The Gunfighter (1950)

As our opening credit crawl notes, "In the Southwest of the 1880s, the difference between death and glory was often but a fraction of a second. This was the speed that made champions of Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok. But the fastest man with a gun who ever lived, by many contemporary accounts, was a long, lean Texan named Ringo"

Now, as glorified as that preamble makes our notorious gunman out to be, the Johnny Ringo we actually meet as The Gunfighter (1950) gets to rolling proper is a study in sharp contrast.

Seems all of his old friends are dead, and his wildcatting ways have him worn down to a nub. And these feelings of wanting to abandon this outlaw life, and starting over before it all finally catches up with him, too, comes to the forefront when Ringo is once again goaded into another fight by some young upstart spoiling for a showdown, where he once more proves the faster draw -- but only barely.

Then, trying to stay ahead of the dead-man's vengeful brothers, Ringo (Peck) heads to Cayenne, where his long estranged wife (Westcott) works as a school teacher, rearing a son he's never met.

Turns out the local Marshall (Mitchell, who is fantastic) used to run with Ringo in the old days but has long since reformed. And while the arrival of Ringo is a cause célèbre for the rest of the town, Marshall Strett does his best to run interference with any local hot-heads who would want to take a shot at Ringo -- namely a young punk named Bromley (Homeier, equally fantastic), looking to make a name for himself -- and move his notorious friend along before any trouble starts.

But Ringo refuses to leave before he talks to his wife, who initially refuses. And as the clock keeps ticking, like a child's puzzle, all the pieces of this rousing melodrama click into place, leading to an inevitable but fantastic climax and resolution that packs one helluva lasting punch.

This is a film that always gets unjustly overlooked when talking about the greatest Westerns of all time. Maybe it's because The Gunfighter is so atypical of the genre; so lean, and so economical, it all boils down to a 'country cottage' melodrama and character study of a man trapped by his own reputation, which has been clouded and diluted over the years with exaggerations and falsehoods. A reputation he is sick of. And a reputation that is about to catch up with him -- in a one way ticket to Boot Hill sense.

The film was loosely culled from the real life exploits of John Peters Ringo, who was a distant cousin of the Younger Brothers (-- who ran with Frank and Jesse James). And according to legend, Ringo also ran with the Cochise County Cowboys and was a ruthless killer, whose exploits included going up against Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881 -- cinematically recreated many times over in things ranging from My Darling Clementine (1946), to Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), to Hour of the Gun (1967), to Tombstone (1993).

But unlike his cinematic counterparts (John Ireland, Michael Biehn), Ringo would survive the notorious shootout at the OK Corral and Earp's vengeful purge. And like in this cinematic version, the real Ringo later made an effort to reconcile with his family but, unlike the film, he was summarily rejected. Extremely despondent over this, Ringo is alleged to have gone on a violent ten-day drinking binge before finally turning his gun on himself and, in a fit of despair, committed suicide.

The story was originally co-scripted as The Big Gun by William Bowers and André de Toth -- The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953), House of Wax (1953). They offered it to Columbia, who envisioned the role going to John Wayne. But Wayne's long-standing hatred of Harry Cohn saw him passing on the part -- a decision Wayne would later come to regret. But Wayne would eventually do a stealth remake of The Gunfighter as The Shootist (1976), where, in true Wayne fashion, the aging outlaw goes out on his terms, not anybody else's.

Meanwhile, with no star attached to it, the script was shelved by Columbia and eventually sold off to 20th Century Fox, where it continued to molder on the shelf until it was eventually dug up by, strangely enough, Roger Corman.

According to his own legend, as documented in his autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost A Dime (1990), before he became the undisputed king of exploitation filmmaking in the 1950s and beyond, when he was first starting out, Corman got a job at Fox in 1948.

Roger Corman.

“The father of a friend of mine knew somebody at Fox and got me my first studio job,” said Corman. “I became a messenger on the Fox lot down by Pico and Motor. The job paid $32.50 a week. It never occurred to me that $32.50 was a low salary. Quite the contrary, this was clearly a breakthrough. I was in.” And it wasn’t long before Corman was working his way up the studio chain, surely but never slowly.

“At Fox, messengers were quite competitive for the right beats [to cover]. They fought to work on the producers’ floors, not the production managers’ floors … For six weeks I rode a bike and delivered messages, letters, film cans, packages, whatever. What excited me was observing the machinery of filmmaking.”

