Shoot Out (1971)

Two years after Henry Hathaway made True Grit (and at the age of 73), he directed this western with Gregory Peck. It’s a handsome film shot in New Mexico and the Sierras of California, with a notable score by Dave Grusin.

Peck manages to plausibly play an ex-con bent on revenge and a man whose fatherly instincts emerge when he’s put in charge of a six-year-old girl. The role is a reprise of Atticus Finch, but with six-guns and a prison record. Somewhat implausibly, the screenplay claims to be based on Will James’ fictional autobiography, Lone Cowboy.

Plot.  Peck is released from prison after serving a seven-year sentence for bank robbery. While leaving the scene of the crime, his partner shot him in the back, and Peck refused to name him at the time of his trial. Now he plans to find the man and even the score between them.

Expecting some money from a former lover in Kansas City, he is surprised when the train delivers instead a small motherless girl (Dawn Lyn). After trying unsuccessfully to get someone to take her off his hands, he takes her along with him on his mission of revenge. Doing the math, he (and we) suspect that the girl is really his daughter. She is feisty and mouthy and adorable most of the time, though sometimes you wish someone would tell her to shut up, and Peck eventually does.

Dawn Lyn and Gregory Peck

The pair of them are being followed by three punks in the hire of the man Peck intends to kill (James Gregory). Led by a young tough (Robert F. Lyons), they have with them a saloon girl (Rita Gam), whose shrill complaints would put cracks in plaster. Together they are like a street gang as imagined in West Side Story.

The crisis in the film comes as the gang invades the home of a widow and her young son, who have given Peck and the girl shelter on a rainy night. The gang’s wanton violation of the sanctity of hearth and home produces a scene that gets creepy with dread, especially as Lyons takes to shooting pieces of fine china off the head of the girl. After long minutes of scary suspense, Peck finally gets the upper hand. What’s left for him is the final meeting with Gregory and the settling of yet another score with Lyons.

Four stars. This is an above-average western, made when the golden age of the Hollywood western was about over. Peck brings an ease to his character that is evident from the first scene as he makes clear to the prison warden that he has not been rehabilitated by his term behind bars. He still has plenty of fight in him.

The supporting cast includes the excellent Jeff Corey, who plays a saloon owner in a wheelchair. Lyons, on the other hand, plays a sadistic villain who is as much punk as psychopath, and you can weary of his unrelenting mockery and malice. Here are all of them in an early scene:

Despite its GP rating, this is a movie meant for adults. There’s some coarse language. Even the little girl swears. For the time, the sexuality is fairly frank, as two of the gang make a three-way with Gam’s saloon girl, and we get a glimpse of frontal nudity. Their raucous carryon interferes with the post-coital mood of Peck and another woman in the next room.

Shoot Out is currently available online and streamable at netflix. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Films, hop on over to Todd Mason’s blog.

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Image credits:

Peck and Lyn, themoviescene.co.uk

Coming up: Max Brand, Red Hawk's Trail (1925)

The Stalking Moon (1968)

You can’t so much see as feel reverberations of the turmoil in the streets in this 1968 western directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck. Both had worked together in the making of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and it’s hard to think of two movies more different from each other.

Plot. Based on a 1965 novel by western writer T. V. Olsen, the film has a plot you could write on the back of an envelope. Peck is retiring after 15 years as a scout in the service of the U.S. Cavalry. When he leaves, he agrees to take with him a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) discovered in a roundup of Apaches. She has with her a young son, whose father is one of the men of the tribe.

The father pursues them, eventually tracking them to Peck’s ranch, where he unsuccessfully attempts to abduct Saint, then one by one kills the two other men living at the ranch. Peck, having been shot once in the shoulder, leaves the cabin on foot to find the Indian. After an exchange of rifle fire and a knife wound in the leg, Peck is finally in hand-to-hand combat with the Indian and manages to kill him.

Spinning the genre. This seems to have been Mulligan’s only western. If screenwriter Alvin Sargent wrote any other western scripts, this seems to have been the only one to make it to the screen. He’s better known for his adaptations of Lillian Hellman’s Julia (1977) and the novel Ordinary People (1980). Today he’s writing Spiderman scripts.

What the director and screenwriter are up to in this movie is not all that easy to guess. Not only the plot is stripped down to a few basic elements. The dialogue is spare. Whole scenes are almost wordless.

The film refuses to offer even the suggestion of romance between Peck and Saint. Mulligan has deliberately prevented any glimmer of affection between them. Peck takes her on at his cabin as a cook and housekeeper only. The closest they come to any intimacy occurs in a scene where he tries to reassure her, drawing her closer to him, and she tentatively places her cheek on his shoulder.

Racial divides. The silence has something to do with Saint’s character. Separated from whites for a half dozen or more years, she speaks hesitantly and simply, as if English has become a forgotten language. There’s little expression in her face beyond apparent dread of recapture by her captor. There is also their son, who maintains a continuing look of incomprehension and speaks not at all.

She also retains her Indian appearance, her blonde hair a long thick thatch, lifeless from years of wind, sun, and desert air. She exists in a kind of limbo on the boundary between two cultures. As in her speech, she moves slowly and stiffly. Her son remains unchanged, in buckskin with long dark hair and a headband.

Robert Forster plays a half-breed scout for the cavalry, who follows Peck to his ranch to warn him that he’s being stalked by Saint’s Indian husband. Forster’s character has mostly crossed over the racial divide. He is bilingual and wears white clothing except for a breechcloth. He tries to draw out the boy, attempting to teach him poker and to count in English, but with little success.

