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The Gunfighter -
This is a classic western that argues that being the best gunfighter is more curse than blessing. It stars Gregory Peck as Jimmy Ringo, who is confronted by challengers everywhere he goes, with it ending badly for them every time. One such encounter occurs before he visits the small town of Cayenne, where he hopes to reconnect with a lost love and his young son and whose Marshal, Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), happens to be one of his old partners in crime. If it weren't enough that the brothers of his ill-fated challenger are after him, Cayenne has yet another hot shot, Hunt Bromley (Skip Homeier), who's gunning (no pun intended) for Jimmy's title.
I like how the movie shows that being the best gunfighter is like being a celebrity and having a contagious disease at the same time for how everyone is equally fascinated by Jimmy, but also wants to keep their distance. This is exemplified by Cayenne's expansive and empty saloon that becomes his hideout, which besides the Marshal and loyal bartender Mac (a young Karl Malden) is only visited by the few customers who somehow haven't heard of Jimmy. The presence the townsfolk's fascination gives Jimmy combined with the threat of those who would see him dead makes for genuine tension. It helps that Peck is 100% convincing for how his skill puts the weight of the world on his shoulders. Thankfully, there is room for tenderness within all the tension, the highlight being when the Marshall reminisces with Jimmy about their time together and explains how he was able to get out. As for the moments when Jimmy finds who he is looking for, they are as bittersweet as you can imagine and are bound to bring tears to the eye to someone who is just as hardened as our antihero. In short, it's an affair as suspenseful as it is melancholic and it successfully shows that being the best at something may make one's life easier in some ways, but the difficulty it adds to others makes you wonder if the tradeoff is worth it. The movie also proves that genre deconstruction was happening much earlier than Unforgiven, which this movie would pair well with in a double feature.
This is a classic western that argues that being the best gunfighter is more curse than blessing. It stars Gregory Peck as Jimmy Ringo, who is confronted by challengers everywhere he goes, with it ending badly for them every time. One such encounter occurs before he visits the small town of Cayenne, where he hopes to reconnect with a lost love and his young son and whose Marshal, Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), happens to be one of his old partners in crime. If it weren't enough that the brothers of his ill-fated challenger are after him, Cayenne has yet another hot shot, Hunt Bromley (Skip Homeier), who's gunning (no pun intended) for Jimmy's title.
I like how the movie shows that being the best gunfighter is like being a celebrity and having a contagious disease at the same time for how everyone is equally fascinated by Jimmy, but also wants to keep their distance. This is exemplified by Cayenne's expansive and empty saloon that becomes his hideout, which besides the Marshal and loyal bartender Mac (a young Karl Malden) is only visited by the few customers who somehow haven't heard of Jimmy. The presence the townsfolk's fascination gives Jimmy combined with the threat of those who would see him dead makes for genuine tension. It helps that Peck is 100% convincing for how his skill puts the weight of the world on his shoulders. Thankfully, there is room for tenderness within all the tension, the highlight being when the Marshall reminisces with Jimmy about their time together and explains how he was able to get out. As for the moments when Jimmy finds who he is looking for, they are as bittersweet as you can imagine and are bound to bring tears to the eye to someone who is just as hardened as our antihero. In short, it's an affair as suspenseful as it is melancholic and it successfully shows that being the best at something may make one's life easier in some ways, but the difficulty it adds to others makes you wonder if the tradeoff is worth it. The movie also proves that genre deconstruction was happening much earlier than Unforgiven, which this movie would pair well with in a double feature.