“Nothing more effectively romanticizes the West than Cinemascope. In striking visual terms, widescreen extrapolates the soul of a myth--the lone and vulnerable figure pitted against a stark and hostile environment. The Man from Laramie, Mann's first 'Scope feature and last western with James Stewart, beautifully delineates the extremes of such a dreamscape. Stewart is the on-leave Army captain pursuing the man responsible for selling repeat rifles to an Apache tribe; it was their assault on a cavalry patrol that left his younger brother dead. Trailing a scent from Wyoming to New Mexico, Stewart encounters a cross-section of the Old West at its most depraved and sadistic.
“Although Mann was making movies since the early '40s, he did not achieve directorial eminence until the '50s with the Western. Here his sense of character, story and visual style coalesced and sharpened into epics of monumental scale. Again in The Man from Laramie, the frontier's primal forces of violence and brutality are dramatically rendered on a mythical terrain where destiny has no choice but to capitulate to tragedy.” Laura Thielen

Note: Look for PFA's ”'Scope” series in August.