Man Without a Star. 1955. USA. Directed by King Vidor. Screenplay by Borden Chase, D. D. Beauchamp, based on the novel by Dee Linford. With Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, Claire Trevor, Richard Boone, Jay C. Flippen, William Campbell. 35mm. 89 min.
King Vidor’s last Western (and his final Hollywood feature) was directed with the seamless assurance of a veteran craftsman who had been working in film since the age of 18. The film is lighter in tone than Vidor’s usual register—more comedy, more music, Kirk Douglas playing banjo and singing—but the erotic charge that runs through Duel in the Sun and The Fountainhead is present in the mutual calculation between Dempsey Rae (Douglas), a Wyoming drifter with a hatred of barbed wire, and the Eastern rancher (Jeanne Crain, cast hard against type) who hires him and makes use of him. Russell Metty’s Technicolor photography gives the open range a warm, saturated look suited to the film’s comparative ease of spirit.
As Kevin L. Stoehr and Cullen Gallagher note in King Vidor in Focus (2024), the film extends Vidor’s long interest in paternal relationships—traceable from The Jack-Knife Man (1920) through The Champ (1931)—in Dempsey’s uneasy mentorship of the green Jeff Jimson (William Campbell). What Dempsey can’t quite teach the boy is his own refusal: of property, of permanence, of the fences that are already closing off the open range. Claire Trevor, in a few scenes as a saloon keeper who knows Dempsey’s history, gives the film its most economical performance—and a nice callback to Stagecoach.