It was only about ten years ago, as a little kid, that I would turn on my television early in the morning, be greeted with a western, and rush to the remote to turn it off as quickly as possible. Westerns? Pfft. Boring old stories of cowboys and Indians. It's funny how much we change. Last week, I got up early just to catch the first western of the day.
A legend of the west, Jimmy Ringo is said to be better than them all, the fastest hand there ever was. Approached in just about every little town he arrives in by some kid out to make a name for himself, Ringo is tired of the heroism of the gunfighter. Pursued by the brothers of one such kid whom he was forced to kill, he decides to return to the family who would much rather forget him.
It is almost a rite of passage for kids in the modern age to grow up regarding westerns as boring old films meant only for grandparents. Indeed, this was a view I more or less maintained up to six months or so ago, Unforgiven the only western I had ever sat through. It was not until an academic approach to the genre began to peel away the predisposition that I began to appreciate the potential intricacies of the western film and the ways in which the conventions could be played with and subverted in order to create something truly great. Considering that, The Gunfighter is just what the doctor ordered. The traditional image of the western gives us a sweeping epic with horses galloping across plains, or the classic showdown on the main street with eyes appearing above the saloon door. This is none of those, the very vast majority of the film spent in a single location, Ringo biding his time at the bar while he waits to hear from his wife, if she will acquiesce to his request to see her. There is no grandiosity to Ringo the gunfighter; he is a tired old man, world-weary and deeply regretful of how he has spent his life. As the town's children pile against the window to catch a glimpse at him, he recedes further into a state of depressed resignation that this is his legacy, that this is the legend he will leave behind. The interactions between Ringo and Mark, his old friend and the now sheriff of Cayenne, are a strong part of the film's comment upon western lore. Mark is in many ways the antithesis to Ringo: he has evaded the appellation of gunfighter, escaped the same doomed fate as Ringo, and made a new life for himself of use to society and, crucially, to Ringo's family. He has all that Ringo desires and yet can never achieve. Like the greatest of westerns, The Gunfighter deconstructs the genre, reducing it to its fundamentals and criticising them for their flaws. Ringo is no role model, no heroic figure to be admired, no future for a young man to aspire to. Violence and bloodshed are not things to be admired, and the distinctly anticlimactic and entirely unromantic ending to the film confirms this.
Saying a lot about the myth of romanticism and heroism in the figure of the titular character, The Gunfighter continues the tradition of the revisionist western by reevaluating the genre's key aspects and displaying their disharmony with reality. Boasting a fantastically muted performance from Peck, and a sadly inevitable fate for his character, this is further proof of just how wrong I was about westerns.
A legend of the west, Jimmy Ringo is said to be better than them all, the fastest hand there ever was. Approached in just about every little town he arrives in by some kid out to make a name for himself, Ringo is tired of the heroism of the gunfighter. Pursued by the brothers of one such kid whom he was forced to kill, he decides to return to the family who would much rather forget him.
It is almost a rite of passage for kids in the modern age to grow up regarding westerns as boring old films meant only for grandparents. Indeed, this was a view I more or less maintained up to six months or so ago, Unforgiven the only western I had ever sat through. It was not until an academic approach to the genre began to peel away the predisposition that I began to appreciate the potential intricacies of the western film and the ways in which the conventions could be played with and subverted in order to create something truly great. Considering that, The Gunfighter is just what the doctor ordered. The traditional image of the western gives us a sweeping epic with horses galloping across plains, or the classic showdown on the main street with eyes appearing above the saloon door. This is none of those, the very vast majority of the film spent in a single location, Ringo biding his time at the bar while he waits to hear from his wife, if she will acquiesce to his request to see her. There is no grandiosity to Ringo the gunfighter; he is a tired old man, world-weary and deeply regretful of how he has spent his life. As the town's children pile against the window to catch a glimpse at him, he recedes further into a state of depressed resignation that this is his legacy, that this is the legend he will leave behind. The interactions between Ringo and Mark, his old friend and the now sheriff of Cayenne, are a strong part of the film's comment upon western lore. Mark is in many ways the antithesis to Ringo: he has evaded the appellation of gunfighter, escaped the same doomed fate as Ringo, and made a new life for himself of use to society and, crucially, to Ringo's family. He has all that Ringo desires and yet can never achieve. Like the greatest of westerns, The Gunfighter deconstructs the genre, reducing it to its fundamentals and criticising them for their flaws. Ringo is no role model, no heroic figure to be admired, no future for a young man to aspire to. Violence and bloodshed are not things to be admired, and the distinctly anticlimactic and entirely unromantic ending to the film confirms this.
Saying a lot about the myth of romanticism and heroism in the figure of the titular character, The Gunfighter continues the tradition of the revisionist western by reevaluating the genre's key aspects and displaying their disharmony with reality. Boasting a fantastically muted performance from Peck, and a sadly inevitable fate for his character, this is further proof of just how wrong I was about westerns.