The man who shot Charles Bronson

There's a classic line from the western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." I couldn't help but think that Charles Bronson might have had that line in mind when he was making the movie From Noon Till Three.

Bronson plays Graham Dorsey, a member of Buck Bowers' gang robbing banks in the old west. Graham has a premonition, however, that the next robbery isn't going to go well. Indeed, on the way to the next town Dorsey's horse breaks a leg forcing him to shoot it and forcing the gang to look for a new horse. They stop at the ranch of the wido Starbuck (Jill Ireland, who of course was Charles Bronson's wife in real life) who, amazingly enough, claims not to have a horse.

Dorsey decides to believe this, if only to get the other members of the gang off of him. This is both so that he doesn't have to go in on that robbery and so that he can have some time with Starbuck. Plus, he can claim to the other members of the gang to be holding her hostage so that she doesn't run off to the authorities. She's rather chaste now that her husband has died, and she's not so forthcoming about her past. Dorsey goes along with the ruse, eventually having a brief but passionate affair with the widow Starbuck while he's waiting for the rest of the gang to return.

Of course, they're never going to return, since the robbery goes bad and they get caught, with vigilante justice scheduling them to be hanged that very afternoon. Dorsey is actually OK with this, but Starbuck has romantic notions about Dorsey being loyal to his gang and trying to save them and she might just not love them if he doesn't go into town to free them. Dorsey eventually agrees, but this is another ruse: he intends to go off to the middle of nowhere and wait for the hanging to pass, with the plan to tell Starbuck that he was unsuccessful in freeing the rest of his gang. What a convenient solution.

Except things don't go that way. Dorsey comes across a posse, who must have been told about him by Bowers, so now he's going to have to try to escape. He's fortunate enough to run into one of those itinerant quack dentists, and forces the dentist at gunpoint to switch outfits with him. The posse then shoots the dentist, leaving Dorsey to ride free in the dentist's wagon and return to Starbuck.

However, when Dorsey asks for directions, the people recognize the wagon and bad suit, so have Dorsey arrested and ultimately sentenced to a year in prison for medical malpractice. Starbuck, meanwhile, has had to confront the townsfolk. She tells them such a fantastic story about those three hours that everybody is overcome with emotion and Starbuck becomes a national celebrity, telling her tragic story that's utterly made up in an early version of an "as told to" book that becomes a bestseller.

Dorsey gets out of prison and has the bright idea of returning to Starbuck, who will be thrilled to find that Dorsey is in fact still alive. Except that she's not thrilled. She's made money off that legend, and she's got ideas about what she wants Dorsey to be, not what Dorsey actually is. She's gone and printed the legend, and now she actually believes the legend. What's a man like Dorsey to do?

I really liked the second act of From Noon Till Three, as it took the basic idea behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and twisted it inside out, taking it in all sorts of odd directions that mostly work. It certainly helps that Bronson and Ireland, being married in real life, play off each other very well. The one problem with the movie, however, is how long it takes for the story to get to the fun, quirky second act. The payoff is quite good, but you certainly have to wait a while to get to the payoff. Liberty Valance solved the problem by having the story told in flashback, while that probably wouldn't work so well here because of the changes wrought in Bronson's character by becoming a legend.

Still, I would say that the payoff is worth the wait. And people who like 1970s westerns are probably going to have a lot less of a problem with the first half than I did. So From Noon Till Three is absolutely worth watching.