tells him he's tracking a man, Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), for the murder of a sheriff in Abilene. He offers Tate $20 to help find Vandergroat and Tate takes him up on it, thinking that he's a sheriff, himself. I mean, he has the "wanted" poster.

Kemp and Tate find Vandergroat "treed" (as it were) on the high peak of a cliff. Attempts to get up there are met with sudden and dangerous man-made rock-slides. Tate is too old to make the attempt, and although Kemp is desperate to get up there, he gets injured in the attempt, the first of many injuries he will sustain in the film. The two back-track to see if they can find a back-route to surprise Vandergroat.

Aid comes in the form of former Union Lieutenant of the 6th Cavalry Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker) who is heading east after serving. Anderson is taking the more precarious route to avoid entanglements with the Blackfeet tribe, as it seems they're tracking him after he compromised the virtue of the chief's daughter. Naturally suspicious, Kemp grills him about his service and when he demands to see Anderson's release papers sees he's been dishonorably discharged for being "morally unstable." 

In this movie, he'll fit right in.

Anderson scales the cliff and gets the drop on Vandergroat (Ryan is creepily brilliant in the role, a standout among great performances). But, Vandergroat is not alone. Anderson is attacked by Lina Patch (Janet Leigh, all of 26 at the time of filming, it was already her 19th film), daughter of Vandergroat's bank-robbing buddy and the desperado takes advantage of the distraction to attack Anderson—one of Ryan's effective little touches is to laugh while he's engaged in a death-struggle with his opponent, which is unique and unnerving. Tate and Kemp manage to show up on time to keep Anderson from being killed, but once Kemp has Vandergroat captured, he begins to lose control of the situation.

"Now, ain't that the way? A man gets set-up for trouble head-on
and it sneaks up behind him every time!"

For one thing, Vandergroat makes it known that he's known Kemp a long time and has no respect for him, calling him "Howie." He also lets Tate and Anderson know that Kemp is no sheriff, he's just a bounty-hunter who wants the $5,000 reward for his capture so he can buy his land back, which he lost during his time in the Civil War. For Tate and Donovan, this immediately changes their view of Kemp and they start making noises about splitting the $5000 reward, something Kemp wants no part of, wanting the entire reward for himself.

Kemp's duplicity, Tate's greed, Anderson's "unstable" morality are all fertile ground for Vandergroat to work: he uses Lina as a pawn for the affections of both Anderson and Kemp, fills Tate's head with tales of striking it rich prospecting, and preys on Lina's loyalty for being the only man who's ever treated her right. By playing on each person's weak spots, he knows that eventually he'll get himself freed from capture and away from the hangman's noose.

And for Kemp, he's fighting other demons besides Vandergroat.  Before the War, he was just a farmer, but the War made him lose everything—his farm, his girl, his trust, his money...he's a desperate man whose only a few belt-notches away from being a gang-lander just like his quarry. He's just trying to get back to the place he was before the war, and if hunting a murderer for reward will get him that much closer, then hunt he will.

But, Vandergroat is as conniving as Kemp is distrustful and not so easily played as Tate and Donovan. It will come down to a battle of wits between the two men and any advantage Vandergroat can use against him is played—Lina's affections, Anderson's jealousy, Tate's pliable loyalty. There's also a psychological advantage; Vandergroat's extremely confident and Kemp is doubting, it's not a case of good winning out over evil, but of strength versus weakness, and Vandergroat takes advantage of every injury, accidental or deliberate to try and kill Kemp...by any means...or any ally...necessary.

The Naked Spur was the third of the five westerns Mann and Stewart would collaborate on during the 1950's, that period when Stewart was experimenting with material and directors like Hitchcock and Mann who would use his Americana persona as a counter-point to stories of obsession and neurosis that show that decency is just a raw nerve away from being exposed as fragile and undependable.

The isolation is key here. In previous Mann-Stewart westerns, there was a back-drop of civilization early on, rough-hewn and hard-scrabble as it may be. Here, in the mountains, there's nothing but the law that is made up on the spot. And it's jungle law. Survival of the fittest. Nature plays a hand in who will survive—both Nature in the wild and the nature of man. The terrain may be wild, but it follows rules of moderation and any excess is dealt with.  By the end of The Naked Spur, the environment is back in balance, with no chance of spinning out of control. Fires are tempered, and the Earth is replenished.

Anthony Mann had a lot of experience dealing with the nature of humans. He started his career in the dark and stormy nights of film-noir, where the worst instinct of people are on display and desperation is just a symptom. But, as this presents, darkness can be found in the light of the sun and the clean, unpolluted vistas of mountaintops. Light doesn't penetrate the darkness than can be found in souls.

For folks newer to film who might not relate, The Naked Spur is sort of like The Hateful Eight...only created by folks who are actually artistically creative...some 62 years earlier. 

The Naked Spur was added to the National Film Registry in 1997.

