Bend of the River

Bend of the River (1952) is an Anthony Mann western you can watch online on iFILM, the second of five collaborations Mann made with James Stewart at Universal Pictures. Stewart plays Glyn McLyntock, a former Missouri border raider escorting a wagon train of Oregon settlers and quietly hoping the frontier will let him bury who he used to be.

He pulls a man named Emerson Cole off a lynch mob's rope along the way. Cole saved his life once, has the same murky past, and rides with them into Portland. But when gold fever turns the town crooked and the settlers' supplies get hijacked, the two men are suddenly on different sides of a line McLyntock thought he'd already crossed back over. Rock Hudson and Arthur Kennedy round out a sharp cast.

Mann's westerns traded the big-sky heroics of the genre for something grittier: tight canyon landscapes that close in like a trap, and protagonists carrying guilt they can't outride. This one is as lean and tense as any of them. Stream Bend of the River (1952) online on iFILM.