The Gunfighter

 Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950) is a sophisticated Western carefully made to undercut and criticize most of the genre's characteristic features.  Shot in the best "invisible" style of Hollywood's classic era, the movie is completely coherent and elegant -- there is so little in the movie to draw attention to camerawork, scenery, and editing that, probably, the most memorable aspect of the mise-en-scene is Gregory Peck's unfortunate moustache.  (The moustache, a bow to period style in whiskers, was slipped in when the producer Daryl Zanuck was abroad -- Zanuck said that he would pay $25,000 of his own money if Peck would remove the moustache, but, alas, the film was in the can by that time.)  King's picture is a film about a gunfighter who is almost never shown firing his weapon.  

In structure, The Gunfighter resembles High Noon (1952), a similarly austere and geometrically precise movie that proceeds, as it were, in real time -- after a brief prologue, the running time of the movie is the duration of the action presented on screen.  The premise of the film is the classical nostos, that is, the return of the hero to his lost home.  This narrative patten is pleasing and originates in prehistory, although it first comes to prominence in Homer's Odyssey.  As in Homer, a warrior returns to an isolated place where his wife is besieged by importunate would-be lovers; there is a recognition scene and a climax in which the lover (singular in The Gunfighter) is disposed-of.  Gregory Peck plays the role of the renowned gunfighter and quick-draw shootist, Jim Ringo, 35 years old, and weary of defending his reputation against upstart challengers seeking fame by forcing the hero into futile duels.  We see him alone in the first scenes and title sequence traversing a variety of Western landscapes (dunes, badlands, prairie).  In a small town, a kid recognizes Ringo, insults him repeatedly, and, then, draws down on him.  Of course, Ringo kills the kid without hesitation or any discernible effort.  (This sequence is very brilliantly conceived.  We never see Ringo draw his gun or fire it.  The camera is focused on the kid who pulls his weapon from its holster only to be immediately drilled by Ringo who is off-screen.  The movie, which posits itself, as a kind of anti-Western eschews any displays of gun-play or virtuosic shooting by its hero -- these are aspects of the gunfighter legend that the movie conspicuously downplays in making its somewhat dour thematic points.)   The dead gunsel has three brothers who predictably pursue Ringo.  But he gets the drop on them, ambushing the somewhat farcical trio of gunmen in the hoodoos at Lone Pine. (Some of these opening scenes seem to have been shot at nearby Death Valley.)  The would-be avengers are stripped of their firearms and have their horses driven off; Ringo spares their lives and tells them to walk back to Santa Fe from which they have come.  Ringo, then, rides  his beautiful horse -- it has a white patch shaped like a lightning bolt on its brow -- to another small village called Cayenne.  The posse, now on foot, surmises that Ringo is headed to this town (villages are few and far between on this desert) and follow him.  Ringo thinks he is three hours ahead of the avengers.  But they secure horses and, in fact, reach Cayenne far before they are expected to appear, thus, triggering the film's climactic showdown.  

The bulk of the movie takes place in Cayenne.  Despite it's name,  the village is a little Anglo-Saxon community that could have been lifted from New England with a big wooden church, a school, and some officious matrons who form a sort of committee for public respectability.  (There's a shot with two sad-looking Indians but, apparently, no Mexicans in this village in the old Southwest.)  The town is the same place that we see, under a different name, in Fred Zinneman's High Noon.  Ringo's estranged wife, a schoolmarm, lives in town with Ringo's 8 1/2 year old son, named after him.  Ringo is urgently seeking a reconciliation with his wife, the schoolteacher.  At first, she refuses to see him.  But he hangs around town, far too long as it turns out, in order to meet with her near the end of the movie.  He tells her, then, that he will return in one year and they will reconcile and go off into some territory where the lethal Jim Ringo is unknown to start their lives together again.  (Ringo has come up with this idea after observing a cowboy, once a wild young man, stopping at the bar for a single drink before he goes to the humble ranch where he lives happily with his wife and children -- this is the model for the existence that Ringo desires for himself.)  Ringo is a model of chivalry, well-spoken, polite, and he doesn't force himself on his estranged spouse who has been resisting other suitors because she still loves him.  The interview between Ringo and his wife is arranged by the sheriff, Mark Strett, a retired outlaw who has (like many of his ilk) reinvented himself as a lawman.  Strett and Ringo were once colleagues in crime and they are affectionate with one another.  (There's a very slight suggestion that if the schoolmarm were to renounce Jim Ringo, her first choice for romantic partner would be the much older Strett.)  There's a kindly saloon girl, a bit faded and one of Ringo's old flames, who also serves as an intermediary between the gunfighter and the schoolteacher.  Karl Malden plays the subservient and fawning bartender at the Palace Bar where Ringo is challenged by a local hothead, Hunt Brondy -- Hunt has been harassing the schoolmarm; Ringo humiliates him in front of his cronies and he creep off the plot his revenge.  Ringo's appearance in Cayenne has created a festival-like atmosphere -- everyone correctly suspects that there are going to be killings and the townsfolk all enthusiastically gather near the bar in hopes of watching the mayhem.  Despite repeated requests that he should leave town, Ringo tarries.  (He thinks his pursuers are on-foot and not mounted.)  All the little boys have fled the school to hang around the Palace Bar, spying on Ringo and hoping to see him shoot someone.  (Jim Ringo, Jr. is among these mischievous scamps.)  There's a touching interview between Ringo and his boy and, then, the three gunmen ride into town to exact their revenge on the killer of their brother.  (There's a subplot involving a grieving father who thinks Ringo shot his son -- in fact, it's a case of mistaken identity -- who tries to  gun down the hero from a sniper's nest near the bar; he fails and gets thrown in jail.)  The final showdown takes place in a completely unexpected manner and, in fact, is decidedly anti-climactic.  In the film's final shot, a lone horseman rides into the sunset, a classic trope in movies of this kind for death.  

The Gunfighter is well-acted with engaging characters.  Despite it's deliberate avoidance of gun battles and duels, the movie is well-paced -- it runs about 85 minutes.  The action is effectively staged and there is good dialogue.  The script compels the viewers to construct almost all of the backstory -- that is, the picture engages the imagination of the audience since it is not particularly explicit about many things:  how did the schoolmarm get involved with the gunfighter, for instance, is an unsolved mystery.  The movie was well-received when first released and has enjoyed a good critical reputation up to the present.  It's quietly radical in almost completely avoiding violence in the context of what seems to be a fairly conventional Western.      

(There was a real bad man named Johnny Ringo who died under unusual circumstances in 1882 near Tombstone, Arizona.  Very little in the film, however, refers to the exploits of the real life Ringo.  One scene in a bar involving a quarrel over whiskey might be derived from a similar incident in Ringo's life.  In case, you are wondering, as I was, the Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr aka Richard Starkey got his first name, not because of this movie, but because of the many rings he was wont to wear on his fingers.  Bob Dylan wrote a long ballad called "Brownsville Girl" based on some scenes in the movie that he claimed he had watched twice and found memorable.  You can hear "Brownsville Girl" on YouTube; the playwright, Sam Shepherd, wrote the lyrics to the song with Dylan.)