Mann of the West: The Last Frontier (1955)

An Anthony Mann movie of any kind is great, but nothing beats his Westerns. The emotionally jittery and sublimely scenic The Last Frontier (1955) is the old west picture I speak of here, but what is it exactly? A Cold War commentary of military belligerence? A post-war noir confronting the emotional disorder of returning soldiers seen through the front of a rugged mountainous setting? It is all of the above, with the added effect of what appears to be handheld camera movements, and demented if not animalistic character plots and behavior—particularly from the movie's lead actor, Victor Mature, as the highly conflicted Jed Cooper. "He's all id," my movie mate blurted out mid-show, a keen statement about a man unshaped by manners, motivated by drink, and prone to irrational outbursts—childlike tantrums really—by the provocations of men in authority who contradict or disapprove of his ways.

Mature is perfectly cast, or this is otherwise a continuation of his villainous typecast. He's usually the unlikeable character—dark, brooding, and never as mentally sturdy as his counterparts, his role as the cumbersome father figure and former convict in Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947) springs to mind right away, as does his role as Doc Holliday in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). Here, though, he is in top erratic form. High key lamps or the searing glow of the sun magnify his sweaty brows and the untamed locks of his hair in an unforgiving way. He moves like a kid twitching with anger, excitement, happiness or vindictiveness, a swirl of moods that seem to erupt all at once. If he's smiling one moment, he's turned on a dime and begun barking madly the next.

When he and his mates default to a U.S. military fort after their possessions are hijacked from a tribe of offending Indians, he brazenly demands recompense for their stolen goods. Jed's thinking is that the U.S. military’s presence on the Indians' land has compelled the natives to force reparations from him personally, however unaffiliated with the military structure as he may be. As Jed sees it, the military owes him for goods that never would have been stolen had the U.S. not invaded the Indians' land to begin with.

Frustrated and unwieldy behind the walls of the fort, Jed and his posse become regular fixtures there, essentially working for the brigade as free agents: their commanders won’t grant them uniforms, the ultimate symbol of a man’s internalization of order and direction—that’s something Jed has simply not achieved. As a grown man, Jed's lack of sophistication cannot be overstated. You see it in his exchanges with women, here with Corinna (Anne Bancroft), the neglected wife of Col. Marston (Col. Marston himself is played rather brutishly by Robert Preston), whose home Jed invades upon one night on a clamoring stampede for whiskey.



Savage Wilderness is the movie’s alternate title that more aptly describes Mature’s character than the setting of the movie itself. Then again, Jed is sort of the “last frontier” to conquer in American mythology too; he is after all the sole remains of uncivilized America, the one too tormented by the practice of premeditated violence to appear unshaken by it. In other words, he’s not the finest Cold Warrior, but even that changes when he finally follows orders and gets his uniform in a move of ultimate conformity.

Maybe the greatest irony is the landscape itself. It was shot mostly (completely?) in the Mexico highlands nearby the towering Mt. Popocatépetl. Even the standard iconography of the American southwest is divorced from the story, showing in another layer the empty veil of Cold War rhetoric.