Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Lord, and Arthur O'Connell co-star with John Dehner, Robert J. Wilke, and Royal Dano in supporting roles.

Link Jones (Gary Cooper) rides into Crosscut, Texas to have a bite to eat, then catch a train to Fort Worth, where he intends to use the savings of his community of Good Hope to hire a schoolteacher.

Sam introduces him to the Crosscut saloon singer, Billie Ellis (Julie London), insisting she could make an ideal teacher.

From a window he signals to three horsemen, Coaley Tobin (Jack Lord), Trout (Royal Dano) and Ponch (Robert J. Wilke), who attempt to rob the train.

They are interrupted by ageing outlaw Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), who is startled to see Link, his nephew, whom he raised to be a killer and a thief.

Tobin reveals his long-held ambition to rob the bank in the town of Lassoo and asserts that Link's return to the gang makes that possible and will breathe new life into them all.

After Link and Sam are sent outside to dig a grave and bury Alcutt, an increasingly drunken Coaley decides to force Billie to strip.

Her cries alert Link and, when he returns to the cabin, Coaley holds a knife to his throat while continuing to demand Billie remove her clothes.

It turns out that Lassoo is a ghost town, its bank deserted except for a frightened Mexican woman named Juanita, who has the two at gunpoint when Trout coldly shoots her.

Tobin starts ranting and firing his gun, and Link finally shoots him and reclaims the bag of Good Hope's money.

Riding back to civilization, Billie tells Link she loves him but, knowing that he intends to return to his home and his family, she is resigned to the fact that she must resume her singing career and go on with life alone.

James Stewart, who had worked with director Anthony Mann in eight movies, five of them westerns: Winchester '73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955), eagerly wanted the role.

For Man of the West, Gary Cooper was eventually cast in the lead role of Link Jones, a former outlaw who is forced to relive his past.

However, in an interview at the 2008 Cinecon in Hollywood, Mirisch claimed that having just wrapped Love in the Afternoon, he promptly signed Cooper for another picture, which ended up being this one.

According to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, Cooper, who struggled with moral conflicts in his personal life, "understood the anguish of a character striving to retain his integrity ... [and] brought authentic feeling to the role of a tempted and tormented, yet essentially decent man."

The age difference was also obvious with John Dehner, who played a key role as Link's cousin and childhood friend, Claude.

Tobin's henchmen Coaley, Trout and Ponch (who rob the train) were played by Jack Lord, Royal Dano and Robert J. Wilke respectively.

Joe Dominguez, Dick Elliott, Frank Ferguson, Herman and Signe Hack, Anne Kunde, Tom London, Tina Menard, Emory Parnell, John Wayne's stuntmen Chuck Roberson, Glen Walters and Glen Wilkerson play minor roles in the film and are uncredited.

The film was shot on the widescreen CinemaScope process (which was introduced in 1953) by cinematographer Ernest Haller, who is best known for his Academy Award-winning work in Gone with the Wind.

Canadian film critic Robin Wood noted that Man of the West is director Anthony Mann's version of William Shakespeare's play King Lear, whose elements appeared in The Furies with Walter Huston, The Naked Spur and The Man From Laramie, with its sense of emotional whirlwind, and an older order crumbling.

Critic and film historian Philip French cites Man of the West as Anthony Mann's masterpiece, containing Gary Cooper's greatest performance.

[11] Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader also hailed it as a "masterpiece," comparing it to "the grimness of Greek tragedy, its mountains and rock formations often suggesting the silent witness of an ancient amphitheater...the penultimate shoot-out in the ghost town is an appropriately eerie split-level confrontation between two wounded, supine men–one stretched out on a porch at screen left, the other stretched out underneath the porch at screen right, as if he were already buried.

It’s a key example of the way that landscape and architecture, people and settings, painting and drama, image and idea, classicism and modernism all merge on Mann’s monumental canvases.

The trade publication Motion Picture Daily reported in 1958 that the National Legion of Decency objected to the content of Man of the West.

Objection to the first was explained thusly, "the highly moral nature of this story is substantially marred by excessive brutality and unnecessary suggestiveness."