1,001 Films: "The Man From Laramie" (1955)

Just look at Jimmy Stewart in the opening moments of Anthony Mann's off-centre Western The Man From Laramie: lost in the landscape, if not his own vengeful thoughts. His travelling companion describes the scene best: "Hate's unbecoming in a man like you." This, then, is the New Stewart, the 50s Stewart, the Stewart of Rear Window, The Naked Spur and, later, Vertigo; the Jimmy who was unafraid to throw a punch or take a life, perhaps because his own psyche was so covered in scars and bruises. Mann's film casts him as Will Lockhart, a trader who rides into town with both personal and professional business to attend to, only to first see his wagons burned and mules slaughtered on the salt flats by the firebrand heir to a cattle company intent on monopolising the area. Even so, this newly agonised Stewart remains the least complex figure in a busy, involved oater: a white hat who lands himself a stigmatic wound after being shot in the hand at point-blank range, and who keeps wandering into the middle of a much more compelling power struggle back on the ranch. This latter is a dusty kingdom drawn up along Shakespearian lines, where the ageing patriarch's eyesight is failing, and his two foremen - one a hot-blooded relative, the other his cooler son-in-law - jostle (fatally, as it happens) for position.

Some of it is plain weird, bordering on the Lynchian - just as Stewart's mannerisms must have registered with that director at a formative age, so the film may have had some bearing on the stranger-in-a-strange-town business of Twin Peaks: a key plot point is a dream the rancher has, revealing the identity of a murderer - and I'm undecided as to whether it's a strength or a weakness, in this case, that the film never settles down in the manner you'd expect of a Western. Certainly, there's something offputting in the way Stewart serves for the most part as a minor distraction, even a mild annoyance: the cattle company has problems interesting enough before his trader begins snooping about, not least the presence in their ranks of one of the screen's best mannered and outwardly most respectable serial killers. The final half-hour at least - a search for a wagon full of guns which is also a quest to prove or disprove the character of the living and the dead - demonstrates Mann's ability to weld psychological signifiers to action.

The Man From Laramie is available on DVD through UCA.