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The faster the gun, the faster the story travels
Talking of guns and America reminded me of the novelty of The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), an off-kilter sleeper of a B-Western determined to extract every last irony from its title's cliché. Less revisionist than mischievous, it runs its well-whiskered tropes—town under threat, shootist with a past, fate-filled showdown—into a pulp fable of gunplay as a clash of anxieties, a sly, not totally over-psyched tweak of the prevailing mythos that nonetheless leaves the decently considered impression that a fast-draw honor culture is nuts.
To the frontier flyspeck of Cross Creek in 1889, it's just the latest news that comes in with the stage: "Clint Fallon was killed in a gunfight! Happened over in Silver Rapids! McGovern's got the collar button Fallon was wearing when he got killed!" No one expects the natural eagerness of the eyewitness to impart his experience or the armchair quarterbacking of his audience to rile the normally, almost notoriously temperate George Temple (Glenn Ford) to the point of ordering them out of his general store, then startling them in the saloon by drinking his way through a bottle of the first whiskey anyone can remember seeing him touch in his four years in town. Then again, no one seems to have known that the mild-mannered ribbon clerk owned the well-notched Colt SAA with which he follows up an irritably delivered, uncertainly received lecture on the mechanics rather than the myths of gunslinging with a display of trick shooting that approaches the impossible, blasting two silver dollars out of the air in the same draw and shattering—it's trick photography, but lining up the shot straight into the camera makes for an audacious fourth-wall blast—a mug of beer the split second it's dropped. It makes him the toast of the town's menfolk; it sparks a long-brewing fight with his pregnant wife Dora (Jeanne Crain) that begins to make sense of her allusions to Dodge City, Deadwood, Cheyenne; it inspires him to try to hang up his gun, or at least turn it over to the town's minister during Sunday services before moving on himself. "Before you know it, top guns from all over will be coming to Cross Creek to find out just how fast I am . . . You don't want them here." Through nothing more than a need for fresh horses after a holdup, however, Cross Creek is already on course for a collision with Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford), the volatile outlaw who called out Clint Fallon in his insatiable quest to be recognized as "the fastest gun there is." The blind bystander of that scene-setting duel warned him, Teiresias-style, as the gunsmoke settled: "No matter how fast you are, there's always somebody faster."
Directed and co-written by Russell Rouse from Frank D. Gilroy's "The Last Notch" (1954), The Fastest Gun Alive started as an episode of The U.S. Steel Hour (1953–63) and retains a certain staginess of structure and dialogue for all the hard natural light and winter-thrown shadows captured like photojournalism by George J. Folsey; at the same time it shows signs of having been opened out by an extra half-hour, less in the slow unwrapping of George's gun-wizardry than its tendency to interrupt the tensions building in Cross Creek with a hoedown, a heist, the vengeful pursuit of the posse which is tailing Harold and his men in turn. When it just holds its attention on George under the burning glass of his own secrets, the picture is riveting. As we learn from a monologue which would be right at home in a jidaigeki, his preternatural skills are the legacy of his father, a legendary town-tamer who trained his son since childhood to surpass him in the ways of the gun, effectively endowing the younger man with a superpower which George has spent his life running away from, even when it meant leaving his own father's death unavenged. Even in a psychological Western, tapping at its conventions and turning them upside down to see what falls out, it's an ingenious twist. Where most gunslingers of his caliber are hiding out from what they've done, George Kelby Jr. is hiding from what he hasn't and doesn't want to. His fear of violence includes his own capacity for it, but in a culture where manhood is measured by force of arms, he can't reconcile himself to the peaceable life for which he is actually, temperamentally suited when it requires him not to care if he's lightly negged around a punch bowl for drinking nothing stronger than cider, if his unarmed status stands out a high-country mile in a town where children beg their fathers to let them trade in their wooden six-shooters for the real thing, if his neighbors who wear their guns like men who want to blow their own dicks off swagger around him as if they personally cleaned up Abilene, and his inability to keep a lid on his thin-skinned shame and his festering pride has kept him and his wife from any kind of permanent, truthful life. He still practices with the gun he loathes, well beyond the town limits where no one can see the cool-handed speed with which he makes the rocks jump in the ring of the sandstone buttes, hatless as usual in the head-bending sun. He would be an easier character if he were just a little funnier or more attractively tormented, but Ford plays him with genuine miserable discomfort, a man who can't stand the inside of his own skin and can't fit into anyone else's, a long-legged, slump-shouldered streak of flop sweat who uncoils with dangerous lightness with a piece in his hand, so long as it isn't pointing to its logical conclusion. He handles a late chestnut of a line with similar intelligence: "That's right," he agrees as he retrieves his gun, "I'm so afraid, I'm sick to my stomach . . . You just don't say a word, Lou. 