The Man from Laramie

A magnificent, if slightly over-ambitious Western. Cattle baron Crisp, who is going blind, is obsessed with who will inherit his ranching empire: his psychopathic natural-born son Nicol, or the more reliable Kennedy, adopted by the old man to keep Nicol in line. Into this morass of sibling rivalry bursts a vengeful Stewart, bent on finding the gunrunner responsible for selling weapons to the Indians who slaughtered his younger brother's cavalry detachment. Visually impressive, psychologically complex and sometime brutally violent, it suffers slightly from the emphasis on the familial machinations at the expense of Stewart's tortured psyche. Otherwise, it's 24 carat stuff.