Really Surprised!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This one is very similar to many other westerns, lacking anything unique. The sequence of events is very predictable - you know how it is going to end in the middle of the movie. The story is very simple and the personalities are vapid (the characters are very similar to those in many other westerns). Kirk Douglas performs very well as he always did. But most of the rest of the cast is rather wooden, with the exception of Richard Boone who comes across as convincingly menacing.

Man Without A Star is directed by King Vidor and adapted by Borden Chase & D. D. Beauchamp from the Dee Linford novel. It stars Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, Claire Trevor, William Campbell & Richard Boone. Photographed by Russell Metty in Technicolor around the Thousand Oaks area in California, with the title song warbled by Frankie Laine.Dempsey Rae (Douglas) is easy going and a lover of life, so much so he has no qualms about befriending young hot head Jeff Jimson (Campbell). The pair, after a scare with the law, amble into town and find work at a ranch owned by the mysterious Reed Bowman. Who after finally showing up turns out to be a lady (Crain), with very ambitious plans. As sexual tensions start to run high, so do tempers, as the boys find themselves in the middle of a range war.It's all very conventional stuff in the grand scheme of range war Western things, but none the less it manages to stay well above average in spite of a tricky first quarter. For the fist part Vidor and Douglas seem to be playing the film for laughs, with the actor mugging for all he is worth. Add in the wet behind the ears performance of Campbell and one wonders if this is going to be a spoof. But once the lads land in town and the girls show up (Trevor classy, Crain smouldering), the film shifts in gear and starts to get edgy with Vidor proving to have paced it wisely. The thematics of era and lifestyle changes, here signified by barbed wire, are well written into the plot. While interesting camera angles and biting photography keep the mood sexually skew whiff. Boone lifts proceedings with another fine villain performance, and Jay C. Flippen in support is as solid as he almost always was. 7/10

Consistently shown these days on AMC, I managed to catch "Man Without A Star" this morning. Without knowing anything about the story, one might think it had something to do about a lawman without a badge, but here the title is used figuratively, and makes sense when cowpoke Dempsey Rae (Kirk Douglas) teaches his sidekick, Texas Jeff (William Campbell), on finding his way by following an evening star. In that regard, the 'man without a star' in the story would have been the direction-less Jeff Jimson, as Dempsey Rae always knew where he was going, even if conflicted about it.Douglas seems to be having a genuinely good time here, strutting his stuff on banjo much like he did in his film from a year earlier, "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea". Seeing it on TV, I didn't have the opportunity to pause and rewind, but it looked like Douglas finished playing his first song about a half click before the music stopped. I can still give him credit for his singing voice though.The story itself is a fairly typical open range tale that turns deadly once barb wire enters the picture - "When wire comes in, there's fightin' and killin'." A little more thought could have gone into developing Dempsey's stand on the issue; at first we're convinced he's dead against it, then he's putting up a fence in defiance of former boss Reed Bowman (Jeanne Crain). By the end of the story, he's heading into a further fence-less West, leaving behind Bowman, Texas Kid, and Madame Idonee (Claire Trevor). In hindsight, I would like to have seen more of Trevor in the story, maybe brawling it out with Bowman the way Dempsey and hell raiser Steve Miles ( Richard Boone) did, wouldn't that have been something?I liked director King Vidor's subtle humorous bits in the story, notably the running gag about a bathroom 'in the house', and Kirk Douglas combing his hair with the help of a goldfish bowl. And say, have you ever seen the Kirk Douglas dimple more pronounced than it is here?

I'd seen this film before, and had I rated it then, I would give it perhaps 7*, tops. But viewing it now, it is a solid 10*, but not for the usual reasons.Viewd 50 years after original release, it provides a perfect example of 1950's films (right in the middle of the decade). It's far from the best Western - of that period or any other, and is way down the list of Kirk Douglas movies (even among his Westerns alone). It has every bit as many cliché characters and lines as Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles," which was all-parody. There is the beautiful, tough-yet-feminine ranch owner (Crain), the "kid" (Campbell), the fast gun and evil killer-type (Boone and Elam), the crusty top hand (Flippen), and, yes indeed, the whore-with-the-heart-of gold (Trevor).One thing about today's flicks - they'd probably have dulled Kirk's smile a bit, given Crain a little less make-up, etc. In these period films in the 1950's, Kirk looked more like his mouth contained perhaps six figures of dental work (wait, it did!). He and Crain were so well-coiffed, you could swear they's had recent $100 visits (at 1950's prices) to high-class salons, augmented before shooting by highly-paid studio stylists (do you think they might have?), and their clothes seemed as if they might have been professionally cleaned and laundered, where in the "Old West" they'd have been cleaned with cistern water, lye soap and a washboard.However, it is the wonderful clichés - visual and verbal - and the nostalgia of the 1950's genre, as well as the cast of well-known figures, now either gone or very elderly, in their younger days, which makes this a 10* for me today.