Death of a Gunfighter (1969)
Dir: Robert Totten, Don Siegel - Cast: Richard Widmark, Carroll O'Connor, Lena Horne, Dub Taylor, John Saxon, Morgan Woodward, Jacqueline Scott
(Note: if you haven't watched this movie yet, you might want to check it out first; this review contains spoilers)
This is an
intriguing, low-spirited western, in many ways a grim comment on the town
westerns of the fifties. However, it's best known for creating the pseudonymous
"Alan Smithee", used when directors who were members of the Directors
Guild of America disowned their own movie. Reportedly Widmark and the original
director (Robert Totten, a TV director making his feature debut) fell out and
eventually Don Siegel was asked to take over the movie. When it was finished,
Siegel refused to take screen credit for his work, but Widmark didn't want
Totten's name on the credits. The film was then credited to the fictitious
"Alan Smithee".
Richard
Widmark plays an aging town marshal, Frank Patch ("Old Patch"), who
was appointed by the townspeople when the West was still Wild and the town
needed a trigger-happy lawman for its protection. Today the marshal has become
an anachronism, a man who could scare off the new investors the townspeople are trying
to attract. When Frank kills a drunken citizen in self-defense, the townspeople
sustain the killing was unnecessary and ask Old Patch to leave, but Frank
refuses, because they had told him he could be their marshal as long as he desired
...
As said,
the film reads like a comment on fifties westerns, notably High Noon. Those
films had brought the town community front and center, as Don Graham put it in
an essay on High Noon. Until then their main function had been to set in high
relief the superior skills of the hero and the villain. Now they were shown with
all their human failings and defects, and the results weren't always pleasing. The
script of Death of a Gunfighter is literate, expressing America's ambiguous
relationship with guns and law enforcement; it shows how a once welcomed lawman
of the Wyatt Earp type, could become a nuisance and possible danger when he
refused to change his habits. At the same time it shows he hypocrisy of the
townspeople who have hired a person to do their 'dirty work' but simply decide
to get rid of him when he has become an obstacle for their future plans. The
town council has planned the departure of the man from the past, but doesn't
know how to proceed after his refusal, other than to do it 'his' way, that is: shoot him to pieces in the
town's street.
An aging
Richard Widmark is exactly the right man for the job: occasionally you get the odd
feeling that he is Old Patch, a man who has outlived his own time. He is
surrounded by a very fine ensemble of character players you know from numerous
other westerns. Carrol O'Connor (in his pre-Archie Bunker days) is a bit of a
surprise as the vile business man hatching plots against the marshal, ruining
other people's lives in the process. So
far so good, but there are a few drawbacks. Lena Horne is underused as the
woman Widmark all of a sudden decides to marry: a black singer and saloon owner
(and former prostitute) who has been his misstress for years, and there's also a superfluous subplot involving
John Saxon as a county sheriff of Greek descent who happens to be a former
protége of Old Patch. Both subplots, and the characters they're feature (one
black, one Greek) are supposed to underline the moral superiority of Widmark's
character. Like Philip French stated, it all feels very 'liberal', and very
unsubtle ...
And then
there's this violent, melodramatic ending. Like Ron Scheer I have some serious
reservations about it. This is what Ron has to say about the final scene:
"It’s
no easy task to pull off a story about a tough but likable lawman who gets shot
down in cold blood. To raise that kind of unhappy ending to the level of
tragedy, he has to do something or be someone who earns his death."
The ending
in particular reminds us of Siegel's The Shootist; we get the idea that Old
Patch stages his own death, as if he desires to create a final act to his own
show. But in the case of The Shootist, the arranged 'ultimate shootout' was
indeed a last hurrah, an honorable homage to a man, an era and a myth. In the
case of this movie, the final act feels like pseudo-execution, more suited to a
criminal than to a lawman who has served his town loyally over the years. And
indeed: the cruelty and excessive bloodletting of the movie's finale, seems
inspired by Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, released one year before.
*
References:
* Don Graham,
High Noon, 1979, University of New Mexico Press
* Philip
French, Westerns, Aspects of a movie genre, London, 2005
Links:
* Roger Ebert:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/death-of-a-gunfighter-1969
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