You buy the man above him
A wonderful, thinking man's, neo-traditional Western. Burt excels as the lawdog made of granite. He doesn't bend, he doesn't trade. He wavers for a brief moment, but the inexorable workings of the patterns of his life pull him back into line. The flickers that pass over his tired face are a masterful demonstration of cinema acting. Beautiful, intricate script to chew on. It's stuffed with strong dialogue, full of meat. Superb, relentless pacing. Stunning shoot-outs. Like a game of chess, there are rules. But it doesn't matter how good you are; you've got to have the killer instinct if you're going to win. What are the issues? If you tried to buy the man above Maddox, who would that be? "There is no easy comfort from God" says the preacher. "From the hardness comes forth purity" is his funeral message. Maddox doesn't need to see from where he stands --- he's the sword of Gideon. And life catches up with everyone in the end. The land was won with guns, and the defeated native Americans ride past in stoic silence. Finally, after watching this implacable story several times, I managed to figure out who shot the old man in Bannock. That killing was NOT an accident. There are enough hints in the early part, and the ending brings it all together with a truly satisfying closure. This is one of the finest of the Western genre, as good as High Noon, and far better than most.

A great Western but a criminal DVD transfer
If nothing else, Lawman proves that there is such a thing as a script so good that not even Michael Winner could screw it up, although having an excellent cast doesn't hurt. Burt Lancaster is the lawman of the title, determined to bring in several cattlemen (Robert Duvall among them) only to find that the local boss Lee J. Cobb owns the town and its once famous, now cowardly world-weary sheriff Robert Ryan, who all but steals the film. Curiously, Ryan far preferred this film to The Wild Bunch, though that may be down to Winner's deference to his stars compared with the thoroughly miserable time he had working with Peckinpah (there's another Peckinpah connection in composer Jerry Fielding, who contributes a good, brooding score). Joseph Wiseman, Richard Jordan, Albert Salmi and Sheree North are also thrown into the mix, and surprisingly all of them have well defined characters in what becomes an increasingly complex morality play about the void between what's legal and what's practical as Lancaster begins to realize that his strict adherence to the letter of the law has left him with nothing else in his life.

At times Gerald Wilson's script is perhaps a tad overwritten - everyone gets their big scene explaining their worldview, with no-one truly bad, merely weak - but it's a forgivable weakness. Winner's not quite as overly reliant on crash zooms as usual, though his characteristic laziness does manifest itself in one scene that has characters ride up to Cobb's house in darkness and come into the room in daylight, but for someone like Winner that's almost verging on the competent by his standards. Sadly MGM/UA's Region 1 DVD is a stinker of a transfer, looking like it was shot through a dirty window. The trailer is the only extra.

The other side of the showdown...
Michael Winner's "The Lawman" reveals that a sheriff - traditional officer responsible for law and order, symbol of virtue and right - is 'not' always morally excellent and virtuous or that his prey thoroughly bad...

Burt Lancaster is cast as a merciless avenger, unmoved by love or pity, determined to one end: Exterminate the opposition...

The criminals here are, in fact, some law breakers, drunken cowboys - who by bad luck - have killed an old man during a rough enthusiastic drinking bout...

Lancaster - blind to his faults, unwilling to judge or to be less severe, and with no intention to arrest - hunts his prey down, one by one, until the last man...

There is no poetic eloquence here, no tension as the two protagonists walk slowly towards their duel, no feeling that right is victorious, no good has conquered evil, no decisive clash to capture the audience's imagination... This is pure brutality: Gratuitous graphic sequences - sickening and revolting - of destroyed shoulders and collapsed faces... Uncalled details of death that may damage the sonorous knell of the 'classic Western' with its ideal behavior and precise rules traditionally observed...

The Western showdown is strictly ritual, quick, clean and purely emotional... The outcome predictable... The moment of suspense exciting as anything the cinema has ever produced...

The showdown in "The Lawman" is disturbing in the way of vision... It follows on in the tradition of Palance/Elisha Cook Jr. ultimate confrontation in "Shane," and excels Sam Peckinpah's commitment to an ideal of self-expression through violent death... It may well mean that a film like "Shane," "High Noon," "Vera Cruz," or "The Fastest Gun Alive," can never be made again...

Lawman Remake
The original release of this film starring Burt Lancaster as the relentless alpha male and Sheree North as his attractive erstwhile lover contained an explicit bedroom scene which revealed more of the latter's earthy charms than seen in the recent remake. While the latter shows better on the screen--the original film is rough and worn through aging--the deleting of such racy images detracts from the film maker's artistic intent. Perhaps the new edition's editors expect to gain a broader audience by not offending puritancal tastes, but for me it's a disappointment. Specially since it's the only film I've ever seen of Sheree North topless (fortunately the original shows occasionally on cable t.v.). While such gratuitous editing occurs frequently on network television, one wouldn't expect it to happen on a DVD. This viewer certainly wouldn't have bought it had he known it had been cut.

Gory Western Melodrama Posing As Greek Tragedy [spoilers]
LAWMAN is a gory, nihilistic Western melodrama, posing as a film with deep moral complexity. It's as if the story was built out of 70's cliches, then written up by a clever film student.

Lancaster portrays the grim marshal of Bannock, come to Sabbath to arrest a gang of cowboys who accidentally killed a man while they were on a drunken spree. Lancaster's refusal to negotiate, combined with the guilty parties' senseless determination to fight him, and the townspeople's meddling, eventually leads to a violent conclusion.

Only excellent performances by everyone in the cast lift this bit of pulp fiction up a few notches from what it would have been otherwise.

The movie is superficially fascinating on first viewing, but doesn't hold up to any careful thought. Nearly everyone in the movies acts irrationally, self-destructively, or fails to do what any normal person in the same situation would do.

Lancaster arrives in town all by himself, even though he's there to arrest 7-8 armed men all at the same time. The big boss (Lee J. Cobb) obviously isn't dumb or hot-headed, and he doesn't want any gunplay, but he doesn't do any of the things a smart, hard-working, calm, sensible cattle baron would really do under these circumstances.

Robert Ryan is the marshal of the town, but he never asserts himself over Lancaster, even though he opposes what Lancaster is doing, it's Ryan's jurisidiction and he could just order Lancaster to leave. None of the cowboys seem to show any concern about getting killed; in fact, it never even seems to occur to them to gang up on Lancaster (he couldn't possibly shoot all of them at once). Since none of them intentionally shot the victim, and they were all shooting off guns, and there's seven of them -- there would be no way a judge could sensibly convict any one man of the crime anyway.

Why did it take months for the original crime to be investigated? If J.D. Cannon's character is so cowardly, why wasn't he afraid enough of Lancaster to just surrender? If he's so sure Lancaster will kill him, why did he run away from him in broad daylight, like a sitting duck?

The movie just doesn't make any sense.

So though the premise and set-up seem interesting at the start, pretty soon you realize the whole story is a contrived violence machine driving to one place: a distasteful, 1970's downbeat ending and you shaking your head and saying "What was THAT?".