Mann's last great Western is both an apotheosis and a monument to decay, with the iconic Gary Cooper and the genre both nearer end than beginning. Cooper plays laconic Link Jones of the village of Good Hope, on his way to Fort Worth to hire a schoolteacher for his town. This upright citizen's journey takes a detour when, left behind by an ambushed train, he is forced to take shelter (along with fellow passengers Arthur O'Connell and Julie London) in a hideout he'd known in an earlier, considerably less civilized life. There he is unhappily reunited with his adoptive family, a gang of grotesques led by the grandiosely amoral Lee J. Cobb. Link's grim struggle to escape his past for the second time is amplified by the vast bleakness of the CinemaScope scenery, the lines on Cooper's face resembling the crags of the hills; it ends in a ghost town where the dust-to-dust imperative of the environment is stunningly fulfilled.