Notorious hired killer John Gant (Audie Murphy) rides into a bustling, peaceful town. Normally, even when Audie Murphy plays a character with a reputation as a killer, he's a guy who was just trying to make a living with the skills he had, and is looking for a place to settle down.
That is not the case here. Gant shows no interest in making a home. For 90% of the movie, we don't know why he's there. It's assumed he was hired to kill someone, but as Gant makes no move to do anything, the uncertainty of people who think something in their past might make someone want them dead slowly tears the town apart.
The movie reminds me of an exchange in High Plains Drifter:
'You make people afraid, and that's dangerous.'
'It's what people know about themselves that makes them afraid.'
Murphy is a constant, quiet presence that looms over everything, but touches nothing. He dresses in black, and the distance others maintain creates a little bubble of space with him as the focal point. His hotel room is on the top floor, and so he keeps entering scenes from there, steps loud on the stairs, the eyes of anyone in the bar below locked on him. Sometimes his shadow crosses over people, disrupting whatever they were doing before he even appears in the shot. Even when he's just sitting on a railing in the background of a shot, looking at nothing, it's framed by the window we're watching through, and the perspective of the person watching with us, so the gaze is on him.
Most of the time, Murphy carries a quiet, malicious amusement. He's fully aware of the effect he's having, and he plays with it. A clerk who ran off with another man's wife, fearing Gant was sent by the ex-husband, gets drunk and tries to face him down. Gant never rises from his chair, just plants his palms on the table and encourages the man to go for it with an eager grin. The local banker and a businessman, fearing this is reprisal for dirty dealing another man in town, try to buy off Gant, without ever directly broaching the subject. He toys with them, terrifying the banker to the point he flees into his office and crumbles under the strain of what he thinks is his impending death.
The one person who tries to befriend Gant is the town physician (played by Charles Drake.) He helped re-shoe Gant's horse (his dad's the town blacksmith) before knowing who he was, and at first, can't square the circle between the quiet, polite man he spoke to being a notorious killer. He opposes trying to force out Gant, who hasn't actually done anything since arriving. Supports the sheriff who argues the same thing.
But as the town Drake thinks is such a wonderful place to live begins to disintegrate like Gant was a poison injected in its veins, and their conversations reveal Gant's nihilistic bent, Drake's perspective shifts. While he still wants to avoid violence by the time the town forms an impromptu mob, he agrees to lead said mob. His argument is he wants to convince Gant to leave peacefully, but it still boils down to running off a man who has done nothing but drink coffee and play chess with the doctor since riding into town. It's not a pretty symbol of what people can justify when they feel their innocence being shattered. Worse, it doesn't work, and without Murphy drawing, or even motioning towards his gun, he frightens the entire mob into backing down with an excellent projection of menace and sheer indifference to their threats to kill him.
The movie also likes to shoot Murphy with his back to the camera, but positioned so we can see his reflection in a mirror. Especially when he's talking to someone, whether that's the physician or the physician's fiance or the gossipy bartender. Within the context of the movie's plot, it feels like it's Gant giving people an opportunity to shoot him, but not really. The reason he's avoided being hung for killing two dozen people is, those people always go for their guns first. This is framed as Gant somehow goading his targets into giving him the pretext to shoot him in self-defense, but for a long time, as he didn't move to kill anyone, I wondered if that was just a story people made up about him and really, he's just that a guy trying to defend himself who happens to be that fast. (That is not the case.)
Anyway, with those mirror scenes, he gives the impression his back is turned, that he might be vulnerable if someone tried to kill him then. But he can see whoever it is in the mirror, so he's ready. Thematically, I think it's about how his worldview seems so backwards, especially to the physician. He can't understand how Gant can be so blase about death, while Gant sees it as simply being realistic. He will die, as will the physician, as will everyone else in town eventually. And if the person he kills would have gone on to harm more people, then isn't he the one saving people, not the doctor who would treat that same person if they were sick or injured?
It would have been interesting to have Gant really just be passing through, to have the guilt of so many "respectable" citizens tear their idyllic town apart. A Twilight Zone episode vibe. It's questionable how well the town's going to do after all this, between the various deaths, the dispirited sheriff and deputy and everything else. Whatever enterprising community spirit it might have possessed could well be shattered. But as it plays out, we eventually learn he is there on business, and who the target is, and the movies rolls to a climax. Even that is handled differently than I expected, but in a way I enjoyed, and in a way that shows Gant, however dark it may be, does have his own principles that he won't discard in tight moments.
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