The Gunfighter

With the emergence of the western noir, psychological demons took center stage in the life of a cowboy. In fact, many of these films sought to deconstruct or demystify the tropes that had made earlier westerns so popular: one excellent example is director Henry King’s reinterpretation of the “fastest gun in the West” concept in The Gunfighter. Starring in the second of his six collaborations with King, a partnership which also produced the extraordinary The Bravados (1958), Gregory Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, a notorious gunfighter whose mere presence in a town incites total pandemonium. When Ringo returns home to visit his estranged wife Peggy (Helen Westcott) and little boy, a young buck named Eddie (Richard Jaeckel), showing off for the other saloon patrons, torments the mysterious visitor until Ringo’s forced to shoot the kid dead (in self-defense), after which he’s advised to skip town since Eddie’s three brothers are bound to seek vengeance. As he waits nearby to see Peggy and the boy before leaving for greener pastures in California, Ringo spends the rest of the film avoiding both external threats (more ambitious gunslingers, Eddie’s vengeful brothers) and internal torments, the dreams and nightmares of his gunslinging life colliding in the form of an identity crisis. Millard Mitchell is very good as the town marshal, Mark Strett, an old friend whose desire to protect Ringo conflicts with the public pressure to expel him from town (“This isn’t Deadwood or Tombstone”). The film is bleak and claustrophobic, yet it’s also a love letter, romantic and bittersweet, addressed to the very idea of the Old West.