The Naked Spur: Frontier Noir

Like Westerns, Film Noir is a genre I have a flimsy familiarity with.

At best my own viewing experience with the gritty, hard-boiled side of cinema rests with homage and revivals.

Movies like Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and, most recently the video game, L.A. Noire. At least these are the ones that instantly come to mind.

There’re all sorts of mash-ups, riffs and latter-day examples that fit the bill, Blade Runner, a lot of the Coen Brothers, Sin City, but I’ve never had any classical film noir experience.

So I was pleasantly surprised when this week’s assignment, a movie I more or less picked on a whim while scanning Instant Watch title son Netflix, turned out to be equal parts western and noir.

The Naked Spur is a tight, gritty story of greed, betrayal and obsession set out in the post-Civil War wilderness.

Howard Kemp (Jimmy Stewart) is on the trail of Ben Vandergroat and the $5000 reward that comes with bringing him in dead or alive. Early on he crosses paths with a luckless prospector and a dishonorably discharged soldier on the lam from angry Natives.

Kemp is driven by betrayal.

The woman he loved had sold his ranch while he was off in the war. He aims to use the bounty to by back his land, and he tries to keep the reward a secret from his two new partners.

But Vandergroat, constantly playing the role of the little devil on somebody’s shoulder, fills them in and sets off a string of schemes as each man thinks of how he can increase his share of the reward. Riding with Vandergroat is Lina Patch (Janet Leigh) a young woman who feels indebted to Vandergroat and eventually falls for Kemp.

So we have a morally grey lawman in Stewart and the femme fatale in Leigh. The solider gives us our dirty cop, Vandergroat is our murdering bad guy and the prospector is the down on his luck sap who’s desperate enough to get caught up in the mess. Even the film’s score felt more noir than the ballads and cavalry horns that have played over the last few films I’ve watched. All of it could have been easily transported to a setting 70 years later in Los Angeles and, aside from a few details, been the same story.

Throughout the film, Kemp is tormented by Vandergroat’s ultimate fate.

He’s frequently reminded that the reward is the same, dead or alive, and when faced with killing the man himself he can never bring himself to do it. Personally I don’t think that I would have bought it if he’d killed him. Not only would it have been out of character, but I don’t think I could see Jimmy Stewart kill a man in cold blood, and that’s something that I’ve been mulling over a lot when I watch these films. I don’t always see actors, but rather famous actors whose images have been distilled over the course of decades.

Early on in this column I established that I had certain pre-established opinions about John Wayne, but that’s not limited to him.

To me Marilyn Monroe is singing Happy Birthday to Kennedy. Frank Sinatra is how Phil Hartman played him on SNL; Jimmy Stewart is It’s a Wonderful Life. I know he did Westerns—I’ve seen a couple of them now—and I know he did great things with Hitchcock that weren’t anything like that seminal Christmas classic. Seeing him in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was easy because it was like “Mr. Smith Goes to the O.K. Corral”.

Here, like watching Wayne in The Searchers, was an actor and a role that didn’t fit the caricature I had drawn of Stewart from my own limited experience with his work.

Even Stewart’s last role was as a cowboy…kinda…

This has been both the most refreshing and frustrating element of this assignment. On the one hand I’m getting to see who these icons were while they were still building their legacy. Frustration sets in when I think about the opinions I have that are either dead wrong, sort of naïve, or worst of all, someone else’s.

Bringing this full circle, this isn’t a dilemma that’s exclusive to actors and actresses.

My understanding of genres, especially westerns and noir, has been cobbled together by spoofs, homage, revivals and the rare golden-era example I’ve sat down with. Had you asked me a week ago what the ingredients for film noir were I would have said “Lots of cigarettes, lots of dames, lots of shadows and a dude who talks like Humphrey Bogart.”

Maybe I would have shaken up the mix with renegade androids or a burnt-out bowler who needed a new rug, but otherwise I didn’t see much wiggle room in it.

I never would have pegged a Western Noir as being anything but a lopsided, winking-at-too-many-conventions mess.

I guess I’m learning something.