Meanwhile, Saint’s Indian husband is a powerful presence for being mostly absent until the end. We get only glimpses of him, usually from a distance. He is murderously savage and leaves a trail of corpses as he pursues Peck. In his stealth, he seems to possess almost superhuman powers.

Red Rock Canyon, Nevada (CC) Stan Shebs

Peck. Gregory Peck had done several other westerns, notably The Gunfighter (1950). He seems not altogether comfortable in this one. There’s much footage of him on foot, tracking across rocky terrain (beginning with the credits), through woods, and over mountains. Called upon to express thoughts and emotions without putting them into words, he often looks uncertain.

You keep wanting to hear that deep, resonant voice of his, and you realize how much of Peck’s performance was in the way he spoke lines. Physically, he lacks the athletic presence of a cowboy actor like Randolph Scott. The costumers have hidden him inside a fleece-lined coat much of the time, and with his flat-brimmed hat he bears maybe too much resemblance to a forest ranger.

Wrapping up. In the search and destroy aspects of the plot, the men are like foot soldiers tracking an unseen enemy, and the movie alludes to a war that was currently being fought in Southeast Asia. Whether it has anything to say about that war is open to question. In some ways, it shows how Peck’s character is drawn into a conflict he never wanted. At the beginning, he overcomes a deep resistance to offering the woman and her son assistance.

As he must eventually defend and protect her, he risks his life to neutralize this indigenous threat to all of them. Not a warm or demonstrative man, he grows even more cold-blooded, especially when his friend, played by Forster, is killed. His friend dies in his arms, with hardly a word spoken, and Peck reaches a gloved hand to stroke his face. It is the only moment of heart-felt emotion in the entire film.

Whether Mulligan and Sargent achieved what they set out to do with this film is hard to guess. In a story about a woman abducted by Indians, they seem to have been after more realism than a similar western, Comanche Station (1960), reviewed here a while ago. And the result is strangely cool, a story told in a minor key, as is much of the music track. Accounting for the fact that she is still alive, Saint says to Peck, “I didn’t have the courage to die.” That desolate and traumatized tone pervades the movie.

While the story is set in Arizona and New Mexico, it was shot in Nevada, partly in Red Rock Canyon, and the widescreen glows at times with its stark beauty. The film is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies is the much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes

The Gunfighter (1950)

In spite of turning 60 this year, this western has aged well. Its story successfully mixes irony, melodrama, realism, suspense, and humor. Direction and cinematography are also first rate. You can tell it was a project everyone believed in.

Gregory Peck plays the gunfighter of the title, Jimmy Ringo, a man in his mid-30s who’s been on the run since his gang broke up a few years back. He’s quick on the draw and has a reputation for having killed up to 50 men who’ve tried to outgun him.

When he shows up in his hometown of Cayenne, New Mexico, he causes a considerable stir. The schoolhouse empties as the boys gather outside the saloon to catch a glimpse of him. Having had such a celebrity as a customer, the saloon keeper (Karl Malden) expects his business to boom. An aspiring gunfighter (Skip Homeier) is eager to become known as “the man who shot Jimmy Ringo.” Meanwhile, the father of one of Ringo’s alleged victims gets out his shotgun to avenge his son’s death.

Ringo’s reason for being there is to see the woman he left behind (Helen Westcott) and the eight-year-old boy who is their son. Given his frame of mind, he seems to sense that his life may soon be over and he wants to make amends. As he waits for her in the saloon, he is reminded of how his life might have been different.

An old friend and partner in crime is now the town marshal (Millard Mitchell), and a young rancher comes in for one - just one - drink. When he leaves, he has revealad himself as the hard-working, enterprising, and optimistic solid citizen Ringo could have become.

But Ringo’s time is running out in more ways than one. In the opening scenes of the film, in a different town, he’s challenged by another young man with a gun (Richard Jaekel), who winds up spread eagled and lifeless on a barroom floor. Ringo has to make a quick departure, the boy’s three brothers in hot pursuit.

Yellow Sky (1948)

This post-war western is set somewhere in the Southwest in post-Civil-War 1867. Gregory Peck leads a gang of six bank robbers who escape across a vast salt flat and fetch up in a ghost town. Like Prospero and Miranda, a prospector and his granddaughter are the only inhabitants. They’ve successfully extracted a fortune in gold, and the gun-toting granddaughter (Anne Baxter) is all for the gang’s immediate departure.

You can forget any memory of Peck as kindly Atticus Finch. He is fully believable as a tough-as-nails gang leader, who isn’t leaving town without the gold or the girl. For both, he has to contend with two fellow gang members, played by a snarly Richard Widmark and tall, dark, and long-legged John Russell (TV’s “Lawman”). Harry Morgan (TV’s Col. Potter on “M.A.S.H.”) plays another member of the gang. Well-written, well directed, well cast, the gang is a well-drawn collection of individuals, each with his own personality and intentions.

While the men are also well outfitted for their various roles as desperate men of the period, Anne Baxter looks like she stepped straight off the cover of a pulp novel. She’s wearing a man’s shirt for a top, and a very snug pair of Levi’s. She’s as tough as any man in the bunch, keeps a shotgun handy, and goes by the name of “Mike.”

Anyone analyzing gender roles in the film would have a heyday with this. One objective of the story is to “feminize” her character. The presence of the men competing for her attention is supposed to awaken her sexuality, long-starved by her life in the desert. By the end of the film, she’s wearing a bonnet and there’s the distinct possibility of a wedding. (I won’t give away which of the six men she picks.)