Man of the West was director Anthony Mann's last great Western, and possibly even his best film in a career filled with hard-edged, tough, and beautifully shot films. Gary Cooper plays Link, a former outlaw who unwillingly returns to his old gang when he's left stranded after the gang robs the train he's on. It's a classic Mann story, dramatizing the internal tensions of a man teetering between good and evil. Link has made a new and better life for himself, marrying, having kids, and living in an intimate farming community. But his reintroduction to his old gang, led by the sadistic Dock Tobin (Lee Cobb), forces him to confront his violent past and the possibility that he could go that way again. This is a fierce, uncompromising film, in which Cooper's stoic face hides the potential for great upheaval, finally let loose in the stunning scene where he beats and strips a gang member as revenge for the gang's sexual humiliation of the saloon singer Billie (Julie London). Mann's touch is visible in every widescreen frame of the film, which is beautifully composed, with Cooper's square jaw standing out dramatically against the wide Western vistas. This visual brilliance is most apparent in the taut, suspenseful closing showdown, in which Cooper and two bandits form a loose triangle on screen as they approach each other, guns drawn and ready. This is a powerful, viscerally exciting, and thematically complex Western, the peak of the genre and of this particular director's work.