James Mangold’s “3:10 to Yuma” is, in every sense, a rarity. It’s an unapologetic Western — not a parody like “Shanghai Noon” or a self-conscious revision such as “Unforgiven,” or an Eastern-Western in the manner of “The Last Samurai” and “Hidalgo,” or an action flick aimed at teenagers à la “Wild Wild West.” Even rarer, it’s a remake of a low-budget classic that maintains the virtues of the original while expanding its scope.

Delmer Daves’s 1957 black-and-white version is a favorite among cineastes who prefer its modest virtues of economy and taut storytelling to two better known films with which it shares plot similarities: the high-falutin’ “High Noon” (which, say its detractors, has more to do with the politics of the McCarthy era than the West) and “Rio Bravo” (which those more jaded than Quentin Tarantino might find a tad too arch). Made from a short story by Elmore Leonard, the plot of “3:10 to Yuma” can be summed up in a line: farmer desperate for money must guard notorious criminal until train arrives.

Low on action but big on characters and suspense, the original “3:10 to Yuma” spends much of its time inside a single building where Van Heflin’s volunteer lawman keeps Glenn Ford’s gunman prisoner. The film benefits much from the sly psychological back and forth between the two characters and the edge given to the outlaw by the gutsy casting of Ford, who seemed to be having an unusually good time; Heflin was a bit too earnest as the farmer.

To acknowledge the film’s strengths, though, is not to concede the greatness its admirers see in it. The film never quite transcends its limitations as a short story, and in the end its plot feels contrived and some of the long scenes with Heflin and Ford feel too confining. The screenplay in the remake (credited to three relatively unknown writers: Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt, and Derek Haas) retains the sturdy bones of Mr. Leonard’s story, adding flesh and even a heart. It also takes much of the suspense outdoors in the form of a nail-biting posse ride to the town of contention where the prisoner will meet the train. I’m not familiar with the screenwriters, but judging from this film, they are not only talented but have done their homework. The tangy dialogue is flavored by late 19th-century rhythms and is shorn of the 1950s adult Western anachronisms that plague the original.

The characters, and the actors who play them, are better in this “3:10 to Yuma.” I’m not sure what it says about the state of American acting right now, but it’s hard to think of better casting for the lead roles than the Australian Russell Crowe and the Welshman Christian Bale. (A year and a half ago, Tom Cruise was rumored to be interested in playing the outlaw, which would have given the film more false vibes than a Tony Snow press conference.) Perhaps at this point, only foreign-born actors like Messrs. Crowe and Bale, who grew up watching Westerns on TV, still feel an affinity for them. They face off their roles with the precision of two actors who have worked out all the kinks offstage.

Mr. Crowe’s Ben Wade is a thinking man’s thief, possessed of both a bloodlust and a poetic soul (Mr. Crowe, an avid reader of poetry, plays Wade like a man who read Francois Villon at an impressionable age). Some actors would find handcuffs to be a severe restriction; for Wade, they’re liberating — their restrictions give him the opportunity to play with men’s heads instead of blowing them off, and like a frontier Hannibal Lecter, he can size up just about any man in a flash and go straight to his weakness.

Mr. Bale, as the down-and-out rancher Dan Evans, has the tougher role. Who wants to stand around symbolizing virtue while Mr. Crowe’s bad guy chews the cactus? But Mr. Bale does an amazing jujitsu with the part, accepting the weaknesses of his character and searching beyond them. Evans’s failures have cost him the respect of his wife (Gretchen Mol) and oldest son (Logan Lerman), and his desperation taps pools of strength he didn’t know he had. As the story builds, Evans strips away layers, revealing a man potentially as dangerous as Wade.

The poking and probing of the two men into each other’s psyches throws sparks, and as the climax builds, a strange camaraderie emerges — the suggestion is that each man needs the other to draw out the best in him.

This “3:10 to Yuma” is not only richer and more detailed than the original, it’s more populated. Peter Fonda, ageing gracefully into a terrific character actor, gives a vivid turn as a bounty hunter who seems comprised of several great Western stars, from John Ireland to Jack Elam to his own father. Ben Foster, from “Six Feet Under,” plays a young albino killer named Charlie Prince with a mad glee that summons the ghost of Lee Marvin before he became a star. The intensity of Prince’s loyalty to Wade borders on the homoerotic, but Mr. Foster suggests other attachments. (One recalls Larry McMurtry’s reply to a woman who asked if most cowboys were repressed homosexuals: “No, most cowboys are repressed heterosexuals.”)

Hollywood’s abandonment of the Western genre has always been misunderstood — they pretty much abandoned all genres decades ago, morphing them into action movies. What Hollywood couldn’t deal with was the shifting national perspective on American Indians, Mexicans, blacks, and women. Mr. Mangold’s “3:10 to Yuma” could be a bell cow, though, for directors interested in doing remakes of tough, tight, small-scale Westerns whose saddlebags are free of sociopolitical issues. You can smell a silver age comin’ down that trail.