'Cause a word is just about all it would take to stop me. Just don't say anything." More than one actor would have made this statement with some wryness, the back-handed bravery of admitting fear. Ford's George who has nothing left to hide from the people he's made part of his personal disaster delivers it without any joke at all, quietly and a little impatiently while his hands go on with their competent, preoccupied work of tying down the holster and checking the chambers, as if he really means it. The demons of the man he's about to face are even blunter than his own, compensating for a wife who ran off in El Paso with the endless cordwood of the bodies of other men. It is stupidly Freudian, but the very unsubtlety of the argument makes it interesting—no one in this movie carries a gun like one of those cool, easy heroes of unchallenged masculinity, dispensing the necessary violence of justice with enviable grace. Instead of badges of virility, they are advertisements of insecurity, self-sabotage, obsession. Clear-eyed as she is, Dora didn't really worry about her husband until she saw him strapping on the gun he hadn't drowned in Miller's Pond after all. She could be talking about a lot of things when she says bitterly, "I kept asking myself, how can it happen without the gun?"
Because the denouement requires its hero to draw his gun in a good cause if only once in his life, I can't call it anywhere near as radical as The Capture (1950), but The Fastest Gun Alive does seem to look for Western expectations to kick over, like the late-breaking rug-pull that while he wasn't exaggerating when he revealed himself as "the fastest gun alive—faster than Wyatt Earp, faster than Billy the Kid, faster than Fallon and faster than the man who killed him," George was lying by an important omission: "I've never drawn against a man." His flash-bang reflexes have never been tested under fire. His father left those notches on his man-killing Colt. Never mind the courage it will take him to step out of the church and into a high noon's main street, if he's scared enough in his first and unavoidable gunfight, he might fumble his draw or freeze on the trigger and leave a kerosene-soaked Cross Creek to the mercies of Vinnie Harold who made his exit from a bank by shooting an unarmed customer just because "I like to be remembered," but if he succeeds in defending the town as this raw-nerved exorcism demands of him, he'll have used his much-hated marksmanship to kill someone. It makes the most satisfying outcome of this ordeal—much more so than the anticipated rehabilitation of the recalcitrant fast gun—the stinger of the double funeral which the posse finds the good citizens conducting, the names and dates on the temporary markers testifying to a mutual annihilation of pistoleers. The eulogies observe the same care with the truth as the man they honor: "He wanted it that way." Quite alive as the crowd disperses and beginning to smile at Dora as he has never before done where we could see, George isn't going to take up his father's profession with his father's gun; he has buried both under their famous name and can turn toward his own life rather than the ghost of the one that has chased him since childhood, his real life of sundries and account books with a wife he kept his word to and nothing to prove. He doesn't have to get a taste for violence, necessary or otherwise. The town will keep his secret and he'll keep their general store. There's always somebody faster and he'll sell you a peppermint stick at a very reasonable price.
Produced with Clarence Greene as were most of Rouse's contributions to film and TV, The Fastest Gun Alive made unexpected bank for MGM and retains a reputation as a cult Western, a sort of murder ballad and case study combo. If you can wait out the digressions, it contains such quirkily distributed rewards as the striated shadows of Red Rock Canyon, the spirited Copland-esque score by André Previn, and a pile of character actors not limited to Allyn Joslyn, Leif Erickson, John Dehner, Virginia Gregg, J.M. Kerrigan, and Russ Tamblyn, for whom the film detours into full musical territory with a bewildering dance number I cannot find it in myself to hate because it involves the acrobatic employment of shovels. I would love to compare the teleplay if it still exists; I had never heard of either version before catching the film on TCM. The Limeliters would undoubtedly have made fun of it, but it doesn't look bad on the Internet Archive. Honestly, the fact that it works at all in the wake of Blazing Saddles (1974) is a credit to Ford's performance; it made me realize that he could have played Dan Evans as originally offered in 3:10 to Yuma (1957), although I'm just as happy that Van Heflin did. This word brought to you by my faster backers at Patreon.
