"How does it feel being put in your place?" "I wouldn't know."Pizazz, spunk, humor, and romance are all found in Borden Chase and D.D. Beauchamp's screenplay to Man Without a Star, but without the wonderful cast to say those great lines, I'm not sure how well it would have played. Kirk Douglas takes the lead in this delightful western as a drifting cowboy with attitude. Surprisingly enough, he's not the bad boy! Jeanne Crain is the bad girl, and the sparks that fly between them are scorching! Jeanne is the ranch owner Kirk works for, and she's a very tough boss. She's hard on her ranch hands, and even harder on Kirk, using every bargaining chip in the book to get what she wants out of him.Joined by Claire Trevor, William Campbell, Richard Boone, and Jay C. Flippen, the cast and director King Vidor creates a classic western, with every element in place to help it stand the test of time. This is definitely one you'll want to watch over and over again, especially if you're a Kirk Douglas fan. My favorite scenes are the tension-filled banters between Jeanne and Kirk, but there's another great scene that's a staple in the western genre: teaching the new kid how to be a cowboy. In Man Without a Star, the scene has an extra oomph of humor and charm, making it surpass other westerns that blend together in my memory. "Did your mother ever tell you it was rude to point?" Kirk asks William Campbell, after he's missed the shooting target. "Sure," William says. "Well, when you're using a gun, you're downright rude, so point!" Too cute!

This one is very similar to many other westerns, lacking anything unique. The sequence of events is very predictable - you know how it is going to end in the middle of the movie. The story is very simple and the personalities are vapid (the characters are very similar to those in many other westerns). Kirk Douglas performs very well as he always did. But most of the rest of the cast is rather wooden, with the exception of Richard Boone who comes across as convincingly menacing.

Yet another range war western, in Technicolor. Yet, in some significant ways, it is special. The person with ambitions to be the cattle baron in this region is a beautiful, sophisticated, iron-willed woman (Jeannne Crain, as Reed) from the East. The man she wants to make love to, if only to serve as an inducement to remain her foreman, is Kirk Douglas, as Dempsey. He's basically a wanderer, who is vacillating between a desire to support Reed's open range policy, which he equates with more personal freedom for him, and a desire to give the surrounding small ranchers a more even shake, by allowing them to put up fences to contain Reed's voracious ambition, and to preserve the quantity and quality of the grass, by fencing out Reed's bloated cattle herd. Reed's stated policy is to exploit the good grazing for several years, and when it's converted to poor grazing, move on to another unfenced good grazing area. This is not what most of the small ranchers want to do.Like Monte Walsh, Dempsey has no desire to 'hitch his wagon to a star', perhaps the star being Reed. He wants to continue his wandering lifestyle, and Reed would appear to be not interested in matrimony, unless perhaps to a virile, but tamable man, preferably who has a substantial cattle herd to add to hers.Jeff(William Campbell) is a young man, who wants to 'hitch his wagon' to Dempsey as his teacher on how to become proficient with guns, including some fancy juggling, and how to become a good wrangler. His position is rather like that of Anthony Perkins in relation to Henry Fonda, in "The Tin Star"(a different kind of star!). Jeff is also sort of a substitute for Dempsey's younger brother, who was killed in a Texas range war instigated by Steve Miles(Richard Boone).Clearly, the villains in this story are meant to be the grasping Reed and pugnacious Miles, who becomes Dempsey's replacement after the latter switched sides. Miles sends 3 men to kill Dempsey in the field, but, instead, Dempsey killed 2, and brought the other to Reed as a warning. Later, the 2 tussle, with Miles getting the worst of it, as he falls into a section of barbed wire. After this apparent victory, Dempsey rides off into the sunset, suggesting that Jeff pay more attention to his girlfriend, Tess.

MAN WITHOUT A STAR has to be one film the former Issur Danielovitch must surely wish he could erase from his resume. Douglas plays a ne'er-do-well ranch hand who ends up switching sides during a range war among two big cattle ranches. Jeanne Crain is the boss lady of the ranch he starts out on, and you can almost feel the beginnings of THE BIG VALLEY in this largely awful Western from the 1950s. Outfitted in stylish, form-fitting shirts, Douglas is simply terrible as the conflicted cowpoke. Talk about miscasting. Crain isn't bad as the boss lady, but she's no Barbara Stanwyck. A veritable army of familiar supporting players including Jay C. Flippen can barely keep this turkey afloat. The script stinks, the direction is aimless, the cinematography is wasted. If this was the kind of movie intended to keep viewers away from their TVs, I can't imagine it succeeded in doing so -- even though I understand it was a box office hit in its time.