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The Naked Spur - 2.5/4
It’s a bit like “3:10 To Yuma” if you replace the gravitas with some top shelf buffoonery. James Stewart is the gangliest, most emotional and weirdest cowboy in almost every western he does. This one is actually a good story but with every climax going slightly wrong… lots of daft shit is going on in the Wild West, from gullible elderly gold-diggers to dishonourably discharged confederate cavalrymen. At one point spurs are used like crampons for hands on a sheer rock face. Spurs spin though.
At the end James Stewart just bursts into tears and blubbers like a big fanny. Apparently it is beloved by the French.
I enjoyed it. If it hadn’t been made in the fifties it might have stood a chance at being good for the right reasons because it’s pretty clear that it was trying to be all-out shocking. Robert Ryan smashes Janet Leigh in the head with a gun at one point and James Stewart kicks a guy in the face. Obviously they hit clean air both times and it is visibly ludicrous when the blows are sold as fully as that but that’s how screen violence usually was in Westerns before the sixties turned it up a notch. James Stewart is just a hard guy to buy as a badass.
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