Here we have Anthony Perkins engagingly cast as an 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). “The tin star isn't just a piece of scrap-metal but a summary of disappointments and bitterness, of secret distresses,” Mann said in a Cahiers du Cinéma interview. “If Fonda and Perkins could surmount, one his rancor, the other his inexperience, then the star would acquire significance!” Less known than the Stewart Westerns, The Tin Star is a signature Mann film in its landscapes, its neurotic heroes-and its pessimism. Jim Kitses writes, “The Tin Star demonstrates how the community brings about the death of its very soul...by denying the existence of evil which its own attitudes create.”