Review: Wisconsin Film Festival
Gunman’s Walk | Phil Karlson | USA | 1958 | 97 min
Wisconsin Film Festival, UW Cinematheque (4070 Vilas Hall), Sunday, April 12, 7:00pm»
Director of hard-boiled fare Phil Karlson delivers a solid western with some excellent dialogue and performances, but it suffers somewhat from a dose of melodrama and its proximity to other greater examples of the genre.
“Nothin’ wrong with a man trying to outdraw himself in the mirror.”
I can’t think of a line from Gunman’s Walk that more aptly encapsulates the film’s strengths and its weaknesses. On the one hand, the film has some outstanding dialogue, of which I would cite that as an example. Taken straight or as injected with a bit of camp—either way, it’s gold. On the other hand, it’s indicative of the psychologized reflexivity of the western at the time. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Gunman’s Walk is somewhere in the middle on that particular score.
The line above is uttered by Lee Hackett (played by genre stalwart Van Heflin), stern patriarch to his two sons: the older, reckless gunslinger Ed (Tab Hunter), and the younger, more pacifist Davy (James Darren). Lee is trying to give his younger son quick draw lessons—and demonstrating his own six-gun prowess in the meantime—when his older son comes along to showcase his own ruthless pistolry in a stunt that might easily have killed his father. Yet, when the scene ends, the father and the older son are walking off together, leaving the less macho son behind. That dynamic is then emphasized and degraded through the rest of the film by Ed’s careless killing of a Sioux man, which Ed and, eventually, Lee do their best to cover up, taking advantage of old family roots and the ever reliable institutional racism of the old west.
When it’s focused on the murder, the movie excels. I found the courtroom scenes to be pretty effective, as I did the mounting familial tension of the latter part of the film and the ending, which is a ballsy one. Plus, it’s not too shabby when you’ve got screenwriter Frank Nugent (Fort Apache, The Searchers) churning out lines like, “You just lost me; you’re gonna have to cut that deck a little deeper,” or, “Son, I quit worrying about you ten minutes ago, when I went for my shotgun.”
When it sometimes meanders away from that plotline into moments of a more melodramatic variety, the film’s aim isn’t always as dead-eyed. However unfair a comparison it might be, when it comes to westerns from the late 1950’s, I immediately go to those of Budd Boetticher. They are whole yet lean, and dramatic without being overwrought. It felt as though Nugent and Phil Karlson, who had himself directed some rather tight noir films prior to this one, could have made this one leaner, particularly in the romance sub-plot and the early depiction of the family dynamic. This notion of proximity to other better films of the time extends to the cinematography by Charles Lawton, Jr., whose work here is solid, but is sandwiched between the much better 3:10 to Yuma and Ride Lonesome.
Sharing top billing with Van Heflin, Tab Hunter delivers a remarkable performance as a thoroughly unlikeable character, who is a raw force of ego and arrogance. While it will be interesting to juxtapose this performance with the one in Polyester and have it contextualized by Tab Hunter Confidential, I also got a great deal of pleasure out of the character actors in the film like Edward Platt and Ray Teal. Not to mention the ragged face and furrowed brow of Heflin, whose performance here—fresh off 3:10 to Yuma the previous year—is quite excellent.
Gunman’s Walk is not a great western, but it’s a good one and, moreover, an intriguing one, especially if you’re a western junkie like me. Admittedly, they can’t all be Ride Lonesome, but I am glad that the Festival continues to include western fare regularly in its extensive lineup. (Especially when it’s in 35mm!) For Gunman’s Walk, just come prepared for showdowns with both revolvers and feelings.