Amazon.com Combining elements of King Lear with Anthony Mann's favorite themes of splintered families and filial betrayal, The Man from Laramie was James Stewart's final collaboration with Mann and one of their best. Lanky Stewart plays his usual brooding loner, a former army scout searching for the man responsible for his brother's death. He rides into a town run by a cattle baron (Donald Crisp) with an irresponsible son (Alex Nicol) who despises him and a dutiful foreman (Arthur Kennedy) who desperately craves his father-figure's affection and respect. The complicated web of love, hate, and betrayal sprawls over the entire town, and Stewart, less psychologically haunted than in previous Mann collaborations, becomes a catalyst that pitches the conflict into violence, usually directed at him. Through the course of the film Stewart is dragged through a burning campfire, shot point-blank in the hand, beaten, ambushed, and generally made unwelcome. Mann's brutal violence reaches a new level of cruel glee in Nicol's sadistic delinquent with a six-shooter, and Kennedy provides the psychotic edge as the spurned son with a black secret. As usual Mann's landscapes are magnificent (though the glorious widescreen compositions are lost to some extent in the pan-and-scan tape) in country where beauty and danger lie in the same handsome wilderness. Also starring Cathy Downs as a Kennedy's long-suffering fiancée, googly-eyed Jack Elam as a shady informant, and Wallace Ford as a tracker who becomes Stewart's ally. --Sean Axmaker