To the frontier flyspeck of Cross Creek in 1889, it's just the latest news that comes in with the stage: "Clint Fallon was killed in a gunfight! Happened over in Silver Rapids! McGovern's got the collar button Fallon was wearing when he got killed!" No one expects the natural eagerness of the eyewitness to impart his experience or the armchair quarterbacking of his audience to rile the normally, almost notoriously temperate George Temple (Glenn Ford) to the point of ordering them out of his general store, then startling them in the saloon by drinking his way through a bottle of the first whiskey anyone can remember seeing him touch in his four years in town. Then again, no one seems to have known that the mild-mannered ribbon clerk owned the well-notched Colt SAA with which he follows up an irritably delivered, uncertainly received lecture on the mechanics rather than the myths of gunslinging with a display of trick shooting that approaches the impossible, blasting two silver dollars out of the air in the same draw and shattering—it's trick photography, but lining up the shot straight into the camera makes for an audacious fourth-wall blast—a mug of beer the split second it's dropped. It makes him the toast of the town's menfolk; it sparks a long-brewing fight with his pregnant wife Dora (Jeanne Crain) that begins to make sense of her allusions to Dodge City, Deadwood, Cheyenne; it inspires him to try to hang up his gun, or at least turn it over to the town's minister during Sunday services before moving on himself. "Before you know it, top guns from all over will be coming to Cross Creek to find out just how fast I am . . . You don't want them here." Through nothing more than a need for fresh horses after a holdup, however, Cross Creek is already on course for a collision with Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford), the volatile outlaw who called out Clint Fallon in his insatiable quest to be recognized as "the fastest gun there is." The blind bystander of that scene-setting duel warned him, Teiresias-style, as the gunsmoke settled: "No matter how fast you are, there's always somebody faster."
Directed and co-written by Russell Rouse from Frank D. Gilroy's "The Last Notch" (1954), The Fastest Gun Alive started as an episode of The U.S. Steel Hour (1953–63) and retains a certain staginess of structure and dialogue for all the hard natural light and winter-thrown shadows captured like photojournalism by George J. Folsey; at the same time it shows signs of having been opened out by an extra half-hour, less in the slow unwrapping of George's gun-wizardry than its tendency to interrupt the tensions building in Cross Creek with a hoedown, a heist, the vengeful pursuit of the posse which is tailing Harold and his men in turn. When it just holds its attention on George under the burning glass of his own secrets, the picture is riveting. As we learn from a monologue which would be right at home in a jidaigeki, his preternatural skills are the legacy of his father, a legendary town-tamer who trained his son since childhood to surpass him in the ways of the gun, effectively endowing the younger man with a superpower which George has spent his life running away from, even when it meant leaving his own father's death unavenged. Even in a psychological Western, tapping at its conventions and turning them upside down to see what falls out, it's an ingenious twist. Where most gunslingers of his caliber are hiding out from what they've done, George Kelby Jr. is hiding from what he hasn't and doesn't want to. His fear of violence includes his own capacity for it, but in a culture where manhood is measured by force of arms, he can't reconcile himself to the peaceable life for which he is actually, temperamentally suited when it requires him not to care if he's lightly negged around a punch bowl for drinking nothing stronger than cider, if his unarmed status stands out a high-country mile in a town where children beg their fathers to let them trade in their wooden six-shooters for the real thing, if his neighbors who wear their guns like men who want to blow their own dicks off swagger around him as if they personally cleaned up Abilene, and his inability to keep a lid on his thin-skinned shame and his festering pride has kept him and his wife from any kind of permanent, truthful life. He still practices with the gun he loathes, well beyond the town limits where no one can see the cool-handed speed with which he makes the rocks jump in the ring of the sandstone buttes, hatless as usual in the head-bending sun. He would be an easier character if he were just a little funnier or more attractively tormented, but Ford plays him with genuine miserable discomfort, a man who can't stand the inside of his own skin and can't fit into anyone else's, a long-legged, slump-shouldered streak of flop sweat who uncoils with dangerous lightness with a piece in his hand, so long as it isn't pointing to its logical conclusion. He handles a late chestnut of a line with similar intelligence: "That's right," he agrees as he retrieves his gun, "I'm so afraid, I'm sick to my stomach . . . You just don't say a word, Lou. 