Then, seeing an opportunity, Corman approached a studio manager and offered to work the weekends for free “just to be on the sets and soak up what I could.” He would also pull some off-hour script reading duties for the story department. A strategy that soon paid off.

“When an opening came up [in the story department], I got the job. Incredibly, my salary doubled to $65 a week and I was now a story analyst at Fox," said Corman. "As the low man, I generally got the worst assignments -- ‘spec-scripts’ recommended by agents, who were anything but impartial. It was extremely frustrating. I plowed through two scripts a day and recommended very few. It wasn’t that I was unusually tough. Most of them were just unusually bad.”

But when word came down the line that the studio was looking for a suitable vehicle for Gregory Peck, something “classy, offbeat," Corman recalled the script for The Big Gun, which had already been read over by one of his friends in the department, who found the script “good but not exactly right.”

Said Corman, “I quietly retrieved it from the files, read it over, rewrote the coverage, and then added notes as to how certain stretches that weren’t ‘right’ could be made to work … It was more a psychological study than a simple shoot-’em-up.” When finished, “I handed it in to one of the top executives in charge of the department,” who complimented Corman on his efforts and felt The Big Gun had potential with his revisions.

But when it was actually chosen to go into production as The Gunfighter, that executive got a fat bonus, which failed to trickle down to the guy who actually did all the work. “I was angry, but there was nothing I could do,” said Corman. “It definitely changed the way I felt toward work as a story analyst. I learned a crucial, if disillusioning, lesson about how the studio system works.”

Corman would quit his job at Fox not long after and left the country to study abroad, setting the stage for his triumphant return as an independent filmmaker and the gonzo mini-movie mogul we all love today.

Omaha World Herald (June 22, 1950).

But Corman wasn't the only one to punch up the script for The Gunfighter, with producer Nunnally Johnson and William Sellers also taking a revising run at it. Frequent Peck collaborator Henry King -- 12 O'Clock High (1949), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) -- was tasked with directing and does an excellent job, as does pioneering editor, Barbara McClean, cutting it all together. (I love the throwaway bits, like the two drunks fighting in the street that fails to impress the gathered crowd.)

In front of the camera, Peck is ably supported by a cast of rock-solid character actors, including Karl Malden, Ellen Corby and Jean Parker. And once again, Millard Mitchell manages to steal another Western right out from under another mega-star -- just like he did to Jimmy Stewart the very same year in Winchester '73 (1950).

And then there's Skip Homeier, whose enigmatic presence, to me, always elevates everything he shows up in -- from this, to Fixed Bayonets (1951), to The Tall T (1957), to The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966).

Homeier is so good in this as that weasel Bromley. In the original ending, after gunning down Ringo, Bromley is arrested by Strett. But when Daryl Zanuck screened the rough cut, he apparently blew his top, sending King and Johnson scrambling to fix the resolution.

These mandated changes resulted in a much more satisfying ending, where Ringo's dying wish is to let Bromley go, a bit of poetic justice, as now everyone will be gunning for the man who gunned down Ringo -- but not before Strett gets his pound of flesh first before sending the punk on his way "to get killed someplace else."

Despite all the clout in front of and behind the camera, and a favorable critical reaction, The Gunfighter would fare poorly at the box office, which has gone a long way toward its dubious reputation. Most of the blame fell on the star. Well, not the star but his mustache -- backed up by hundreds of scathing comment cards and weepy fan letters demanding the star never sport a nose-broom again.

The studio wasn't too keen on it to begin with, but Peck had demanded that he be allowed to have it, claiming period authenticity. And he probably got away with it because at the time filming began, the head of production at Fox, Spyros Skouras, was on vacation. And by the time he got back and saw the rushes, too much of the film was in the can, making it too late to shave it off and start all over. Ever since, whenever Skouras ran into Peck, he would remind him how that mustache cost them millions of dollars.

As for me? Meh. I think the mustache looks fine. And I cannot recommend The Gunfighter, the movie it "ruined,” highly enough.

Originally posted on November 2, 2015, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

The Gunfighter (1950) Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation / EP: Darryl F. Zanuck / P: Nunnally Johnson / D: Henry King / W: William Bowers, William Sellers, André De Toth, Roger Corman, Nunnally Johnson / C: Arthur C. Miller / E: Barbara McLean / M: Alfred Newman / S: Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier