For the Mann of the West, the wilderness landscape is an internal landscape, its challenges reflecting the tensions within-and only then between-his characters. Here we have Anthony Perkins engagingly cast as an over-anxious fledgling 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 said in a Cahiers du Cinéma 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 frequently screened and written about than films like Man of the West and Bend of the River, The Tin Star is an opportunity to explore Mann's themes and formal devices anew.