Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4186 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-10-01
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Man from Laramie is the last of five remarkable Westerns Anthony Mann made with James Stewart (starting with Winchester '73 and peaking with The Naked Spur). Only John Ford excelled Mann as a purveyor of eye-filling Western imagery, and Mann's best films are second to no one's when it comes to the fusion of dynamic action, rugged landscapes and fierce psychological intensity. This collaboration marked virtually a whole new career for Stewart, whose characters are all haunted by the past and driven by obsession--here, to find whoever set his cavalry-officer brother in the path of warlike Indians.

The Man from Laramie aspires to an epic grandeur beyond its predecessors. It's the only one in CinemaScope, and Stewart's personal quest is subsumed in a larger drama--nothing less than a sagebrush version of King Lear, with a range baron on the verge of blindness (Donald Crisp), his weak and therefore vicious son (Alex Nicol) and another, apparently more solid "son", his Edmund-like foreman (Arthur Kennedy). There are a few too many subsidiary characters, and the reach for thematic complexity occasionally diminishes the impact. But no one will ever forget the scene on the salt flats between Nicol and Stewart--climaxing in the single most shocking act of violence in 50s cinema--or the final, mountain-top confrontation. For decades, the film has been seen only in washed-out, pan-and-scan videos, with the characters playing visual hopscotch from one panel of the original composition to another. It's great to have this glorious DVD--razor-sharp, fully saturated (or as saturated as 50s Eastmancolor could be) and breathtaking in its CinemaScope sweep. --Richard T Jameson, Amazon.com

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
In Anthony Mann's THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, a Wyoming man (James Stewart) heads for New Mexico to catch the men who sold rifles to the Apaches, who in turn used them to slaughter his brother.

Customer Reviews

Stewart and Mann do a Western where Shakespeare meets Freud
"The Man From Laramie" is a great example of the psychological westerns that were popular in the 1950s. Jimmy Stewart plays Will Lockhart, an army Captain who goes undercover to learn who sold rifles to the Apaches, which were then used to kill his brother when a cavalry patrol was ambushed. Lockhart delivers supplies to storekeeper Barbara Waggoman (Cathy O'Donnell) in the isolated town of Coronado, deep in Apache country in New Mexico. He also meets her uncle Alec (Donald Crisp), a wealthy, arrogant cattle baron who is basically a decent man and who loves his worthless son Dave (Alex Nicol). The old man is going blind and is worried that a man will come and kill his son. Trying to reign in the psychopathic Dave is the ranch foreman, Vic (Arthur Kennedy), who is sort of an adopted son to Alec and engaged to Barbara. Of course, the answer to Lockhart's quest is to be found in this tortured family and a lot of people are going to have to die before his obsession finally ends.

This 1955 film, the last Western Stewart did with directed Anthony Mann, owes as much to Shakespeare's King Lear as it does to Freudian psychology. It also features one of the most violent sequences you would find in a Western (for that time) when Dave and his ranch hands roust Lockhart's wagon train loaded with salt. They rope Lockhart, drag him through a fire, burn his wagons and start shooting his mules. Only the arrival of Vic stops Dave from killing Lockhart, setting the stage for his involvement with the Waggomans. The performances by the cast and excellent, with Stewart, Crip and Kennedy are especially good and the film has the additional virtue of having been filmed on location near Sante Fe. "The Man From Laramie" is one of the darkest Westerns, what you might consider the "Unforgiven" of its day.

Our man Jimmy Stewart
This is a dark, beautifully photographed western, and -as with all James Stewart movies- one can count on his solid, convincing and totally affable acting. The same could be said about most performances (Donald Crisp and Arthur Kennedy), however there is an evident miscast with the characters of Dave (the foreman) and Barbara (the dismal woman interest). Unlike most films of the genre, the "Man from Laramie" is at its best when filming the psychological tensions and conflicts between characters, rather than action sequences. Columbia did a fine job transferring the film to DVD format, while the extras are Ok, but nothing we haven't seen before. All in all a must buy for anyone who cares about westerns, Stewart, or both.