Henry King's The Gunfighter isn't so much a traditional Western as it is a morality tale set in the Old West. Similar to William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) it uses the historical and mythological trappings of the Western in able to examine human nature. The film follows Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck), an aging gunfighter with the unfortunate reputation of being the fastest draw in the West. Ringo wants nothing more than to abandon that life and settle down. But wherever he goes he is challenged by cock-sure youngsters desperate to make a name for themselves by killing him. When a young man named Eddie tries to shoot him, Ringo is forced to kill him. Despite clearly acting in self-defense, Eddie's three brothers swear a vendetta against him. Ringo flees to the town of Cayenne in order to see his wife and the son that he hasn't seen in eight years. As Ringo waits for the brothers to catch up with him, he must confront shadows of his past, such as an old man who believes that he murdered his son. And then, of course, there is the arrogant young whelp named Hunt Bromley who sees Ringo as the key to finally gaining fame as a gunslinger...The Gunfighter is a truly magnificent film with a cynical, yet realistic eye on human nature. The town of Cayenne becomes a vacuum in which this old shootist is poked, prodded, and abused by the people that he has touched, either directly or indirectly. The Gunfighter was one of the first Westerns of the fifties that injected the genre with a new sense of moral awareness. Along with Devil's Doorway (1950), one of the first of ten Westerns directed by Anthony Mann in the fifties that would redefine the genre, The Gunfighter helped revolutionize this most beloved of American cinematic traditions.
9/10
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