Harper (1966)

Harper (Jack Smight, 1966) The modern private eye, post-Chandler has always been a smart-aleck, but most of them have the charm to at least be surprised by the pecadilloes of their clients.

Not Lew Harper* (Paul Newman).  He's been in Los Angeles so long, he's seen everything and is so jaded, everything rolls off his back like polluted water.  Been there, done that, sneered at it and held his tongue, did his job and took a shower afterwards.  

Most detectives of the ilk don't take their work home with them.  Not Harper.  Now, in the middle of divorce proceedings from his wife (Janet Leigh)—well, not in the middle, he's just not signing the papers, hoping he might be able to charm her back (fat chance)—his work is his home, living in his rat-trap of an office.  When he's not working, he looks like he's a derelict.  But, he's Paul Newman, so he "cleans up" very nice when he's got a job to do, getting his hands dirty..

Harper cleans up real nice

But business has not been good, and he's been depending on the kindness of friends.  His attorney buddy Albert Graves (Arthur Hill), has a very lucrative client—an eccentric oil millionaire, Ralph Sampson—who has gone missing. An interview with his brittle, incapacitated wife (Lauren Bacall) shows a disdain for the man, disinterest in his whereabouts, and only a cunning interest in how it will affect the family dynamic—she despises her step-daughter, the lithe and somewhat vacuous Miranda (Pamela Tiffin)—and the financial situation if Graves should wind up...you know...dead or, worse, out of money. 

The man is eccentric and invisible.  Mrs. Sampson has been through it before—the disappearance for weeks at a time, the affairs, the drunken remorse, then Sampson washes, rinses, then repeats.  She just wants to know where he goes on these benders.  First, stop: round back to the pool, where Sampson's pilot (Robert Wagner) is enjoying not working, with Miranda, Sampson's daughter, who is fulfilling her part in, what can be described in the 60's as "the Raquel Welch role," dancing in a bikini to generic rock n' roll.  Both are curious where Daddy is, but not enough to do anything about it.  And the last time the pilot saw Sampson, he'd just flown him to L.A. from Vegas, and the man had made a phone call to be driven to the bungalow he keeps in Bel-Air. 

Pamela Tiffin, comfortable with boogaloos and bungalows

The trail leads Harper through a series of California cast-off's, a way-past-her-prime actress (Shelley Winters) and her husband-handler (Robert Webber), a junkie lounge-singer (Julie Harris) and the leader of a religious cult (Strother Martin) that's a front for smuggling illegals into the U.S.  They're all semi-competent, deeply flawed to the bone and more than a little desperate.  Just when Harper thinks he might be onto something, there's a call from the Sampson's saying that the old man's been kidnapped and the perpetrators are asking for $500,000.  The money is dropped, then disappears.

Then people start dying.

It's an odd, slightly bungled mystery with not an awful lot of suspense, but more of a jaundiced eye towards the desert wasteland of Los Angeles and the buzzards who circle it.  Harper seems to mark a tipping-point for the detective movie—where the evil that men did was in the past done by a minority of professionals, now it's done by amateurs, and seemingly anybody.

What I think the central interest of Harper is in the subject of loyalty.  It's a stand-by of detective yarns as far back as The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade rambled on about the raison d'être for taking the case.

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

Chandler took that moral quandry to the next level in his novel "The Long Goodbye"**(there are odd echoes of Chandler's books throughout Harper, but none of the moral authority).  There, a friend of detective Philip Marlowe's, Terry Lennox, asks him, no questions asked, to drive him to Mexico.  It is revealed later that Lennox's wife has been murdered, and suspicion immediately falls on Lennox, and, as an accomplice, Marlowe, being in the detective business, doggedly investigates whether his friend's a murderer. When Robert Altman made his 70's version of The Long Goodbye, he took a step far afield of the norm and the book—in the movie, Lennox does kill his wife, and Marlowe's answer to the loyalty question is simple: he shoots Lennox dead.  Loyalty's one thing, but murder's another.

Harper is somewhere in between, where loyalty is tested by actions of friends and the detective has to decide what he's supposed to do about it, whatever he thinks of him.  The ending, where Harper decides to do the right thing, expecting a bullet in his back so he doesn't have to ("Aw, hell!") is an example of not decisive action, but of passive-aggressiveness.  Newman was becoming well-known as an anti-hero actor, and his detective, while not being heroic, is not exactly anti-, either.  That would take a writer the likes of Mickey Spillane, crafting the hero as thug (because, "hey, why waste time, I've got a bottle of scotch getting warm"). William Goldman, after Kenneth Millar, doesn't go that far, and ends it unresolved.  The mystery ends, but justice is never served.  Life goes on, and seems disappointed at the prospect.  Hardly noir.  Hardly much of anything.

* Harper is based on Ross McDonald's Lew Archer character from the novel "The Moving Target," but Newman had enough clout that he could change the name to Harper (because he had a string of box-office hits with titles that began with "H.")

** "The Long Goodbye" was actually published four years after the the book that was the basis of Harper, "The Moving Target."