Tramonto di fuoco

Rory Calhoun has had enough of being a gun man, so he goes into town, looking for a job punching cattle. Sheriff Dean Jagger wants him as a deputy. Jagger's daughter, Martha Hyer, thinks he'll be like all the others, addicted to the high-paying, thrills, and on his way soon. Robert Middleton thinks he's for sale. Sociopathic gun man Grant Williams is gigglingly upset at his lack of professional courtesy.

It's directed by Jack Arnold. He's best remembered for his 1950s scifi movies, monster fare with a tangy soupcon of subtext. It's here in this western programmer, pitched midway between the moribund B Western and the overblown A Western. There's a formality in the composition of the story, with its prologue in which Calhoun is saved by the wily smarts of longtime gunman James Millican. Millican plays his role with a dolorous mien, wishing he had a chance to do it all again, and take a real job. The actor had already received his own death sentence. This would be his last role, and he would be dead of cancer by the time it premiered. Perhaps that informs his performance.

More than that, there's a rigidity to the film's structure: here's a Western, it seems to say. We've been making them for more than half a century, and they all proceed this way: the good bad man, the bad bad man, the rich man trying to make a fortune by pitting one against the other, the sheriff, the pretty girl. How will it turn out? In many ways, it comments on the western itself. Where is it going? Television? Spaghetti westerns? What will become of Calhoun, the sheriff, the whole panoply? It won't mean what it meant to the audience that saw it in the theaters in 1956.