CineM Review: The Gunfighter (1950)

Revisionist (or not) Western

The first thing you should know about Henry King’s ‘The Gunfighter’ is this: it is not a Western. Sure, it traces its story in the saloon of a dusty town called Cayenne, and the story demands the ready occurrence of men with guns, and boys with guns. Hence, the setting of the West.

You meet a saloon-keeper unlike any you will come across in the mythically tough Old West – he is girlishly celebrity-struck, presides over his domain like a harried schoolmaster, and is incapable of evicting truant schoolchildren from his porch, forget drunk and rowdy customers. You also meet a town marshal (widely acknowledged to be a hard-as-nails hombre) who is mostly content with setting deadlines, then extending them, issuing terse warnings which go unheeded and pacifying matrons, when he is not acting as a messenger boy between a man and his estranged wife. Finally you meet the gunfighter – a guy with a frank, open face and eyes which twinkle when he meets old acquaintances; who is ready to perform as a town peace office by herding characters with guns into the town jail when the marshal is out, and pacifying a particularly strident women’s citizen delegation with all the diplomatic and conciliatory skills of a town mayor. And this man has toted up a personal body count of 12 men!!

 ‘The Gunslinger’ is a spare story which is sad but has played itself out true before and will, again. There is a man who has committed some wrongs, now attempting to ride away from the destiny which he unmistakably foresees, and then there is a bunch of people, some who would like to be the audience when he meets that fate, and a few who would like to be its deliverer. It is a sad story which dispenses with shining heroes or tenacious villains. You will buy into the premise easily enough, and identify with the man heading towards a fate which you can visualize instantly after the first draw.

 

With a story as spare as this, the screenplay is tight and performances are crisp. The film however, stretches further and wants to up-sell the idea of an identifiable setting with a cast of standard characters acting very un-identifiably just because you have bought into the basic idea. It comes as no surprise that when the gunfighter ultimately meets his fate, it is not on the back of a horse or in a sun-baked dusty street, but on a boardwalk, his head comfortably propped up on a pillow with a blanket laid out and the townspeople congregated respectfully around as if they are at the dying bedside of the town parish priest.

CineM's Verdict