Gunsight Ridge

Few actors portray brokenness as well as Mark Stevens, who stars in Francis D. Lyon’s Gunsight Ridge as Velvet Clark, a reluctant small town pianist who copes with his personal disappointments by holding up stage coaches and robbing banks, all behind a mask. When Mike Ryan (Joel McCrea) arrives in town and becomes deputy to sheriff Tom Jones (Addison Richards), who has been ineffective at tracking down the masked bandit, Velvet’s lucrative enterprise is threatened, so he goes on the offensive. Joan Weldon plays the sheriff’s daughter Molly, whose initial resistance to Ryan’s presence in town slowly changes to respect, and even romance. While it may not dive too deep into the souls of men, this is a meat and potatoes western with a violent noir underbelly which is supplied almost entirely by the tormented, pathological Velvet, the kind of villain who blows up a horse and shoots an old man’s corpse just to make sure he’s dead. Alternating between sweeping Arizona vistas, small town set pieces, and nighttime noir expressionism, the film boils down to man against man, culminating in a prolonged, intimate shootout on the titular ridge.