'Cause a word is just about all it would take to stop me. Just don't say anything." More than one actor would have made this statement with some wryness, the back-handed bravery of admitting fear. Ford's George who has nothing left to hide from the people he's made part of his personal disaster delivers it without any joke at all, quietly and a little impatiently while his hands go on with their competent, preoccupied work of tying down the holster and checking the chambers, as if he really means it. The demons of the man he's about to face are even blunter than his own, compensating for a wife who ran off in El Paso with the endless cordwood of the bodies of other men. It is stupidly Freudian, but the very unsubtlety of the argument makes it interesting—no one in this movie carries a gun like one of those cool, easy heroes of unchallenged masculinity, dispensing the necessary violence of justice with enviable grace. Instead of badges of virility, they are advertisements of insecurity, self-sabotage, obsession. Clear-eyed as she is, Dora didn't really worry about her husband until she saw him strapping on the gun he hadn't drowned in Miller's Pond after all. She could be talking about a lot of things when she says bitterly, "I kept asking myself, how can it happen without the gun?"
Because the denouement requires its hero to draw his gun in a good cause if only once in his life, I can't call it anywhere near as radical as The Capture (1950), but The Fastest Gun Alive does seem to look for Western expectations to kick over, like the late-breaking rug-pull that while he wasn't exaggerating when he revealed himself as "the fastest gun alive—faster than Wyatt Earp, faster than Billy the Kid, faster than Fallon and faster than the man who killed him," George was lying by an important omission: "I've never drawn against a man." His flash-bang reflexes have never been tested under fire. His father left those notches on his man-killing Colt. Never mind the courage it will take him to step out of the church and into a high noon's main street, if he's scared enough in his first and unavoidable gunfight, he might fumble his draw or freeze on the trigger and leave a kerosene-soaked Cross Creek to the mercies of Vinnie Harold who made his exit from a bank by shooting an unarmed customer just because "I like to be remembered," but if he succeeds in defending the town as this raw-nerved exorcism demands of him, he'll have used his much-hated marksmanship to kill someone. It makes the most satisfying outcome of this ordeal—much more so than the anticipated rehabilitation of the recalcitrant fast gun—the stinger of the double funeral which the posse finds the good citizens conducting, the names and dates on the temporary markers testifying to a mutual annihilation of pistoleers. The eulogies observe the same care with the truth as the man they honor: "He wanted it that way." Quite alive as the crowd disperses and beginning to smile at Dora as he has never before done where we could see, George isn't going to take up his father's profession with his father's gun; he has buried both under their famous name and can turn toward his own life rather than the ghost of the one that has chased him since childhood, his real life of sundries and account books with a wife he kept his word to and nothing to prove. He doesn't have to get a taste for violence, necessary or otherwise. The town will keep his secret and he'll keep their general store. There's always somebody faster and he'll sell you a peppermint stick at a very reasonable price.
Produced with Clarence Greene as were most of Rouse's contributions to film and TV, The Fastest Gun Alive made unexpected bank for MGM and retains a reputation as a cult Western, a sort of murder ballad and case study combo. If you can wait out the digressions, it contains such quirkily distributed rewards as the striated shadows of Red Rock Canyon, the spirited Copland-esque score by André Previn, and a pile of character actors not limited to Allyn Joslyn, Leif Erickson, John Dehner, Virginia Gregg, J.M. Kerrigan, and Russ Tamblyn, for whom the film detours into full musical territory with a bewildering dance number I cannot find it in myself to hate because it involves the acrobatic employment of shovels. I would love to compare the teleplay if it still exists; I had never heard of either version before catching the film on TCM. The Limeliters would undoubtedly have made fun of it, but it doesn't look bad on the Internet Archive. Honestly, the fact that it works at all in the wake of Blazing Saddles (1974) is a credit to Ford's performance; it made me realize that he could have played Dan Evans as originally offered in 3:10 to Yuma (1957), although I'm just as happy that Van Heflin did. This word brought to you by my faster backers at Patreon.
