The Fastest Gun Alive

The Fastest Gun Alive is an ingenious Western written and directed by Russell Rouse for release in 1956.  The movie stars Glenn Ford and Jeanne Craine.  Ford's performance is eccentric -- the film was part of a wave of so-called "Adult Westerns" that captured the screen in the fifties: these movies undercut mythic archetypes by providing the characters with idiosyncratic psychological motivations.  (The most characteristic of these films is Arthur Penn's The Left-handed Gun in which Billy the Kid is imagined to be acting-out homosexual impulses -- the film was written by Gore Vidal.)  Glenn Ford channels, unsuccessfully it must be said, the stammering, murmuring, wounded style of James Dean -- he seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  It's an interesting performance but Ford doesn't have the acting chops -- he looks too steadfastly simian and his fundamental personality is too staid and conventional for the devious hoops through which he leaps here.  The Fastest  Gun Alive is entertaining and exceedingly clever -- but, ultimately, the psychological Western was a self-defeating genre.  It denies too many of the fundamental pleasures of the form -- it's hard to stage convincing horse scenes with mighty steeds galloping across the desert when the action is mostly interior, the gunfighter wrestling with his demons in the dark night of the soul.  In this context, The Fastest Gun Alive supplies characters with intricate and tormented back-stories -- even the heavy, Broderick Crawford, looking doughy and a little off-balance, is given a sad story to recount from his youth.  This material clogs up the narrative and undercuts the fundamental pleasure of seeing men and beautiful horses arrayed against the sublime landscapes of the American West.  John Ford always staged at least one scene showing cavalry crossing a river -- perhaps, he was punning on his name, but he understood the elemental appeal of seeing horses in great numbers colorfully splashing through water beneath red sandstone buttes.  In The Fastest Gun Alive, the trio of bad hombres pauses to water their horses at what seems to be a little ooze under some bedraggled cottonwood trees.  The pond is about six feet long and the horses and men drink from it and, then, ruinously splash in the water -- but it's not a western river under red rock formations, but rather just a tub-shaped indentation on a grassy hillside.  This doesn't exactly stir the heart. 

Glenn Ford plays a General Store merchant who has named himself George Temple to escape his reputation as "the fastest gun alive."  He's sober, hardworking, with a beautiful pregnant wife.  (Jeanne Craine is so fantastically beautiful that she makes all of her scenes completely lifeless -- they become nothing more than exercises in contemplating her fantastic mannequin-like gorgeousness.  She has only one expression, a sort of astonished, inert horror, an affect that she shows in just about every scene in the movie.)  But Temple, despite his success, is unhappy -- selling candy and arguing with cantankerous female customers about the color of store-bought dresses ordered from New York has abraded his soul to the point that he can't bear his placid life any longer.  He gets drunk and shows off his spectacular prowess with a six-gun.  (This exhibition is triggered by an account of a bad man, Vinnie Howard, Broderick Crawford's character, who has gratuitously gunned-down a man in a nearby town -- Vinnie Howard is obsessed by achieving fame as the fastest gun alive and he is willing to kill to attain this objective.)  The people in town realize that it is a calamity to have in their midst a gunfighter renowned as the fastest gun in the West and, so, in a church service they swear a solemn vow to never tell anyone about George Temple's lethal skills.  But just as they are swearing this vow, Vinnie Howard with his henchmen rides into town, fleeing a posse that is pursuing them after a bank robbery in which a townsperson was killed.  Howard learns from an admiring little boy (who is playing hooky from Church) that there is a fast gun in town and he wants to duel with the man.  When the townspeople, true to their oath, refuse to reveal that they are harboring Temple in the church, Howard sets out to burn the village to the ground.  Of course, this threat forces Temple to reluctantly reveal himself, striding down main street with his six-gun strapped to his leg for the climactic duel with the half-mad Vinnie Howard.  

The film is full of interesting minor characters -- there's a garrulous Irishman who saw Howard kill the gunslinger in the nearby town; he repeats the story ad nauseum driving Temple to drink and his display of shooting skills that triggers the film's climax.  An ornery female customer turns out to be kind and generous when the chips are down.  The town's bar owner discourages people from drinking.  There's a blind Swede in the opening scene who pronounces doom on Vinnie Howard and the bad man's two accomplices, one of them played by Noah Beery, are convincingly nasty but, also, vaguely endearing.  True to form, the film is overly lit, depicting a series of neat geometric interiors, the exact opposite of the squalor shown in Westerns made a decade later -- here the Old West is exceedingly neat and tidy with everything in its place.  The town folk are all well-meaning bourgeois -- it's not clear how the village supports itself in the barren desert.  Everyone has their reasons and the characters are fully and roundly humanized.  Broderick Crawford's lethal rage has to do with being humiliated when his wife ran off with a faro dealer -- the gun is clearly a substitute for his inadequate phallus.  The film has some remarkable twists and turns.  Ford's character sweats up a storm -- his forehead is always beaded with perspiration.  It turns out that not only is the mousy little storekeeper a great gunslinger but he is also a coward to boot --  this adds an additional level of suspense to the final shoot-out.  The music by Andre Previn is overly emphatic -- it insists on finding climaxes about every six minutes in the film.

The most remarkable aspect of the film has nothing to do with its plot and, in fact, is a weird distraction from the movie's themes.  Russ Tamblyn plays a young man seen courting a girl in an early hoe-down scene.  People urge him to dance and dance he does -- he hurls himself around the barn climbing walls, swinging on ropes, using a see-saw to throw his partner twenty feet in the air.  Some of his dance moves look like parkour -- he dives off obstacles and lunges over feed troughs and, then, hopping atop shovels does a bizarre and spectacular dance using the tools like stilts.  Tamblyn apparently could really dance and this elaborate sequence is shot in only three or four extended scenes -- all from middle distance without anything faked.  Glenn Ford was reportedly miffed by the sequence saying that Tamblyn "was doing a Donald O'Connor all over the walls."  He wanted the scene cut, but it was simply too brilliant to be excised and so it sits in the middle of the movie, an island of song and dance, that has nothing to do with anything around it.