The Gunfighter: You Can’t Go Home Again

The Gunfighter is a film that, already in 1950, assumes we’re up to speed on the myth stuff, and asks us to consider the making of these icons as a part of the story. Rather than lingering on the gun-fighting renown of its hero, or giving us a braggart or someone tightly coiled, prone to swift violence, it gives us a long, lean, unflappable Gregory Peck—a presence, to be sure, but one very much at odds with the prevailing idea of a vigilante. What Peck shows us is how tired this man is, and how badly he wants out of life on the run from his own reputation. As if anyone could live up to such a reputation, even if he wanted to. What is a man like Ringo—whose rumored body count goes as high as fifty, depending on whom you ask—supposed to look like? Not like Peck usually did; his mustache here apparently so violated the star’s image that executives wanted it changed. But this is of a piece with King’s vision, which short-circuited the western repertoire to aim for unadorned realism. A genre audience trained on desert landscapes, murderous, alienated Native people, westward aspirationalism, and the like won’t find much of that here. Instead, we get a man looking to craft a redemption for himself—with redemptive arcs becoming another of the tropes King is undermining here. Ringo has come to Cayenne to see his wife, Peggy Walsh (Helen Westcott), and their young son for the first time in eight years. He’s here to take them away, into a future free of the cycle of violence that, by the time Peggy finally gives him the chance to propose his plan, has already made his death inevitable.

The Gunfighter paired King with producer Nunnally Johnson, in their second western outing, but this time with the addition of the elite film-noir mind of Andre de Toth, who conceived the story with screenwriter William Bowers (Bowers went on to cowrite the script with William Sellers). It was Bowers’s idea to borrow from one version of the history of an altogether minor figure: Johnny Ringo, a peripheral member of the Clanton gang and onetime opponent of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. Besides an evident skill with a pistol, there are few similarities between the real Ringo and the hero of King’s film. But one other detail is consistent: his murder at the hands of a man who not only gave him no chance to draw but bragged about that fact.

This is what it means to suggest that The Gunfighter peers inward, and that in doing so it represents an intriguing pivot in the history of the western. The presiding sense of fate that accompanies Ringo into Cayenne is what makes the character feel familiar but also out of place in this genre at this time. His arrival is, after all, a bona fide event. Word about it gets around, and if anyone has a job, few seem eager to do it. The local girls get the day off from school because the boys, hoping to witness a gunfight, are playing hooky and loitering outside the saloon. King takes pleasure in watching the news travel, his swift tracking shots picking up bits of detail and healthy heaps of shit-talk along the way. We see the moment that the town’s moral gatekeepers—a fastidious troupe helmed by a Mrs. Pennyfeather (the great Verna Felton, in a very Verna Felton role)—catch wind of these goings-on, by chance, on a visit to the store; we see the moment that Hunt Bromley learns the news, too, in a barbershop, where what ought to have amounted to idle chatter instead becomes the information that does Ringo in.

But what really seals Jimmy Ringo’s fate is the emotional baggage weighing him down and keeping him in Cayenne, the past that is catching up with him—an idea deftly literalized by the plot itself, with its insistently cyclical sense of comeuppance. In this way, the film has a noirish fatalism that is key to its enduring resonance. You certainly couldn’t argue that it was the first film of its kind to trawl the dark. But to do so with so little outright violence—to displace half of the film’s tension onto the question of the man’s future and his aspiration for reconciliation with his family, rather than making it merely the shoot-’em-up revenge tale it teasingly imitates—was something new.

The shoot-outs are a case in point: precisely staged and cut, beautifully gestural and psychological in their implications, but almost completely obfuscatory in their approach to violence. Just look at the opening inciting incident—which takes place in the town Ringo stops in before Cayenne—wherein the young upstart Eddie tries to take on Ringo, as Ringo could have predicted someone would, and dies for it. Ringo is at the bar; the conversation heats up; and suddenly we confront Ringo, a glass of whiskey in one hand, letting his shooting hand dangle near his holster with the intensity of a rattlesnake’s rattle. We cut to Eddie, who draws—and when a shot rings out, he falls out of the frame. We return to Peck, gun now in his hand, the shot still ringing in the air. But King—and editor Barbara McLean, whose rhythmic handling of not only this scene but the introduction of every new space and pivot in the film is another key to its success—has denied us the goods: Oughtn’t we get to see the famed gunfighter draw? Everyone else did—this becomes the subject of the scene. “Did you see that?” Ringo asks. Multiple men attest that they did. He asks because the fact of who drew first is the legal difference between self-defense and outright murder—though, so far as Ringo’s body count and reputation are concerned, it is clear the distinction is of no consequence.

One of the great joys of The Gunfighter, one of its most recognizably human touches, is in fact one of its most melancholic details: the shadow that crosses Peck’s face every time a barkeep tries to engage Ringo in a game of “Remember when . . .”; it’s the same deflated, agitated look he gets when it’s clear that a young man on his periphery is heading his way with aggression on his mind. Ringo isn’t exactly one to kill and tell, but it’s more than implied that he was once young and reckless. It’s his old friend and former fellow vigilante Mark (Millard Mitchell) who alludes to the man Ringo once was, the one who wanted to be “top gun of the West,” whose lifestyle once drove his family away but who now seems, if not regretful, at least thoughtful on the subject of violence. “Guess I got more people wondering when I’m gonna get killed than any other man in the country,” says Ringo. “You don’t sound as happy about it as you did the last time I saw ya,” says Mark.

A lot can change in eight years. An infant can grow into a healthy young child, for example. An outlaw like Ringo can live long enough to see his own youth catching up to him by way of violent karma. And an outlaw like Mark—now the marshal of Cayenne—can live to change his ways. Can Ringo? He tries; there’s an effective scene a ways into The Gunfighter in which Ringo, mistaken for one of Mark’s deputies, witnesses the “decent” women of Cayenne, led by Mrs. Pennyfeather, demanding that Mark do something about the presence in their town of Ringo, whom they believe, in unambiguous terms, to be a murderer. So here’s Ringo’s chance to mount a defense for himself. That he’s forced to make his appeal to a group of women foreshadows the appeal to come—to his wife, whom he spends much of the film waiting to see. His defense? Self-defense. One thinks back to the moment of Eddie’s shooting and Ringo’s insistent canvassing of  the witnesses: “Did you see that?”