AT GUNPOINT is a typical Allied Artist B+ western: top lead actors (Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Malone, Walter Brennan), good direction and camerawork, ambitious if overwrought score by Carmen Dragon and a spotty script by Daniel Ullman -- great situations and scenes, some awful dialogue.When some bank robbers hit a small town, storekeeper Fred MacMurray picks up a gun and squeezes off a shot -- and by a miracle brings down a bad guy a half mile away. Hurray! But the dead man's brother wants his vengeance.... and keeps killing the wrong man, resulting in the town turning against its former hero.Westerns are among the oldest of film genres, and along the way they accumulated so much baggage that they became symbolic fiction, like science fiction and fantasy (which has largely replaced them in the cinema). This movie has a strong political message, which it delivers, ultimately, overtly. This weakens it. A better western with political commentary, like HIGH NOON, could leave its subtext in the subtext. Still, for fans of B westerns, it's a lot of fun to see some money spent on a favored form of fun.

During the 1950s, 90% of the westerns were based around two plots: the evil baddie who (often secretly) is trying to force everyone off their land as well as the town that's too cowardly to stand up and fight against evil. There have been tons of films based around these themes and "At Gunpoint" uses the second theme--the same one in "High Noon" and many other westerns. Just because things like this never actually occurred in the old west didn't seem to matter!The film begins with a gang robbing a bank in a sleepy little town. They kill a teller and the town comes out to try and stop the robbery. One of the locals gets off a lucky shot...and kills the gang leader. His hot-headed brother (Skip Homeier) is determined to come back to town and get revenge. The first one they kill is the Sheriff and eventually they're coming back for the guy who fired the lucky shot, Jack Wright (Fred MacMurray). However, one by one, the townsfolk provide to be cowardly weenies and it looks like Jack is just gonna get his head blown off sooner or later!The film is so, so familiar--so much so that even with some very nice acting and production values, it's just another western. Well done...and at least the ending itself was original.

Fred MacMurray is a peaceful shopkeeper who kills one of the Dennis gang with a lucky shot. The rest escape. MacMurray becomes a hero throughout the state of Texas. The remaining five members of the gang determine to kill him. The other town residents know it and begin to avoid MacMurray. They offer to stake him to a new store in far away Amarillo. Should MacMurray hide his tail between his legs, pack up his loving wife and adorable kid, and skip town? Are you kidding? This is a routine 1950s Western. There must have been hundreds of them ground out, intrigues and drama in a studio-built town with one dusty main street, flanked by a dozen building fronts made of wooden planks. Here, the core issues of Heartland America were on display -- bravery, cowardice, love, treachery, and the question of what you do with a neighbor in your tidy suburb who refuses to mow his lawn as often as everyone else. The 1960s were a transitional period, turbulent and full of excess and challenge. By the 1970s, the issues had changed to corruption and street crime and the milieu in which these dramas were played out was changed to the city streets.But this is from the 1950s. And was released five years after the wildly successful "High Noon" with Gary Cooper as the upholder of reticent righteousness.In "High Noon," a couple of gunmen are returning to town to kill Cooper because he "sent up" the viperous Frank Miller. In "At Gunpoint," the same number of gunmen are coming back to town to kill Cooper, I mean MacMurray, because he accidentally shot a gang member who was the brother of another.The rest of the story is familiar. The gang sneaks in at night and murders the town marshall. Everyone knows they will come back and take care of MacMurray too. As in "High Noon" the town gradually marginalizes the well-meaning shopkeeper and his family, but he refuses to leave town because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. His wife, Dorothy Malone, plays Grace Kelly and disparages his attempts to maintain his self esteem but, unlike Kelly, she's quickly won over. We see the gang riding into town for the final show down. We see the scared MacMurray behind a couple of barrels on the street corner, taking a few shots at them that miss their marks by seven hundred yards. The gang trot on towards MacMurray, grim and determined.Now, this is not the kind of movie that has any tricks up its sleeve. That's the whole point -- it should be comforting in its predictability. For instance, one of the character we meet at the beginning is the harmless, smiling, younger brother of Malone. There's no particular reason for his being there. He's always in the background being pleasant, but this story concerns MacMurray and Malone -- not MacMurray and Malone and Malone's BROTHER. Discerning viewers, those with the aficion for old movies, will recognize immediately that this character is DEAD MEAT. And so he is.Well, for the gang to continue its trot up the powdery street, right on up to the helpless Fred MacMurray, whom they then shoot full of holes, is unacceptable. Not because it wouldn't happen in real life but because it would surprise and challenge the audience. The only alternatives are (1) MacMurray to have four MORE lucky shots left in his Colt, or (2) the townsmen relent and capture or kill the gang. There are no other possibilities that don't involve supernatural intervention. No power on earth could force me to reveal which alternative the movie chooses.Oh -- those viewers with the aficion for old movies will recognize a lot of faces in the supporting case: Walter Brennan, Whit Bissell, the miscreant Jack Lambert, Harry Shannon (cf., "Citizen Kane"), John Qualen, and Frank Ferguson.Social psychologists will note the illustration of one of the more surprising findings of cognitive balance theory. Take a person who holds attitude A and opposes attitude B. Tell him that you'll pay him to act AS IF he holds attitude B. After he argues for attitude B long enough, he'll lose his belief in A and genuinely switch to B. In "At Gunpoint," the townspeople are friendly to storekeeper MacMurray. After the first shooting, they begin to avoid him out of fear for themselves and their families. Pretty soon, after they've acted as if he had the plague, they come not to like MacMurray very much and want to get rid of him. They begin with attitude A, act AS IF they held attitude B, and finally FEEL attitude B. They don't even congratulate him when his reward check comes, and they don't say thanks when he buys them a ceremonial drink at the saloon. Have you non-psychologists grasped the point? Good. That will be ten cents.

