DEATH OF A GUNFIGHTER

US, 1969, 94 minutes, Colour.
Richard Widmark. Lena Home, Carroll O'Connor, Kent Smith, John Saxon.
Directed by Allen Smithee.

Death of a Gunfighter is by no means an outstanding western. Its opening is slow and dark and a number of western cliches creep in. On the other hand, its theme is of great interest and reflects the 1969 mood of makers of westerns in focussing attention on the transition period, from the old traditions to the twentieth century machine, business and hurrying world.

Frank Patch has been Marshall for twenty years, is a trigger-happy gunfighter type who embodies the harshness and rugged attempts at honesty of frontier justice. In the early 1900's he is an anachronism and he has to go. There are the usual sub-plots, villains and a reminder of High Noon with a wedding in the middle of a day of tension. But what is striking about the film (and one wonders whether the producers have realised the implications of the images of America they are offering) is that the seemingly respectable town council decide to take the law into their own hands, and the U.S. lawman, the town's authority, is shot down in broad daylight in the middle of the town by the leading citizens.

Good entertainment, but it raises a number of questions about social change, ageing and, especially, American justice and violence.

1. What is the theme of this film?

2. How did this differ from the routine western?

3. Was Frank Patch a good man or a bad man? What did people say in favour of him?

4. Why did the town council, which had employed Patch twenty years earlier, now want to get rid of him?

5. Somebody said that Patch was the town's conscience. He knew everything about them and this is why they wanted to get rid of him. How true was this?

6. Why was Patch a violent and bad-tempered man? Were there any excuses for the way he hit people and shot men dead instead of disarming them?

7. How out of date was Patch? Were the councillors right to say that his style and ways didn't fit into the twentieth century?

8. Was the Oxley episode credible (father and son and their deaths}? What did this story tell of the attitudes of the town?

9. What had Patch done for Lou Trinidad? Why didn't he respond to Trinidad’s offers?

10. What influence did the saloon-keeper have in the town? Why did he want Patch killed?

11. How did the film convey the atmosphere of the place and the times - cars, horses, old marshalls, twentieth century progress, the Catholics, the saloons?

12. The film showed the passing of the old west and its traditions. Did the old western traditions need to go? Why?

13. What impact did the final shooting have on you - the whole town hiding to shoot one man, its marshall?

14. What myths of the west and of western heroism and violence did the film attack?