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James Mangold’s “3:10 to Yuma” is an amazing western movie that we haven’t seen for some years now. The Western in its glory days was often a morality play, a story about humanist values penetrating the lawless anarchy of the frontier.

It still follows that tradition in films like Eastwood’s “The Unforgiven,” but the audience’s appetite for morality plays and Westerns seems to be fading. Here the quality of the acting, and the thought behind the film, make it seem like a vanguard of something new, even though it’s a remake of a good movie 50 years old.

The plot is so easily told that Elmore Leonard originally wrote it as a short story. A man named Dan Evans, who lost a leg in the Civil War, has come to the Arizona territory to try his luck at ranching. It’s going badly, made worse by a neighboring bully who wants to force him off his land. The territory still fears Indian raids, and just as much the lawless gang led by Ben Wade, which sticks up stagecoaches, robs banks, casually murders people and outguns any opposition.

Through a series of developments that seem almost dictated by fate, Dan Evans finds himself as part of a posse sworn in to escort Wade, captured and handcuffed, to the nearby town of Contention, where the 3:10 p.m. train has a cell in its mail car that will transport Wade to the prison in Yuma and a certain death sentence.

Both Dan and Ben have elements in their characters that come under test in this adventure. Dan fears he has lost the confidence of wife Alice and teenage son Will, who doubt he can make the ranch work. Still less does Alice see why her transplanted Eastern husband should risk his life as a volunteer. The son Will, who has practically memorized dime novels about Ben Wade, idealizes the outlaw, and when Dan realizes the boy has followed the posse, he orders him to return home. “He ain’t following you,” Wade says. “He’s following me.”

Mangold’s version is better still than the 1957 original, because it has better actors with more thought behind their dialogue. Christian Bale plays not simply a noble hero, but a man who has avoided such risks as he now takes and is almost at a loss to explain why he is bringing a killer to justice, except that having been mistreated and feeling unable to provide for his family, he is fed up and here he takes his stand.

Crowe, however, plays not merely a merciless killer, although he is that, too, but a man also capable of surprising himself. He is too intelligent to have only one standard behavior which must fit all situations, and is perhaps bored of having that expected of him.

“3:10 to Yuma” has two roles that need a special character flavor and fills them perfectly. Peter Fonda plays McElroy, a professional bounty hunter who would rather claim the price on Ben Wade’s head than let the government execute him for free. And Ben Foster plays Charlie Prince, the second-in-command of Wade’s gang, who seems half in love with Wade, or maybe Charlie’s half-aware that’s he’s all in love. Wade would know which, and wouldn’t care, except as material for his study of human nature.