Blu-ray Review: Henry King’s The Gunfighter on the Criterion Collection

The protagonist of Henry King’s The Gunfighter will seem familiar to audiences of the revisionist westerns that surfaced in the late 1950s and flourished in the ’60s and ’70s. Loosely based on Old West outlaw Johnny Ringo, Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo is a legendary killer with a gun that’s said to be as fast as Wyatt Earp’s, yet he’s beyond taking pleasure in such stature. He’s a solitary and regretful man in his mid-30s and carries the weight of his reputation in his anguished angular frame. In the film’s opening, we see Ringo kill a young hotshot looking to make a name for himself, and whom Ringo gives multiple chances to walk away. We keep hearing of how violent Ringo once was, yet what we see is a likable, tentative, assured person who desperately wishes to be left alone. And this contrast—between what we hear and what we see of Ringo—is intensified immeasurably by Peck’s performance.

Seen today, The Gunfighter has an incongruous element that many of its revisionist offspring lack. One may expect to see Warren Oates or Robert Ryan in the role of a taciturn, melancholy outlaw, as Peck is popularly associated with characters who embody a bedrock of shaman-like decency. But like the unduly sentimentalized James Stewart, Peck was willing to toy with this persona, which wasn’t cemented in 1950 at the time of The Gunfighter’s release. By this point, Peck had given what’s still his riskiest performance as the horny villain in King Vidor’s hallucinatory 1946 film Duel in the Sun, and had mined subtler forms of sexual obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case the following year. Which is to say that Peck as a killer may have been less startling for audiences seeing The Gunfighter for the first time in 1950.

Regardless of context, Peck doesn’t even attempt to conjure the evil of an iconic killer, as his Jimmy Ringo is refined and unruffled, seemingly untouched by violence, and this disjunction is the point here. King’s film is a tall tale—or, more accurately, a resonant celebrity myth constructed by a person who no longer wishes to play it. The relationships between Ringo and the residents of a town called Cayenne, where he holes up for a morning, suggest a parallel for how modern icons are both empowered and entrapped by their disciples. Ringo’s failure to look the part of the killer, which triggers much of the violence that occurs in The Gunfighter, mirrors how many of us expect our favorite athletes, actors, and singers to be more than mere people. The film understands such an expectation to be a dangerous kind of dehumanization.

King and screenwriters William Bowers and William Sowers, working from a story co-written by filmmaker André De Toth, cannily physicalize the notion of entrapment by celebrity throughout. Ringo hides out in a saloon from various fans, as well from enemies looking to kill him, in order to avenge either nonexistent sleights or incidents that weren’t Ringo’s fault. And all the while, King and cinematographer Arthur C. Miller accentuate the vastness of the saloon while vividly establishing the spatial relationships between the bar and the surrounding buildings, imparting the sense that Ringo could get plugged anytime from anywhere.

The claustrophobia of the setting and the compact time period recall subsequent modernist western prototypes such as Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon and Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma. King also savors intimate moments of small-town American life, detailing, say, the specifics of shopping for potatoes and onions, or of the day-to-day trials faced by Marshal Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), who has a relationship with Ringo that evokes the one between William Holden and Robert Ryan’s characters in Sam Peckinpah’s seminal The Wild Bunch. The film’s supporting characters indicate a flawed yet vibrant society that Ringo has divorced himself from via violence, while his long moments of thoughtfulness suggest atonement.

Yet Ringo’s ironic decency isn’t without sentimentality. The Gunfighter is highly critical of the young guns looking to bring down Ringo, while the protagonist himself, who once lived this sort of life, is uncriticized and unexamined—accepted by the filmmakers wholly as a doomed member of the reformed. If Ringo had shown even a trace of the crazy swagger that was said to once drive him—the kind of swagger that Michael Bien gave to a much different conception of the character in George P. Cosmatos’s 1993 western Tombstone—the film would have more bite. Think also of Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny in Unforgiven, or of the general air of hopelessness and viciousness that drives De Toth’s later, somewhat similarly plotted Day of the Outlaw. However, Peck communicates a supreme, restrained longing that quietly envelopes the film, imbuing it with a haunting, confessional grandeur. Like many postwar noirs, The Gunfighter is about a man who already knows he’s a ghost.

Image/Sound

Per the disc’s liner notes, this 4K restoration was undertaken by the Twentieth Century Fox Restoration Department in 2015. The image here is spotless: pristine and healthy, with sharp whites and rich, weighty blacks. This clarity particularly emphasizes the stature of Arthur C. Miller’s gorgeous deep-focus cinematography, which suggests the work of Gregg Toland. The disc’s single sound track, in English LPCM 1.0, is correspondingly nuanced, intensifying the film’s influential use of diegetic sounds to establish location and magnify suspense.

Extras

Two superb new supplements discuss the careers of director Henry King and editor Barbara McLean. Filmmaker, writer, and archivist Gina Telaroli offers an overview of King’s life, claiming that he was underrated because he lacked the flash of such contemporaries as John Ford and Raoul Walsh. Telaroli portrays King as a humble man and astute collaborator who was fascinated with the internal functioning of specific communities, such as a fair in State Fair, the military in 12 O’Clock High, and the western town of this film. Intriguingly, Telaroli compares King to documentarian Frederick Wiseman, perhaps the most famous portraitist of social infrastructure. Meanwhile, film historian J.E. Smyth charts the influence of McLean, who worked closely with King on several productions and was prized by studio head Daryl Zanuck as an auteur in her own right. McLean rose through the studio system and became so influential that she would sit on sets and tell directors when they needed to shoot more coverage for her cut, which often included working with the sound elements as well.

Nineteen-fifty was a big year for McLean, who not only edited The Gunfighter, which Smyth analyzes in exhilarating detail, but also Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, which illustrated her gift for balancing spectacle with performance. McLean’s accomplishments are incredible for anyone, let alone a woman working in a male-dominated industry in 1950, though Smyth pushes back against this perception, reminding us of the enormous role that women played in the shaping of classic Hollywood. Two archive supplements allow us to hear from the subjects themselves: audio excerpts of McLean, from 1970, and King, from 1971, from interviews that were both conducted by historian Thomas R. Stempel for the AFI’s Oral History Collection. These interviews offer more context about each filmmaker’s career and their work within the studio system. Rounding out a slim but noteworthy package is a booklet featuring K. Austin Collins’s essay “You Can’t Go Home Again,” which beautifully contextualizes The Gunfighter’s melancholia within the framework of postwar America.

Overall

With this characteristically beautiful disc, Criterion sheds light on an underrated, mournful western that anticipated the genre’s revisionism roughly a decade later.