Like so many westerns after Tex Ritter had a hit with the theme for High Noon, The Lonely Man (1957) starts with a cowboy tune sung by no less than Tennessee Ernie Ford. "The world looks empty to a lonely man," Ford sings, "as he rides an endless trail." It's a "hopeless" world "as he drifts from place to place." The credits roll over the silhouette of this lonely man on horseback, a tiny figure in a vast wasteland captured in Paramount's VistaVision. American westerns in the '50s were probably the pinnacle of the genre, at least if you go...