4 Star

Cows, Guns and Barbed wire.

Before he turned to Russia for his epic movie War and Peace, director King Vidor (Solomon and Sheba, Lightning Strikes Twice) turned to the Wild West to make Man Without a Star with screen legend Kirk Douglas (A Letter To Three Wives, Champion, The Vikings) as the star. Set at the time of range wars, where the wide open plains are starting to be split up and separated by the dreaded barbed wire.

Drifter Dempsey Rae (Douglas) is heading West to Wyoming from Kansas City, he has hitched a ride on a cattle transporter train. As the train comes to halt, Dempsey hides unlike the young inexperienced Jeff Jimson (William Campbell, Star Trek (TV Series), The High and the Mighty) who gets knocked out by the Brakeman. An unconscious Jeff is laid across the railway track, and Dempsey quickly saves him and gets him back in the boxcar.

Never sell your saddle.

At night as they travel, they are woken by someone on the roof as the Brakeman and another hitch-hiker tussle, eventually the Brakeman is stabbed and his body thrown off the train. The next morning, the train slows on the outskirts of a town, where the authorities are waiting to find the killer. Jeff having already had a run-in with the Brakeman and getting a gash in his head, is the immediate suspect, until Dempsey points out the real killer. This earns him half of the hundred dollar reward.

The deputy doesn’t like free-loaders, so he tells the new pair of friends to get a job or get out of town, Dempsey isn’t leaving town until he gets his reward. Plus he has an old friend in the town, Idonee (Claire Trevor, Stagecoach, Key Largo) who is as happy to see Dempsey as he is to see her. After a clean-up, Idonee gives Dempsey a six-shooter, ‘you can’t go out half dressed’.

In the saloon the pair meet Strap Davis (Jay C. Flippen, Oklahoma!, Wild River) who works for the Triangle cattle ranch. He needs four-hundred cattle moving and he needs a couple of new hands. Look no further. The Triangle ranch has a new absentee owner, and they have big plans for the plains and their 10,000 cattle.

Dempsey starts teaching Jeff all the skills a cattle hand needs to know, including how to shoot. This is where Dempsey unknowingly meets the new owner of the Triangle, Reed Bowman (Jeanne Crain, State Fair, The Fastest Gun Alive) a woman with very big ideas to make a fortune out West.

What she proposes to do is to fill up the plains with lots more cattle, enough to strip the grass in the whole area in just a couple of years. This doesn’t sit well with Dempsey, as it will destroy the grass for all the small ranches dotted about, even though he wants to be with Reed.

With old rivals on their way, Dempsey and the ranchers are in for a tumultuous time. Man Without a Star is a hard hitting western with the great star in Kirk Douglas, and now on Blu-ray courtesy of Masters of Cinema, it is a must add to the Kirk Douglas Blu-ray collection thanks to Eureka.

Man Without a Star is available on Blu-ray

BLU-RAY EDITION SPECIAL FEATURES

1080p presentation on Blu-ray | Uncompressed original mono audio | Optional English SDH | Brand-new audio commentary with writers Barry Forshaw and Kim Newman | Brand-new interview with film scholar Neil Sinyard | Trailer |PLUS: A collector’s booklet featuring a new essay on the film by film writer Rich Johnson, and a new piece by critic Richard Combs about the Western films of King Vidor