The Gunfighter (1950)

Where to Watch: Plex (Free)

***1/2

I've never been huge on Westerns. I think a lot of this is because of two things. The first is that, as a kid, we drove from New South Wales to Kalgoorlie. As a result, for many years, I fucking hated the desert. The second is that a lot of Westerns deal with the American psyche and the myths Americans  tell about themselves, and as an Australian I've never felt much of a connection to them. Also, as a kid, I just thought watching a bunch of stoic guys shoot eachother because of a land dispute was really boring.

Older and wiser, I've come around to this sort of film. But I still prefer the outliers - Westerns that challenge or tweak the standard formula. Your Johnny Guitars, your True Grits. That sort of thing. And The Gunfighter definitely does all that and more. 

Describing the plot might make The Gunfighter sound somewhat generic, but it's important to bear in mind that a lot of what it did was pretty new for the times. You've probably heard of the black hat/white hat dichotomy, for example. Well, the hero of this film (played brilliantly by Gregory Peck) is the Black Hat. He's not exactly a bad guy, but you could never really describe him as good. After years spent trying to become the fastest gun in the West, Johnny Rico has found that fame is something of a burden. Everywhere he goes he gets challenged by some young idiot hoping to make a name for themselves, and more often than not that creates even more trouble as said young idiot's friends and family misguidedly try to seek revenge. Tired of killing to stay alive and being moved on from every town he rides into, Rico decides to head to the town of Cayenne to hunt out an old flame and the child he left behind eight years earlier. Unfortunately, he's being pursued by the three brothers of a youth he shot down in self defence (one of the problems with being known as a notorious killer, even if you don't happen to actually be one, is that people rarely tend to take your side when the time for explanations comes around). In Cayenne, Rico holes up in a saloon under the agreement, made with his former partner in crime now turned marshall, that he will clear out as soon as he's had a chance to talk to his lost love - the local school teacher, now living under an assumed name. He's done the math, and worked out that he has until at least eleven AM to clear out of Cayenne. Unfortunately he didn't factor two important things into his calculations - the first, that his pursuers would manage to acquire horses as replacements for the ones Rico managed to get rid of, thus meaning they would arrive in Cayenne a full hour early, and the second, that there would be a young idiot in town even more foolhardy and persistent than the one that got a posse on his tail in the first place.

A lot of people who don't watch Westerns much probably assume they're full of action and derring-do. The Gunfighter has a little of that, but it's really a very tense and mature (though often humorous) drama  in which most of the goings-on occur indoors. This was probably partly for reasons of budget - Rico is stuck hanging out in the Palace Bar for most of the film, as per the agreement with the Marshall. This is also a movie that focuses as much on the societal reaction to crime as it does on the crimes itself. All the young boys in Cayenne, and a lot of the adult men, are of the opinion that Rico is some kind of hero, and the whole town turns into a circus for the duration of Rico's stay there. The local equivalent of the CWA, on the other hand, have a black and white view that Rico is a deranged criminal and should be arrested, gunned down, or hanged. The owner of the Palace Bar is practically gleeful about all the business he's going to get after Rico leaves, as his place will become almost a shrine to the gunslinger. And at the centre of it all you have poor Rico - fully aware that he brought this on himself when he was young and dumb, but also realising that the snowball effect of killing has led him to a place he never wanted to be and a life he can barely stand to live. Every dumb punk who comes gunning for Rico is both a price he has to pay for the choices he made over the years, and a grim reminder of what a stupid fuck he was to want to go gunning for fame in the first place. And Gregory Peck fucking sells it.

Of course, this is a Western from 1950, and the Production Code was still in effect. So no one should be surprised that Rico ends-up dead. What is surprising, and very well done, is the way that happens. I don't want to ruin it, but there's no big shoot out at high noon or any of that. Rico meets a sad end only a few moments after having his hope of a normal life rekindled, but he also manages to have his revenge on the man who gunned him down. There's a strong attempt to make Rico a sympathetic character, and that audience sympathy is used to play with genre conventions and allow for a complexity far beyond the black and white morality encouraged by the production code. Suffice to say that the man who kills Rico gets exactly what he wants, and the audience is left in no doubt that it won't be long before he realises just how truly bad a decision he's made.