Jim Kitses remarks in his book Horizons West (shortly to be reissued in an expanded version) that “Mann’s cinema is pre-eminently a cinema of landscape”. As such, it takes naturally to the widescreen format. The Man from Laramie is the first of Anthony Mann’s Westerns in CinemaScope, but all his subsequent films in the genre are widescreen. Several sequences show Mann making particularly striking use of the expressive qualities of the format. When his hero, Will Lockhart (James Stewart), is caught out in the open by the crazed Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol), his extreme vulnerability is heightened by the empty space of the prairie all around him, thus making all the more dramatic the brutal act of symbolic castration which Waggoman performs. Earlier in the film, the initial meeting of the two men is wonderfully well staged. A panning shot across salt flats shows Lockhart and his men working quietly. In the next shot riders appear in the distance. Mann holds the shot as gradually the riders get closer, riding diagonally across the screen, the sound of their thundering hooves increasing the tension until Waggoman pulls his horse to a stop in front of the waiting Lockhart. In the final confrontation of the film, Mann is able to combine his characteristic love of high places with a widescreen panorama to emphasise the epic nature of the struggle.
Ed Buscombe