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overthinking entertainment
Movie: The Naked Spur
A bounty hunter trying to bring a murderer to justice is forced to accept the help of two less-than-trustworthy strangers.
Directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, and Millard Mitchell. Holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with 21 critics reviews.)
posted by mark k on Nov 28, 2025 at 10:58 PM
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I thought this is a great movie, with one (fairly large) caveat.
It opens with Jimmy Stewart's bounty hunter about to corner and catch his quarry, a scene that would take a typical modern movie 45 minutes to get to. Action scenes are generally pretty well done throughout, and the Colorado landscape shots are in gorgeous technicolor. What starts as a straight up action movie--complete with a scoundrel of an Army officer discharged for being "morally unstable" chipping in on the side of the good guys--quickly becomes a tense character drama reminiscent of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Only "gold" is a marvelously hateable Robert Ryan, working to turn his three captors against one another.
The part that's aged the worst for me (not counting the Native American treatment) is the Stewart/Leigh romance--or, for that matter, trying to figure out why Leigh is with Ryan at the beginning. It's very '50s; the screenplay does what it can to make it plausible that the two characters would warm to one another, but the logic is still that a woman will be attached to a man, and two stars will end with each other. Which is doubly unfortunate since Stewart's whole character arc is motivated by his relationship with Leigh.
I'd still strongly recommend it, because everything else is that good.
Robert Ryan seems to have had an interesting political resume.
posted by mark k at 11:17 PM
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I thought this is a great movie, with one (fairly large) caveat.
The title?
posted by fairmettle at 12:54 AM
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because everything else is that good.
Yeah, it's consistently ranked one of the best Hollywood westerns for a reason, and along with Winchester '73 (both must-sees for fans of the genre) is at the top of the list of the half-dozen or so Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart collaborations.
If you keep going after this and your Fort Apache post, mark k, you're gonna have me rewatching a bunch of classic (though often problematic) westerns.
posted by mediareport at 11:06 AM
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