Wow! Such a good movie.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

While traveling clandestine in a train, the drifter cowboy Dempsey Rae (Kirk Douglas) befriends the naive youngster Jeff "Texas" Jimson (William Campbell) and helps him when he is arrested by mistake in a train station. Dempsey Is hired by the foreman Strap Davis (Jay C. Flippen) to work in the ranch owned by the greedy Reed Bowman (Jeanne Crain), who brings civilized habits from the East, like having a bathroom inside the house. When the owners of minor ranches use barbed wire fence in the open grass to protect some land for their cattle in the winter, Reed hires a gang of troublemakers leaded by Steve Miles (Richard Boone) to work in her ranch and tries to seduce Dempsey to convince him to help her. But Dempsey decide to help the ranchers against the gunmen and Reed. "Man Without a Star" is a flawed but entertaining western. Kirk Douglas performs a nice cowboy that "adopts" a youngster to be the substituted for his brother that was killed in a dispute of land; hates barbed wire fences that he associates to the cause of the death of his brother; and is very successful with women. However, despite telling that barbed wire comes together with fights and killings, his character is incoherent when he defends the ranchers that are installing barbed wire fences. Jeanne Crain is amazingly seductive and sexy with her beauty, and her manipulative character is strong but totally forgotten in the end of the story. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Homem Sem Rumo" ("Drifter")

Before Eastwood, before Spaghetti, Westerns came in two flavors: the first was Gary Cooper; serious gunslingers and death, and the other was John Wayne; tales of manliness and Western values.Douglas here is definitely in the latter vein. The plot of the cattle ranchers and the greenhorn is very familiar and this is definitely a character driven piece.It is full of energy, charm, and fun. It is not however a great film; I never felt involved, but I was entertained.It is too lightweight to be anything other than a good Western as seen through Hollywood's eyes. Fine and dandy for a while, but really instantly forgettable afterward.If you like Westerns then this is definitely worth viewing - just don't expect it to do anything than entertain.

MAN WITHOUT A STAR has to be one film the former Issur Danielovitch must surely wish he could erase from his resume. Douglas plays a ne'er-do-well ranch hand who ends up switching sides during a range war among two big cattle ranches. Jeanne Crain is the boss lady of the ranch he starts out on, and you can almost feel the beginnings of THE BIG VALLEY in this largely awful Western from the 1950s. Outfitted in stylish, form-fitting shirts, Douglas is simply terrible as the conflicted cowpoke. Talk about miscasting. Crain isn't bad as the boss lady, but she's no Barbara Stanwyck. A veritable army of familiar supporting players including Jay C. Flippen can barely keep this turkey afloat. The script stinks, the direction is aimless, the cinematography is wasted. If this was the kind of movie intended to keep viewers away from their TVs, I can't imagine it succeeded in doing so -- even though I understand it was a box office hit in its time.

In 'Man Without a Star' Kirk Douglas as Dempsey Rae, gives a great performance; an outgoing cowboy, unstable and with fits of euphoria. This film is able to capture the beauty of the west, of the big herds of cattle, and the daily life of the cowboys. Dempsey is running away from barbed wire, which to him means the end of freedom. He calls himself a man without a star because he is obsessed about his freedom of choice, whereas following a star will bind him to a predetermined life. His affair with Jeanne Crain, with plenty of sexual innuendo, but far from being explicit, is one of the great things about this film. William Campbell has a very important part as an easterner who wants to become a cowboy and Douglas is there to teach him.