The Gunfighter (20th Century-Fox, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 1) I watched a double bill hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke of two films released in 1950 (but both shot a year earlier), Henry King’s The Gunfighter and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy. I last posted to moviemagg on Gun Crazy when my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of it in 2009 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/06/gun-crazy-king-brosunited-artists.html) but I really don’t have anything to add about it now. The Gunfighter was a quite downbeat Western starring Gregory Peck as Jimmy Ringo, veteran 35-year-old former gunslinger (Peck was 34 when he made the film) who is traveling through the Old West just wanting to be left alone. After briefly being run out of a previous town by a local sheriff when he kills a man who accosted him at a bar, Ringo shows up in the town of Cayenne (meaning “hot pepper”) where an old friend and former associate from his outlaw days, Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), is now the town marshal. Ringo is there to meet his former wife Peggy Walsh (Helen Westcott), mother of his son Jimmie Walsh (B. G. Norman), who’s changed her name and carefully erased her previous connection to the outlaw. Ringo sends messages to Peggy via Marshal Strett and also through Molly (Jean Parker), a singer at the Palace Saloon in Cayenne (though we don’t actually get to hear her sing).

The chief issue in the plot of The Gunfighter is that a lot of punk kids, and some punk not-so-kids, want to kill Jimmy Ringo because doing so will “make their bones” and establish them as legendary tough guys of the West. Dwight Macdonald, who especially admired this movie, said it was an occupational hazard among gunfighters similar to black lung disease among coal miners. He also called The Gunfighter a rare artistic triumph for an ordinarily mediocre director and an ordinarily mediocre star. I think he was being unfair to both Henry King and Gregory Peck; King had a real skill at getting actors to calm down and behave naturalistically on screen, like real people, and Peck moves through this movie with a kind of quiet desperation, at once resigned to his fate and anxious to find somewhere he can be left alone to go about his life without idiots with guns trying to knock him off. The film was based on a story by William Bowers and André de Toth (a director in his own right with some intriguing credits, among them the film noir drama The Pitfall with Dick Powell and his most famous film, House of Wax) and the screenplay was by Bowers and William Sellers. On TCM Mankiewicz said that one of the writers had told an interviewer that the inspiration for the film came from retired boxer and former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, who complained that whenever he went anywhere someone would come up to him and challenge him to a fight.

The Gunfighter was an excellent movie reflecting the subtlety and understatement characteristic of King’s direction (one shudders to think of what John Ford would have done with this story, even though Ford was one of the greatest Western directors of all time and his own late film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, has some of the same autumnal quality as The Gunfighter). It’s beautifully cast even though there’s only one star actor besides Peck – Karl Malden, who turns up as the owner and lead bartender of the Palace Saloon in Cayenne. But next to Peck’s, the best piece of acting in the film is by Skip Homeier, playing the apprentice gunslinger Hunt Bromley who finally brings Jimmy Ringo down. Homeier had an unusual career; he began on stage in a play called Tomorrow, the World!, about a young German-American boy who gets stuck in Germany when the Nazis take over and, when he returns to his family in the U.S., has become thoroughly indoctrinated in all the Nazi B.S. Homeier got to do the film version as well, which was made in 1944 (still during World War II), though like Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker he’d got too old for the role between the stage production and the film. Nonetheless, his performance in Tomorrow, the World! is chillingly effective, and he got to do a few other movies but rarely in a role as challenging as this one. With his dying breath Jimmy Ringo gets his revenge by insisting to the bartender and the marshal, as well as all the other people gathered around, that he drew and shot first – even though he didn’t – and both he and, after Ringo croaks, the marshal tell Bromley that by using his dying breath to spread that rumor, Ringo has sealed his fate because now everywhere Bromley goes, he’ll have to contend with nitwits trying to knock him off for the “honor” of being the man who killed the man who killed Jimmy Ringo.

Ethan Hawke said he got interested in The Gunfighter after hearing a song by Bob Dylan called “Brownsville Girl,” co-written with actor-playwright Sam Shepard, on Dylan’s album Knocked Out Loaded (1986). The song mentioned The Gunfighter, though it merely referenced a Gregory Peck Western and didn’t specify which one. But the connection was confirmed by Gregory Peck himself, who in presenting Bob Dylan the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in Washington, D.C. in 1997 said, “Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called The Gunfighter about the lone man in town with people coming in to kill him, and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin’ starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country … and the ages.” And Bob Dylan wasn’t the only legendary 1960’s rock ‘n’ roll musician whose path crossed with The Gunfighter: a young aspiring drummer in Liverpool named Richard Starkey saw it as a boy and it inspired him to use “Ringo Starr” as his stage name. After The Gunfighter and Gun Crazy, Turner Classic Movies on June 1 showed yet a third movie dealing with a fugitive on the run both from the law and his own past: Tomorrow Is Another Day, a 1951 production from Warner Bros., directed by Felix Feist (a director I know otherwise only from his 1936 musical short Every Sunday with Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin, and his 1953 science-fiction feature Donovan’s Brain with Lew Ayres and Nancy Davis, the second Mrs. Ronald Reagan) and starring Ruth Roman and Steve Cochran, though I find I’ve already posted about it in 2020 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/12/tomorrow-is-another-day-warner-bros-1951.html and so I won’t need to write any more about it.