I could scream out, do something rash, make people look, but where would that leave me?

It rained explosively for about thirty seconds, after which the petrichor drifted in through the windows and Autolycus sat on the sill and chattered intently at the sparrows which had taken refuge in the yew tree outside my office.

This afternoon's appointment obliged me to visit MGH, which afforded me the opportunity to walk over the Longfellow Bridge for what may have been the first time in almost three years. My knee was killing me by the end of it, but I was smiling at the rattle of the Red Line and the brackish exhaust-kick of the overcast, buffeting air. On the docks by the ex-drawbridge of First Street and Edwin H. Land Boulevard, I saw couples lying or sitting with their arms around one another, their reflections in the cormorant-pleated water; there were new curlicues in the graffiti on the concrete of the bollards and the gatehouse. If I am going to run around a doctors' map of Boston, I should definitely start carrying my camera again.

The sun had come out by the time I reached Broad Canal.

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?"

( Trouble collects around a fast gun. )

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.