MORE CHARACTER STUDY THAN WESTERN

"The Naked Spur" (1953) -- 8/10

By Martin Zabell
(Wrote June 23, 2007)

I am tempted to write that "The Naked Spur" is one of the best Westerns I've seen, but it is not really a Western.

This 1953 movie is really a character study like "The Breakfast Club" or "The Big Chill." Except for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," I've never watched a movie with so few characters. There are only five who speak plus several native-Americans who appear for only one scene.

The presence of so few characters gives viewers a chance to get to know all of them, and the writers do a great job of introducing the characters, developing them, getting inside their heads, and portraying their conflicts. This character portrayal dovetails neatly with the plot – an 1866 bounty hunter captures a murderer after persuading two other people to help him without mentioning the huge reward and then has to march the killer from Colorado to Kansas with his angry new cohorts.

The writing was so good that I found myself rooting for the villain although the actor, Robert Ryan, delivers a subpar performance by smiling constantly and not coming across as threatening. Basically, I was rooting for a David whose hands were shackled and his quasi-girlfriend against three Goliaths with guns. If he could time travel, I would have loved to see Jack Nicholson as the villain.

The fact that the Goliaths are all flawed and plotting against each other makes the movie even better. In addition, Jimmy Stewart is the best actor ever.

Non-Western fans will like this movie a lot, but there's also something for Western aficionados. There is relatively little action, but the action at the start is very interesting and the action scene near the end is one of the best I've ever seen. The end-of-movie action is enhanced by gorgeous photography and scenery in the Rockies.

On the negative side, there were some slow moments in the middle of the movie and, maybe it's me, but budding romances just don't work in most old movies that I've watched. Women are treated as too needy and too willing to fall for every guy they see. It's just not credible that drop-dead gorgeous, very young women like Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and, in this movie, Janet Leigh will fall for a middle-aged and gawky Jimmy Stewart who has lots of problems.

I gave the very similar "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" a 9 and "The Naked Spur" an 8 because the former was a great character study that wasn't diluted by a non-credible romance while the latter included such a romance.

In addition, Stewart's decision to choose Leigh over the money at the end was too sudden. Perhaps, a meatier conversation between the two during the middle of the movie would have made Stewart's turnaround more explicable.