THE SHEEPMAN (1958) *** I got excited when I saw the title, thinking it might be a film about an isolated character in Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance , but then it was obvious from the date that it couldn't be. Instead we get Glenn Ford, way cooler than I've ever seen him before: transcendent, like Warren Beatty; dismissive like Brando; tough like Charles Bronson (well ok, not quite the magnitude of any of that, but you get the idea). It's a silly enough Western, in a way-there are plenty of events that don't seem like they'd go down quite like that in real life (but isn't real life the same way)-but it does include the requisite rugged individualism (in spades) and some pretty good gun battles. Shirley MacLaine is no better than good as the female totem, and Leslie Nielsen would never attain the heights as a demi-villain that he would later come to define as the bumbling accidental hero, but Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez is at least as good in (it wasn't politically incorrect, then) comic relief, and Pernell Roberts looks pretty scary a few times as the really bad guy. But it's Glenn Ford's baby, he would eventually play 107 roles on screen and I've seen less than half so I can't declare this his best, but it's the first time I'd describe him as great, and I'd never before suspected that he could do this well. Now I'm open to the possibility that he can be even greater. That says something.
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