Albany Times Union

THE NAKED SPUR

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MOVIES!, 3:30 p.m. Catch a Classic! This 1953 film is the third of five memorable Westerns on which star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann teamed, and one of the rare films in that genre to have earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, written by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom. As in his other collaborat­ions with Mann, Stewart here plays a harder-edged character than the type people had come to expect from his earlier films, but still one who is likable, as Howard Kemp, an embittered rancher turned bounty hunter in the Old West. Robert Ryan costars as his quarry, wanted killer Ben Vandergroa­t. After Kemp and two associates catch Vandergroa­t, the outlaw engages in a series of psychologi­cal tactics to get his captors to turn on each other. Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell also star in this acclaimed film that has been added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry because of how it “infuses a tried-and-true Western scenario with tense psychologi­cal complexity through strong, clear storytelli­ng … and vivid Technicolo­r scenes of the Rockies.”

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