MAN WITHOUT A STAR (1955)

Even the title doesn’t mean quite what you think in this deceptively non-standard Western from King Vidor, his final Hollywood production after 40+ years at it.  (His last two films multinational epics.)  That eponymous ‘star’ not, as you’d expect, a Sheriff’s or Marshall’s badge, but a reference to a person’s lode star, something Kirk Douglas is still searching for as this cattleman drifts from one job to another in the old West.  Instead, seeking direction from the next opportunity or person he meets.  Currently, he’s ridin’ the rails in Texas where he hops a train with naive kid William Campbell and starts teaching him the ropes . . . literally.*  The two, after dodging a false murder rap, landing on a big cattle ranch just as a range war is about to break out.  Not as usual cattlemen vs. homesteaders, but Free Range ranchers vs. Barb Wire ranchers.  (In this film, the ‘good guys’ are debatably on the ‘wrong’ side of the law.)  And Kirk, against them for personal reasons, just might end up fighting on their side; again for personal reasons.  Chase Borden’s almost subversive script pulling the rug out on one issue, and character, after another: past lover Claire Trevor; tough-as-nails new ranch owner antagonist/putative lover Jeanne Crain; old enemy/current confederate Richard Boone, and so on.  Vidor letting everyone play in the broadest manner imaginable, wide as the Texas panhandle.  (That’s a hundred & sixty miles!)  So broad, you half expect a musical number to break out.  And why not, OKLAHOMA! was likely playing in the theater down the block.  Heck, this film’s got Frankie Laine on a hokey title track and when Kirk does breaks out in song, accompanying himself on the banjo, the film briefly feels stylistically balanced.  (Kirk darn good at both, even better showing off some gun-slinger tricks.)  An intriguing uneven film, worthy of King Vidor.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Campbell, playing the tenderest of tenderfoot/greenest of greenhorns, over-parted.  Going for the ‘aw-shucks’ manner of a young Robert Walker, he just seems a bit dense.  And that makes Kirk’s tender loving care all but inexplicable without adding in an element that takes us past brotherly affection and toward loverly attraction.  Same situation seen in Howard Hawks’ THE BIG SKY/’52 where Dewey Martin partnered with Douglas.  There, bromantic elements between the boys far stronger than anything happening on the heterosexual front.  Both films see Kirk pretty much abandoning his own wants to ease his pal’s path to sexual fulfillment thru sacrificial celibacy.   How much intentional never to be known.