For Anthony Mann of the West, the landscape of the wilderness is an internal landscape, its challenges the interior tensions within-and only then between-his characters. Here we have Tony Perkins engagingly cast as a fledging, over-anxious young sheriff who turns to bounty hunter and ex-lawman Henry Fonda for counsel. The latter is as reluctant a father-figure as ever there was. Like the eponymous Winchester 73 of Mann's 1950 classic, the tin star is both a cipher and a foil, or McGuffin. “It's quite a simple story,” Mann has said in a Cahiers du Cinema interview, “a lesson in apprenticeship. The tin star isn't just a piece of scrap-metal but a summary of disappointments and bitterness, of secret distresses. If Fonda and Perkins could surmount, one his rancor, the other his inexperience, then the star would acquire significance!” Less often screened or written about than Mann's noted Westerns (Man of the West, Bend of the River et al), The Tin Star is an opportunity to explore his themes and his formal devices anew.