Director Alfred L. Werker's frontier drama "At Gunpoint," with Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Malone, and Walter Brennan, qualifies as one of the best post "High Noon" horse operas. Just as Gary Cooper had to defend himself against three ruthless gunmen in "High Noon" (1952), Fred MacMurray incurs the wrath of an entire outlaw gang for killing their bandit leader. In both films, the hero must stand alone because his friends had abandoned him. Although this western appears blandly routine, "At Gunpoint" emerges as a sturdy, realistic western with a first-rate cast and an imaginative storyline with a surprise ending. Compared with traditional westerns where the gun-toting hero is a lawman or an outlaw, the "At Gunpoint" hero looks definitely non-traditional. Rarely do we see storekeepers elevated to a status of heroic prominence from the obscurity of the periphery where such characters are confined."At Gunpoint" opens with the five-member Dennis gang riding into the sleepy little town of Plainview, Texas, where they rob the bank. During the robbery, an overzealous bank teller tries to thwart them and they gun him down. As they are riding out of town, the bank robbers kill elderly Marshal MacKay (Harry Shannon of "The Tall Men") before he can get off a single shot. Amid all the gunfire, storekeeper Jack Wright (Fred MacMurray of "The Texas Rangers") retrieves MacKay's six-gun and miraculously nails gang chieftain Alvin Dennis (John Pickard of "Black Horse Canyon")with a single shot. Another courageous citizen George Henderson (Frank Ferguson of "Rancho Notorious") knocks Dennis out of the saddle with a couple of extra shots. The remainder of the gang has to high tail it rather than get caught in a crossfire. Not only does the Dennis gang lose their leader, but also Alvin Dennis was carrying the bag with the bank's loot in it when Wright and Henderson plugged him. Naturally, everybody in Plainview is proud of Wright's sharp shooting and both Wright and Henderson get their faces on the front page of the local newspaper. When Alvin's hot-blooded brother Bob (Skip Homeier of "Tomorrow The World") learns the identities of the two men who shot and killed his Alvin, he vows vengeance. Meanwhile, Plainview holds a celebration at the saloon to honor their heroes. In one of the film's best lines, Wright jokes about the circumstances of his shooting: "You're looking at the man who shot the notorious Alvin Dennis from a distance of half a mile... with a slingshot." Initially, the townsfolk want Jack Wright to follow in Marshal MacKay's footsteps as their next lawman, but he refuses because he owns and operates the only general store in town, so they persuade family man George Henderson to accept the badge. On the way out of town after the celebration, George runs into Bob and his fellow gang members and they gun him down in cold blood.After Henderson's murder, the townspeople live in fear that the Dennis gang will return and kill Jack Wright. They are so afraid of this prospect that they don't want to be around Jack any more than they must so they stop shopping at this store and they forbid their children from playing with his son. Things calm down for a couple of weeks while a Federal marshal (Harry Lauter of "Three Outlaws") arrives in Plainview to write a report about the bank robbery and to see that Jack received his reward money for killing Alvin Dennis. Despite the repeated requests of the town fathers for the Federal marshal to stick around, the lawman dismisses their anxiety and suggests that the Dennis gang has probably left the state. After all, he points out that posses are scouring the countryside for them. Late one evening, Bob Dennis rides into town, knocks insistently at the door to Jack Wright's store and shoots the man who comes to the door. Unfortunately, the man who answered the door was Jack Wright's brother-in-law Wally (James O'Hara of "Death of a Gunfighter") and Jack's wife Martha (Dorothy Malone of "Basic Instinct") is traumatized because she realized that the gunman thought that Wally was Jack.What sets "At Gunpoint" apart from most westerns is its sense of realism. Nothing happens here that couldn't happen in real life. Jack Wright knows that he made a lucky shot, despite the congratulations that he receives from his fellow citizens who insist that he is a crack shot. In the end, when the Dennis gang comes after Jack and he has a gun in hand, every bullet that he fires misses them. Jack was an everyday person before the shooting and he is still the same after the shooting. Most films would have made him a crack shot with no practice after he shot the outlaw. The cowardly town citizens who begin to shun him after they realize that the gang is waiting for the opportune time to shoot him resemble the pusillanimous citizens in "High Noon" who refuse to help their lawman that requests their help after the three gunmen begin to stalk him. The ending in "At Gunpoint," however, differs considerably from "High Noon" and that is one of the film's saving graces. The Fred MacMurray character never considers himself an accurate shot, but he realizes that he cannot run from the Dennis gang. The suspense and tension that Werker generates in this modest but top-notch western between the time that Henderson is shot and the gang returns is a tribute to his talent as a director.