Your enjoyment of "Man Without a Star" may very well depend to a large degree on your feelings about Kirk Douglas's over-the-top performance. For me, it was just a little too much of Kirk Douglas being Kirk Douglas: he's all physicality and coiled energy, tight-wasted, barrel-chested, (dimple-chinned, natch), lusty brawler in this one. Nobody pulled this off quite like Douglas, so I may in fact be underestimating what he brought to this movie, but... whenever there's the hint of something like grandeur or poetry, for instance (say, in the direction and/or cinematography), here comes Douglas barreling across the screen. (I should add that I've very much enjoyed other Douglas performances. Vincente Minelli's Vincent Van Gogh biopic "Lust for Life" comes to mind, for instance, which I thought marshaled Douglas's seemingly boundless energy in precisely the right direction; and I remember liking him quite a lot in another, later western, "Last Train from Gun Hill.") Likewise, there are moments of broad humor which I found slightly tiresome, for instance, the running joke about the bathroom in the house. I also thought Claire Trevor was nearly wasted in this movie: though her role was more than a cameo, and she played a part in the film's climax, her role was strangely underdeveloped, a mere tool in Douglas's cowpoke Dempsey Rae's story. That's unfortunate, because Trevor is a fine actress and a compelling screen presence, and I thought her character might have been one of the more interesting in the movie had it been developed a little more, even if it just highlighted her jealousy of Dempsey's fascination with Jeanne Crain's Reed Bowman, the new ranch owner with dollar signs in her eyes. As it is, the story has Dempsey sort of caught between his lust for Reed and his loyalty to his conscience and Wyoming's other ranchers, mostly upright men simply trying to survive and make a living herding cattle on the range. There's a young buck in tow (William Campbell as Jeff Jimson, or Tex), which allows for a number of mentoring scenes (some of which, frankly, just play as an excuse for Douglas to play Western movie star via sharp-shooting, gun twirling, etc.). I guess my main complaint was that there were hints of something else, something more mature: scenes in the boarding house, for instance, reminded me of scenes from "Of Mice and Men" (the novel as well as different movie versions), but here the stye was all Hollywood and very little realism. Overall, I would hardly say that "Man Without a Star" is without its pleasures: it's nicely directed and shot, with colorful Technicolor cinematography, and there's some fine work among the supporting players (Jay C. Flippen and Richard Boone are of note). But I mostly only recommend this for classic movie Western fans who like Kirk Douglas at his broadest. (The Movie Czar 10/17/21)
Review of Man Without a Star