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On an unrelated note, this upcoming film might be relevent to your interests (stuff with mermaids/sirens or selkies makes me think of you).
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I like a lot about it! It's definitely the kind of Western which is a referendum on what a man's got to do, but it seems to be of the opinion that sometimes what a man's got to do is really stupid. And I genuinely love George's backstory, the switchbacks of which are possible to sense if not fully see coming—at least one of the supporting cast has his suspicions after the silver-dollar display—and which means that Cross Creek ends up with the most irrelevantly lethal shopkeeper in the West. There's always somebody faster and he'll sell you a peppermint stick at a very reasonable price.
On an unrelated note, this upcoming film might be relevent to your interests (stuff with mermaids/sirens or selkies makes me think of you).
I had not heard about this project! Thanks for letting me know. (I am honored to be thought of.)
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I love this description quite inordinately, and I'm now very intrigued about this movie!
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Thank you! I wish I had thought of it for the review itself. [edit: I determined that it is my journal and I get to add lines to reviews even that people have commented on if I want.] The movie is uneven—I want the television version to have survived so that I can check my suspicion that it was more tonally consistent and tighter—but I really like George and his dilemma and its resolution, which I still feel is the sort of thing that happens to people in anime.
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He's great; I don't think the movie would work if he weren't, and it may be the most interesting thing I've seen him do. To be fair to Glenn Ford, outside of 3:10 to Yuma and Gilda I feel like I keep catching him in movies I don't actually like. I should check out his other noir.
(In the same year, Russ Tamblyn starred in my dad's movie The Young Guns!)
That's so cool! I'll have to see it.
But Irving was looking for one forty-three
Big dum-dum Irving
Which I still think you would write an amazing radio play of, assuming the rights issues are not an inherent hell.
Annoy the wrong gunslinger and you suddenly got a number on your back.
I believe this culture is considered to have existed more in dime novels than the actual nineteenth century, but makes for such good fiction.
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This and your previous Patreon review are really giving me food for thought regarding just how deeply gun worship is embedded in US culture. I knew it was there but I just had no idea how deeply it was there.
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The film elides it at first: we see George and Harold circling one another in the street like a holmgang, formally exchanging names—George for the first and last time in his gunslinger's life gives his as Kelby—before the quick-draw blast of shots heard by the townsfolk waiting inside the church, from which we cut directly to the posse riding in to discover the funeral. Their leader observes that in order to have taken down Vinnie Harold, "This fellow George Kelby must have been plenty fast," and hears in reply the reverent epitaph, "He was the fastest man alive." The line about wanting it that way is the answer to the obvious question of why, if he was so fast on the draw, his fellow citizens seem to have just finished burying him. It satisfies the posse, who will take the story with them to the next town much as the news of the death of Clint Fallon arrived originally in Cross Creek; it leaves the audience briefly unsure whether George really let himself be killed as some kind of atonement in a duel he was qualified to win; and then as the crowd thins out and we catch sight of his bare-headed familiar figure in his sheepskin jacket, we understand that he just faked his own death with the help of the entire town. It's a natural conclusion of the earlier scene in the church where one by one, his neighbors swore never to divulge the secret of the fast gun living among them—a generous gesture of community folklorically undone by the oversight of one child playing outside at the time, not knowing to take part in the promise and therefore fearlessly, fatefully contradicting Vinnie Harold as to the identity of the fastest gun alive. It's even more convincing this way, with a headstone to point to should anyone ever come looking for George Kelby and no reason to suspect George Temple of being anything other than the quiet-living storekeep he honestly is. He did outdraw the other man; he did kill him; he was just as split-second deadly as his father trained him to be. He never has to do anything like that again. It's not who he is and, having been just once that other person, he can finally make his peace with the fact. His father's gun was starting to behave like a cursed object, anyway.
This and your previous Patreon review are really giving me food for thought regarding just how deeply gun worship is embedded in US culture. I knew it was there but I just had no idea how deeply it was there.
It's bone-deep and I find it really weird. I don't want to fall headfirst into Westerns, but they do seem to be a genre where the issue keeps particularly churning up.
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