Bend of the River. 1952. USA. Directed by Anthony Mann. Screenplay by Borden Chase, based on the novel Bend of the Snake by Bill Gulick. With James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Julie Adams, Rock Hudson, Jay C. Flippen. 91 min.
The second collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart (after Winchester ’73 and before The Naked Spur, The Far Country, and The Man from Laramie), Bend of the River introduces the full psychological grammar of their partnership. Stewart plays Glyn McLyntock, a reformed Missouri border raider guiding settlers to Oregon, whose redemption is provisional and under constant pressure. Mann and screenwriter Borden Chase (who had also worked on Winchester ’73) are interested less in whether McLyntock is good than in whether goodness, under sufficient strain, holds. It doesn’t quite—and what emerges from the cracks is the violence that made him useful in the first place. Irving Glassberg’s Technicolor photography, shot largely on location along the Sandy River and on the slopes of Mount Hood, gives the Oregon landscape a saturated clarity that Mann uses expressively: The higher the wagon train climbs, the thinner the moral atmosphere gets.
Arthur Kennedy, as the charming double-crosser Emerson Cole, is McLyntock’s shadow self, the man who chose to stay bad. Kennedy would reprise variations of this dynamic for Mann in The Man from Laramie and elsewhere, and the interplay between him and Stewart here is the series at its most economical. Rock Hudson, then still in the early stages of his stardom, fills out and ensemble that includes Jay C. Flippen, Harry Morgan, and Royal Dano. 4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures from the original Technicolor negative, in collaboration with the Film Foundation.