The Gun Hawk

Somehow I wound up with a bunch of westerns on my DVR several months back, which is why a few of them are going to show up in relatively close proximity. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Gun Hawk.

We don't meet the titular gun hawk in the opening scene; that instead introduces us to the second lead, singer turned actor Rod Lauren. He plays "Reb" Roan, a drifter who winds up drunk in a town that's the old home town the "hawk" came from and is about to come back to. The sheriff, Ben Corey (Rod Cameron), is a childhood friend of the "hawk" but suggests to Roan that he settle down here since it's a growing town.

It's at this point that the "hawk", named Blaine Madden (Rory Calhoun) shows up in town, and has a conversation with the sheriff about not having been in town for three years. Not that he's planning on staying, since he has a new home that shows up later in the movie. But he runs into Roan, who is in the middle of being attacked by a couple of brothers for no good reason, other than we need a good plot reason to have Blaine and Reb fall in together.

While they're at the bar together, those two brothers who attacked Reb earlier show up again, this time harassing a drunk who happens to be Blaine's father. This is really a way to get at Blaine, although in the resulting gunfight it's Dad who gets killed. Against the advice of the sheriff, Blaine goes searching for the two men wanting to bring them to justice, even is his form of vigilante justice is illegal. Worse, he gets shot in the arm by the sheriff who has in turn followed Blaine, but is able to get away.

Reb goes after Blaine as well and eventually catches up to Blaine, removing the bullet from Blaine's arm and giving Reb some power over Blaine since he knows a crucial secret about Blaine. The two of them go back to Blaine's new home a town called Sanctuary that has a reputation for allowing people in regardless of their past, but with the proviso that it's a place where you go to cool off, which means no violence. And there's a man there to make certain everybody follows the rules: the gun hawk who we of course know is Blaine. But if he's been shot in his shooting arm, will he be able to maintain justice? And, of course, Sheriff Corey is going to be coming after Blaine.

The Gun Hawk was made at Allied Artists and released in 1963, at a time when there were still a lot of B westerns being cranked out. The Gun Hawk fits in well enough with the cycle of B westerns, which is to say that it's not doing anything particularly groundbreaking, and feels as though it could have been made easily enough for episodic TV. Western fans will probably be mildly entertained, although nobody will ever mistake this for one of the great westerns.