Frame By Frame – Man With The Gun (1955)

Year – 1955
Decade – 1950s
Director – Richard Wilson
Cinematographer – Lee Garmes
Genre – Western
Keywords – 1950s Westerns; Robert Mitchum Movies
Studio – United Artists
Shooting Location – Los Angeles, California
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm with spherical lenses; black and white

The Movie
The plot – and title – of this 1950s oater are generic, but the genre effort is elevated by the presence of Robert Mitchum and the cinematography of Lee Garmes – an Oscar winning silent film veteran whose credits included Shanghai Express (1932), Scarface (1932), Duel in the Sun (1946) and Nightmare Alley (1947). Mitchum is a nomadic “town tamer” who drifts into a new berg looking for his runway wife and ends up using his gun skills to liberate the inhabitants from the land baron oppressing it. However, because this is a 1950s Western – an era typified by so-called “adult” or “psychological” Westerns – Mitchum isn’t a saintly, pious infallible moralist. Instead, he’s given a tragic backstory about witnessing the death of his pacifist father as a boy and a temper that can turn menacing.

The film’s ostensible villain Dade Holman (played by Joe Barry) doesn’t even appear until the denouement and doesn’t have a single line in the entire film. In his stead, a cast of henchman heavies keep Mitchum occupied, including Claude Akins and Leo Gordon, who opens the film by gunning down a boy’s dog in the middle of Main Street.

Released by United Artists, the film marked the directorial debut of Richard Wilson, who got his start as an actor with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater (he performed on Welles’ famed War of the Worlds radio broadcast) and went on to serve as associate producer on Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai and Macbeth.

One of three movies Mitchum made in 1955 – along with Not as a Stranger and Night of the Hunter – as a free agent after a long contract at RKO. The cast includes future Shane villain Emile Meyer as a civic minded blacksmith, Werewolf of London lycanthrope Henry Hull as the town’s ineffectual sheriff and a young Angie Dickinson in one of her first roles as a saloon showgirl.