Will Lockhart (James Stewart) rides into town, we eventually learn, to find the man who sold guns to the Native Americans who killed his brother. While searching for that man, Lockhart becomes embroiled in the King Lear-indebted saga of the Waggoman family. In his final Western with Stewart, Anthony Mann synthesizes his previous Stewart collaborations (Winchester '73, Bend of the River, the Far Country, and the Naked Spur) into a different kind of Western. The Man From Laramie, with its ensemble of morally ambiguous characters and multiple threads expertly woven into something bigger, is a film noir in Western garb.
Through Mann's films, we've gradually seen Stewart's characters become tougher and increasingly self-interested. In Bend of the River, we see him protecting the weak and enduring their unwillingness to forgive his criminal past. In The Far Country, we see him spend most of the movie attempting to avoid other people until he eventually stand up for his community. Here, it's as if the sum of the strain from his previous roles have driven him to a new level of single-mindedness. Despite clear warnings, Lockhart is willing to endure intense violence against himself and others in pursuit of uncovering who facilitated the death of his brother. Not only are there vicious assaults against Stewart, but we can see fear and pain in his eyes. This is a humiliating brutality, the type of which I haven't usually seen in studio Westerns until the antihero era of the 1960s and 1970s (the maiming of Lockhart's hand would be later appropriated for Corbucci's Django). After his suffering, Lockhart takes his punishment in a manner akin to that of Spade or Marlowe - it only serves to embolden him.