The Gunfighter: the futility and tragedy of trying to escape a violent past

 

The Gunfighter (1950) is an excellent Western, made even more interesting because at the height of the genre’s popularity it began to question the myths it was propagating and started a theme of the ageing man of violence, who’s not so quick on the draw anymore, tired of brutality, haunted by the men he’s killed and whose reputation is such that he is now not only the object of unwelcome curiosity and obsequiousness but also the target of young toughs who want to prove themselves against the most famous gunslinger in the West and, in doing so, seize his mantle.

Gregory Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, based on the famous outlaw Johnny Ringo, who’s reached the stage of his life where he wants to give up his tempestuous past and settle down. He tracks down the woman he loved before he embarked on outlawdom and wants to persuade her that he’s a changed man and now wants to be a family man.

As he waits, holed up in the town saloon, for her to make her mind up, the local population becomes increasingly agitated by having such a famous visitor in their midst, the town’s children, in awe of his exploits, want to catch a glimpse of the legendary man; the local businessmen see a chance to make money; the women’s temperance leaders notice an opportunity to express their moral outrage; while the town’s young loudmouth talks himself into taking on the notorious fighter.

While all this uproar is taking place, a trio of brothers are closing in on Jimmy wanting revenge for the killing of a family member. It seems that Ringo’s dream of a new life, a peaceful life, with his past behind him, is going to elude him.

Henry King directed the film from a screenplay by William Sellers and William Bowers, based on an idea from Andre de Toth. De Toth, as both screenwriter and director, is responsible for some of the finest Westerns – Man in the Saddle, Carson City, Springfield Rifle, The Stranger Wore a Gun, Day of the Outlaw – while the film is also referenced in the Bob Dylan song, Brownsville Girl:

Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that
Kid down and string him up by the neck
Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath
Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death

Indeed, Gregory Peck quoted Brownsville Girl in 1997 when presenting Dylan with the The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.

Peck said in his speech: ‘Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called The Gunfighter about the lone man in town with people comin' in to kill him and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country... and the ages.’

The Bravados: revenge, Homer and Christianity

Revenge is a ubiquitous theme in Westerns. In frontier societies that have not yet acquired all the accoutrements of civilisation, such as the rule of law, the question of what is justice and, more importantly, how is to be achieved is inescapable. Indeed, it is what gives Westerns their Homeric flavour, makes them such an attractive genre for film-makers interested and inspired by the classical world and particularly the philosophy of The Odyssey and The Iliad.
 
But what of those makers of Westerns of a more Christian persuasion? While revenge is justified in the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – by the time we get to the New Testament, revenge is disparaged and Christians are advised not to seek it but to ‘turn the other cheek’.
 
The Christian edict eschewing revenge is problematic for Westerns, which are notorious for their ridiculing of religion, their assertion that it has no place in this world of violence, hostile landscapes, honour, shame and so on. The man who turns the other cheek in the West is a fool, a weakling, who would soon be dead.
 
An exception to the anti-religious bias of the Western is The Bravados (1958), which tries to temper the urge for revenge with a Christian perspective.
 
Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, a remorseless man on a mission, which is to see the men who raped and murdered his wife pay with their lives for their atrocity. He spends six months tracking them down and just when it seems his obsessive task has a been accomplished, with the four outlaws set to hang for an unrelated crime, the criminals stage a bloody escape.
 
Douglass now leads a posse hunting the fugitives, though, as one by one he finds them, it becomes clear that, vicious killers though they are, they may not have been responsible for the violation and killing of his wife. Is Douglass’s revenge still justified? And what has the pursuit of it turned him into? In tracking them down, has he not taken on their brutal characteristics? And what will their deaths actually achieve? They won’t restore the world before his wife’s murder. He will still have to live with the knowledge of her barbaric treatment.
 
It is these questions that place Westerns somewhere in the middle of the full-blooded Homeric concepts of revenge – where there is no time for questions of the psychological impact on the avenger or the long-term consequences of vengeance – and the Christian view of love your enemy, of empathy and forgiveness.
 
By all means, pursue revenge, Westerns tell us, but the original evil you have been subjected to will not be overcome, you and your life will not return to how it used to be. Your nightmares will not end.
 
Back to The Bravados, Henry King – a pioneer of Hollywood cinema – was more renowned for directing historical and romantic films, even if the three Westerns he directed, Jesse James, The Bravados and The Gunfighter are all classics of the genre. The dose of Catholicism he wants to inject into The Bravados is grating and can’t be reconciled with the Homeric affirmation of revenge or the Western’s more nuanced stance on the subject, which he seems to have embraced before his Christianity intervened. Still, when the film doesn’t get bogged down in overt theology, the depiction of the brutal landscape of the Texas-Mexico border is breathtaking and Peck’s performance is outstanding, and this is generally an excellent and interesting piece of work, which even has an ending that brings to mind the equivocal and troubling ending of Taxi Driver, rebuking and mocking society for its love of violence and those who perpetrate it.