Allen Smithee

I remember reading many years ago that if a director for some reason didn't want his name on a movie, directing credits would be given to a fictitious director called "Allen Smithee", or some similar spelling, since this was a name no actual director had. It turns out there really aren't all that many movies credited to Allen Smithee, so I was a bit surprised when I watched what was one of the earliest: the western Death of a Gunfighter.

Richard Widmark plays Frank Patch, marshal of Cottonwood, one of those small west Texas towns right on the railway line, circa 1900. The circa 1900 date means that times are beginning to change, as the old west is going and the settled townsfolk are getting more modern. Patch is a man out of his time, as the film opens more or less with him sleeping in one of the jail cells and adolescent Dan comes into check on the marshal.

Later that night, a drunk gets erratic enough that Frank shoots the drunk in self-defense, and that's enough for the town fathers to step up their campaign against Frank. The problem is that Frank had been given a more or less lifetime contract when the town was founded, because he was good at putting down the violence that was stereotypically rampant in Old West towns back in the day. Since the town fathers want to modernize, having a marshal like Frank just won't do. The simplest thing would be to persuade him to retire gracefully, but the editor of the town's newspaper, Oxley (Kent Smith), who would also like to see Frank leave, knows that Frank is never going to give up the job voluntarily.

One other person who doesn't have it in for Frank is Claire Quintana (Lena Horne), the proprietress of the town brothel from back in the days when such towns had brothels. It seems odd for the marshal to have a good relationship with a woman of ill repute, but he does, and it's to the point that he may just ask her to marry him, which seems really shocking for west Texas circa 1900 since it's the wrong kind of interracial marriage. (The movie was released in 1969, but which time the Production Code had been done away with and white/black "miscegenation" was no longer forbidden.)

The town fathers then go searching for Frank to try to convince him to retire, finding him fishing with young Dan. Frank refuses, and when Oxley is more insistent on it, Frank punches Oxley to the ground in full view of Oxley's son. Oxley eventually responds to this by... killing himself. And that really sets the town fathers into trying to provoke Frank into doing something that will let them kill him legally.

I knew about Allen (or Alan on later movies) Smithee being a pseudonym, but I didn't know the full story. In the case of Death of a Gunfighter, there were actually two directors. The first was a TV director whom Widmark didn't particularly like, so Widmark got the director off the job and replaced by better-known film director Don Siegel. Siegel didn't think it was fair to take credit for another man's work, and the DGA eventually reached the compromise that neither director really had directorial control, coming up with a pseudonym directors could use in future under exceptional circumstances.

As for the movie itself, it's not the world's worst movie by any means, although it's also not the greatest. For those who like the sort of western about the changing society, they'll probably enjoy Death of a Gunfighter; for regular people, it might be a bit slow and feeling like not a whole lot is happening.