Death of a Gunfighter (1969)
As said, the film reads like a comment on fifties westerns, notably High Noon. Those films had brought the town community front and center and the townspeople were shown with all their human failings and defects (*1). The script of Death of a Gunfighter is literate, expressing America's ambiguous relationship with guns and law enforcement; it shows how a once welcomed lawman of the Wyatt Earp type, could become a nuisance and possible danger when he refused to change his habits. At the same time it shows he hypocrisy of the townspeople who have hired a person to do their 'dirty work' but simply decide to get rid of him when he has become an obstacle for their future plans. The town council has planned the departure of the man from the past, but doesn't know how to proceed after his refusal, other than to do it 'his' way, that is: shoot him to pieces in the town's street.
An aging Richard Widmark is exactly the right man for the job: occasionally you get the odd feeling that he is Old Patch, a man who has outlived his own time. Carrol O'Connor (in his pre-Archie Bunker days) might be a surprise as the vile business man hatching plots against the marshal, ruining other people's lives in the process. Unfortunately Lena Horne’s character of the black saloon owner and former prostitute (she has been Old Patch’s mistress for years and now marrying him) is a little erratic. There's also a superfluous subplot involving John Saxon as a county sheriff of Greek descent who happens to be a former protége of Old Patch. Most probably both characters (one black, one Greek) were supposed to underline the moral superiority of Widmark's character (characterizing him as a ‘liberal’), but it all feels rather forced and unsubtle.
And then there's this violent, melodramatic ending. Like Ron Scheer I have some serious reservations about it. This is what Ron has to say about the final scene:
"It’s no easy task to pull off a story about a tough but likable lawman who gets shot down in cold blood. To raise that kind of unhappy ending to the level of tragedy, he has to do something or be someone who earns his death."
The ending in particular reminds us of Siegel's The Shootist; we get the idea that Old Patch stages his own death, as if he desires to create a final act to his own show. But in the case of The Shootist, the arranged 'ultimate shootout' was indeed a last hurrah, an honorable homage to a man, an era and a myth. In the case of this movie, the final act feels like pseudo-execution, more suited to a criminal than to a lawman who has served his town loyally over the years. And indeed: the cruelty and excessive bloodletting of the movie's finale, seems inspired by Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, released one year before
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