Man Without a Star (1955)

Memorable, crazy movie

Fantastic!

Absolutely the worst movie.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

For all of us little boys, born and raised in the suburban wild west, there's King Vidor's The Man Without a Star, a brainless little oater that features Kirk Douglas at his most rough-and-tumble; with bullets, fists, and--gulp--hinted sex with Jeanne Crain (I never would have picked up on that as a 10 year old).If you get to see MWAS on AMC some Saturday morning, remember to ask yourself, as you wade through the machismo and the clichés, if movies really have gotten better over the last half century. That one's still up to the jury, but danged if seeing ol' Kirk duking it out with Richard Boone, teaching William Campbell how to shoot, and getting into a lip lock with Crain that made my remote control break out in a sweat is pretty good evidence that the folks in Hollywood could entertain the sweet grass out of us back in the day.Yeehaw!

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?

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.

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.