Man with the Gun

There are westerns and there are westerns with many actors and then there is a Robert Mitchum western....in this film Mitchum plays a no nonsense, hard as nails character as a so called "town tamer"....he follows his estranged wife played coldly by Jan Sterling as she is the madame of a group of dance hall girls...Mitchum wants to make amends with his ex-wife Sterling but she is cold as ice toward him. Mitchum accepts the job as a combo sheriff and "town tamer" and then manages to shoot up the whole place and fight with anyone who gets in his way....he does not believe in taking any so called prisoners. Along the way Mitchum defends a local young man and his wife who are being terrorized by the local hoodlum who runs the town from his distant ranch. The town council soon gets very wary of Mitchum and wants to see him kicked out of the job...Mitchum in his normal, cold and calculating way tells the town to take a hike - that he wants to continue in his job. Check out a very young Angie Dickinson who plays a dance hall girl...must have been one of her first roles. In the end a good gun fighting scene with a set up dance hall girl and a town misfit played by Leo Gordon who along with the local kingpin rancher tries to wipe out Mitchum. Mitchum handles this role like a pro - cold and calculating, always looking over his shoulder for the next confrontation. One is never far away. A very young Karen Sharpe has a good role as a young housewife infatuated with Mitchum. In the end Mitchum is shot up and winds up in the arms of his estranged wife Sterling. Solid western, very enjoyable....Mitchum up to top standards as a hard charging sheriff. One of Mitchum's best B westerns.

I don't remember ever seeing this one before tonight, probably the title sounded so ordinary it kept passing me by. But it is a well crafted b Western, with an interestingly brooding storyline complemented by acting veering from the good to corny.

Robert Mitchum slopes into wide open town looking for his wife and news of their daughter, and stays for a time as town-tamer. As usual the good business folk have mixed emotions - they want to get rid of the baddies but like the business they bring. It still applies: relax drink and gambling laws and encourage the industries but pretend to deplore the seedy effects it can have on ordinary people. What's fascinating about this film is Mitchum's cynically intense portrayal in going about cleaning the town of baddies, and the townsfolk's acceptance that his violent methods were the only ones. Favourite bit: the sudden demise of 2 of the baddies in the Red Dog saloon. The firing of the main saloon bordered on nasty, but it was an effective way to combat the spread of poison.

Overall a very good film with its only fault tending to be a little hokeyness - not so good for Do-Gooders who would probably prefer a lifetime of negotiation with Evil rather than end it.

In Man With the Gun Robert Mitchum plays Clint Tollinger, a man who hires his gun out to clean out lawless towns in the west of which there seems to be a never ending supply. But he comes to this particular town in search of his estranged wife, Jan Sterling who since she left him has taken up the occupation as Madam of the local bordello. Of course the girls which include Barbara Lawrence and the still unknown Angie Dickinson are still called dance hall girls, but the Code was slowly cracking.

It's by chance he gets drawn into the town politics involving a big cattle baron who runs roughshod over every thing and every one in the general vicinity. The town council hires him to clean out the place of gunmen and sheriff Henry Hull makes it official by making him his deputy and giving him a free hand as per Mitchum's terms. The results ain't pretty.

Mitchum's a grim, bitter man heading the cast of a grim and bitter western. Part of his bitterness is the estrangement between him and Sterling. There's quite a history behind it as the movie shows.

Man With a Gun is a good western, but I have to say I was let down by the climatic gunfight at the end. It takes place on a deserted town street while most of the cast is at a town council meeting. James Westerfield plays a part similar to J. Edward Bromberg's role in Jesse James. He sets up a nasty ambush for Mitchum. But I think the plan fell flat in the writing. If Mitchum didn't suspect he was being set up before he did with gunman Leo Gordon following him, he was not the smart guy we'd been led to believe.

Of course if you want to see what I'm talking about then by all means see Man With a Gun.

Clint Tollinger arrives in a small town looking for his estranged wife and news of his daughter, tho he finds her, the chance of any sort of reconciliation is very slim. Whilst here, the sheriff and the important townsfolk learn of Tollinger's reputation as a pistol specialist town tamer. As they are living in fear of a mysterious landowner who is stripping the town from them bit by bit, they hold a meeting that chooses to hire Tollinger to rid the town of it's unsavoury elements.

Man With The Gun seems to be either a forgotten piece or a vastly under seen one, for at the time of me writing this, it has just over 200 votes and a paltry 9 user comments written for it on IMDb. It's a shame on either score because although the production values scream out that this is a "B" movie Western, this is a fine entry in the Western genre. That the piece takes on a rather standard plot theme of an harangued town turning to an avenging dark angel, probably hasn't done the film any favours over the years, I myself read the synopsis and thought it's just another in the line of similarly themed pictures. Yet I was pleasantly surprised to find a darkly dramatic picture boasting many enjoyable moments, both technically and as a functioning story.

Robert Mitchum is in the lead as Tollinger, perfectly cast, he strides thru the picture like some brooding menace. We often talk about the screen presence that John Wayne and Charlton Heston had (justifiably of course), Mitchum is right up there with the best of them. One sequence here sees him standing in the shadows at the back of a room as a meeting takes place, we don't see his face, but we can feel that piercing brood staring out at us! The rest of the cast are very much in Mitchum's shadow, so really it's solely with the big man that the films acting credentials are high. Perhaps it's unfair to single out Ted de Corsia for a kick? but Man With The Gun's minor failings are with its villains, and sadly de Corsia is lacking any sort of villainesque menace.

The score from Alex North is excellently layered (fans of Spartacus will certainly be pricking their ears up) and the cinematography from Lee Garmes is highly impressive when one realises that the majority of this picture was shot on the studio lot. Directed and co-written by first time director Richard Wilson, Man With The Gun holds few surprises for the genre, but it's dark in tone, violent and above all else, highly watchable. 7.5/10

there should be a sub-genre in the Western called 'the Robert Mitchum Western'. Mitchum's brilliant, idiosyncratic, usually undervalued Westerns import his film noir persona to etch some compellingly dark character sketches, and bring an elegiac world-weariness more familiar from the films of Sam Peckinpah. 'Man with the gun' is one of his best. Directed by Orson Welles protege Richard Wilson, it is a stark, monochrome beauty, full of chilling silhouettes and terrifying outbursts of savage violence, as Mitchum comes to tame a town terrorised by a monopolist with a private army. Mitchum's regression from soft-spoken stranger to deranged murderer, with a host of dark emotions in between, is a marvel of expressive, physical acting.