Man With the Gun

I didn't expect to do a pair of Robert Mitchum westerns in fairly close succession, but I had to change a bit of blogging about movies in the order I watch them when The Good Guys and the Bad Guys showed up on TCM earlier this month. The other Mitchum western I had watched was an earlier one, Man With the Gun.

As you might guess, Mitchum does in fact play the man with the gun, a man named Clint Tollinger, although he's actually more or less a good guy. He's what's known as a "town tamer", a fairly itinerant person who goes from one town to the next, wherever the town is having trouble keeping law and order. This time, Clint shows up to Sheridan City, where a rancher named Dade Holman who lives just outside of town uses his surrogates to keep his sort of order, which means everybody else lives in fear of him. Well, maybe not Jeff Castle (John Lupton), who's just dumb enough to try to farm the plot of land he has his eye on even though Holman doesn't want that.

Nobody in town really wants Clint here, and he doesn't really want any interference from them, as he's a sort of necessary evil in that their crime problems won't be solved any other way. Among the people who really doesn't want Clint around is Nelly Bain (Jan Sterling). Nelly runs the local "dance hall", which is still a euphemism since the Production Code was still pretty strong when the movie was made, but, more importantly, Nelly has a past with Clint. She didn't want to be around him any longer because his profession is a dangerous one and she was afraid of losing him to violence. So she up and left him to make a clean break of it, but here he is again.

One of Clint's techniques is to have everybody who comes to town check their guns at the door. As you might guess, this doesn't make Holman's men very happy, and a group of them comes to town trying to get rid of him. Needless to say, that doesn't go well and Holman is only going to try harder to rid "his" town of Tollinger. Clint's personal life is also about to get more complicated, as Castle's girlfriend Stella (Karen Sharpe) finds that she's developing feelings for Clint, who is much more masculine than Jeff. Nelly, for her part, also feels those old feelings stirring up, and making her jealous.

Man With the Gun is a well-made programmer western from the era, the sort of thing you could imagine Randolph Scott having done if only he were 20 years younger. Although the movie is in black and white, the production values are pretty good, and the plot is serviceable, with professional performances from the cast. Since it's only a programmer, there's nothing extra special about it, but there's really nothing wrong with it either. It's the sort of nice 90 minutes of entertainment that fans of westerns will really like.