O Matador

Is there any place, any retreat, any home of retirement, that an inevitably tiring gunman can move on to?

This predicament is best conveyed, explored and given its full tragic weight in Henry King's 'The Gunfighter.'

Ringo (Gregory Peck), wearing his reputation as the fastest gun in the south-west territories like a heavy load, enters each bar warily when he needs a quiet drink, knowing full well the reaction—fear, respect, perhaps admiration, and certainly the intervention in some form or other of a young upstart with itchy gun-fingers.

Although Ringo, guilty for previous sins, tries to refrain and to avoid the shoot-out... But he is always compelled to eliminate the worthless maladjusted gunmen, wishful for a big name...

The pattern is set early on when Peck has to shoot a boy (Richard Jaecke1) in self-defense. And so a feud begins—you feel it's only one of many—with the three brothers of the boy (Alan Hale Jr., David Clarke and John Pickard) hell-bent for revenge…

Peck deals with this situation, at least for the moment, sighs and then moves on to a place that passes for home... Here is his wife (Helen Westcott) and his son, who won't, however, be providing him with a welcome since in the eight years that husband and family have been apart the wife has been trying to build a life of their own… Here also is a sheriff (Millard Mitchell) formerly engaged in Peck's outlaw activities, but now reformed, and an old girl friend (Jean Parker) ready to he1p him in anything that concerns him most… His actual concern is reconciliation with his wife and a new life together… There is a tentative rapprochement but, of course, there is another of those young contender interventions, this time in the person of Skip Homeier…

Henry King draws up carefully the ultimate end of the 'top gun of the West.' His film is an inclination towards a classical tragedy, destined to be destroyed inevitably... Peck strikes the right note from his first edgy entry... He wants to shake off his past... He is disgusted to kill in order to survive... He is aimless for a change, sick with death and glory, showing tiredness of killing, conscious to a tragic fate one day...

Peck is superb in his brief and nervy reunion with his small son, impressed like the rest of the local kids by the fact that Jimmy Ringo, the gunfighter, is in town...

"The Gunfighter", keen and penetrating, explosive and tense, is beautifully acted, tautly directed and superbly photographed by Arthur Miller in black-and-white...

The Western is not my favorite genre. I've seen some of John Ford's classics and many B-Westerns. Of most I can't even remember the titles, but this one is different. It's much more a psychological study, without the grand landscapes, backgrounds or epic story lines. If John Ford's splendid cinematography is not for you, this one cuts back to the basics of human relationships, without the epic adventure many Westerns try to depict.

This film is skimmed down to an absolute minimum with Gregory Peck as Jimmy Ringo, notorious killer and the deadliest shot in the Old West. Though his appetite for bloodletting is over, Ringo is forced to stay on the run from young ambitious gunners determined to shoot him down. After killing an upstart in self-defense, he escapes to the nearby town of Caynenne. There, he hopes to convince his estranged wife (Helen Westcott) to resume their life together, but his arrival causes a sensation. With more young bucks gunning for him, Ringo's fate lies in the hands of the sheriff (Millard Mitchell), his old bandit partner.

With this film the old credo, "less is more", is evident. No great showdowns, not much action, just Gregory Peck in a great character study with carefully built-up tension. He never let me down, giving a fantastic performance, again.

Camera Obscura --- 9/10

I found every moment of this movie gripping. Now, I am a fan of the Western genre, but this one is one of my favorites along with The Oxbow Incident and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The "tough-guy who can not get away from his past/reputation" is a classic and Gregory Peck's performance has the perfect air of menace and weariness for the role. I recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys thoughtful and dramatic movies.

Meet the western, deglamorized: gunslinging makes you feel guilty, your ex is a prudish school teacher too hung up on your trail of corpses to see you, the town where you've decamped is filled with half-witted bums, puritans, celebrity-gazers and a most unlikely marshal, and somewhere on your trail are three brothers of the dead smart ass who drew on you in the last town. Jesus, do you need a whiskey.

No ordinary genre film, "The Gunfighter" (1950) is both a hugely satisfying entertainment and a conventional studio film with surprising depths. The surprise comes from the nature of the western in the mid-century where, with few exceptions, the black-and-white morality plays are as plain as the gunfire. Not so here, where we get the treat of seeing Gregory Peck play an antihero who has stepped far outside of conventional morality and now wants readmission, even though the bloodstains won't wash out. Welcome to Ambiguiety Gulch.

It's tempting to say that "Gunfighter" looks forward to the spaghetti western, especially in its themes of alienation and social revulsion. Frankly, though, it feels less like a western and more like a film noir. The feeling of claustrophobia is always near, whether in Peck's fear of another violent summons or in subplots involving the closeted desires of various townspeople to kill him (one gritty sequence in a boarding room is more unsettling than anything in Hawks or Ford). Surfaces are untrustworthy, motivations questionable, psychological derangement hovers in the wings, the "law" is both more and less than it appears, and as characters make startling pacts with their bloody pasts you can almost sense the triumphalism of the post-war years turning to anxiety and dread.

There are a handful of western films that have immersed me in the story and the characters so effectively that I never grow tired of viewing them. Even though I may have seen the film fifty times or more, I get so involved in the film that I hope that one plot element will change and the story will have a different ending. Those films are: "High Noon", "Shane", "The Shootist" and "The Gunfighter".

It was Peck's idea for Jimmy Ringo to have a mustache--to Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck's disgust. Zanuck thought that moviegoers liked to see a clean-shaven Peck. The picture was not a box office success at the time, but it ranks among the Top 10 western films of all time in my book.