If you are looking for a shoot-em-up western, this film is NOT it. Instead you get a gripping drama with a lot of dialogue and emotions. Gregory Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, an ace gunfighter with a fearsome reputation, but is tired of it all and wants to reunite with his wife who he left many years ago and his young son who he has never met. However his reputation is also the cause of his downfall. That's because every young squirt wants to pick up a fight with the great Jimmy Ringo to enhance his own reputation, as he himself had once been. This film is about life comes a full circle and your deeds eventually catch up to you.Peck's style, as always, is about a man who does not feel the need to vigorously assert his manhood or toughness. He goes about it in a calm and collected way with a quiet confidence. The town marshal (who was Ringo's buddy back in the day) is played beautifully by Millard Mitchell. As Ringo remarks in one scene, Marshal did not need to carry a gun to intimidate the bad guys.Ringo's wife Peggy is played by Helen Westcott who is torn between having nothing to do with Ringo and going away with the hopefully reformed Ringo. She still clearly loves him but is afraid to trust both her and her's son life with a man who lives so dangerously.All in all, this is a very fulfilling movie with lots of clear lessons to learn from it.

Cliché ridden tale of the young gunslingers constantly on the loose to challenge notorious gunmen. Doesn't it always have to take a bullet in the back to bring the want to reform gunslinger down?Gregory Peck, as Jimmy Ringo, plays such a so called reformed gunman wishing to reunite with his wife and young son despite her reluctance to do so.Helen Westcott, who changed seats with Susan Hayward, in "With A Song in My Heart," plays the reluctant wife.Ellen Corby and Verna Felton, the latter Hilda Crocker on television's "December Bride," bride represent town women looking to rid the town of troublemakers. Felton's performance becomes comic in nature.Millard Mitchell, who co-starred with Peck the year before in "12 O'Clock High," is the reformed person who escaped a life of crime, by being a minor character among hoodlums, represents an individual truly reformed.

The gunman in western movies is often a glamorous figure. (Who can forget tall, handsome, gallant Henry Fonda in "Warlock"?) We find him fascinating even though we know he is at best outside the law and at worst a murderer.In "The Gunfighter," a terrific movie, Gregory Peck's Jimmy Ringo has some of the mystique of the gunman, but mostly what we see is his weariness of the life he has led and his fear that he is doomed to be hunted down and shot by some upstart gunman, pretty much like the Jimmy Ringo of 15 or 20 years before. Ringo at age 35 or so is now something of a gentleman in his relations with others, and we learn that he lives by a code--never drawing on an unarmed man, for example. But there is no attempt to whitewash his past. For all we know, his career has been one of unredeemed criminality.What captures our sympathy for Jimmy Ringo and holds us in suspense as to his outcome is not the glamor of the gunfighter but the vulnerability of a tired man desperate to elude his fate. He has convinced himself that he can start a new life with the woman he has always loved but abandoned eight years ago, along with their young son.The entire story covers a span of only a few hours. Pursued by three men who seek to kill him, Jimmy Ringo has arrived in an obscure town with precious little time in which to make his appeal to the woman and her boy. It is clear that his idea of reuniting with her and taking her and the boy away to a place where no one has heard of him is a fantasy. In the end, he dies the way he has lived--by gunfire."The Gunfighter" is a well-written, tightly constructed, tragic story filmed in stark black and white. It's a reminder of how much we have lost with the passing of the western genre.

The Gunfighter is surely one of the great classic Westerns of the late 1940's/early 1950's era. Yours truly saw it in 1950, when it was new, with my family in the local small-town theater. It made as powerful impression then as is possible on a 6-year old kid, and it gets better and better with subsequent viewings for the fading old geezer.Tautly and skillfully directed by old studio veteran Henry King, and filmed in stark black and white, this hour and twenty-five minute picture moves along at a brisk pace with nary a wasted scene, all along building suspense while painting intense character studies. Gregory Peck, as the title's badman, and Millard Mitchell as his lawman friend, both turn in overpowering performances, with fine support coming from Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Helen Westcott, and Skip Homeier. The Gunfighter is tough, tense, poignant, gritty, authentic, dramatically engaging, and first rate in every way. The story by William Bowers and William Sellers drew an Acedmy Award nomination. The movie was well received by critics but not by the paying public for some reason. Yet it is now widely, and deservedly recognized as an all-time classic Western.That being said and without detracting from its formidable merits, The Gunfighter was hardly the first "adult" or "mature" Western, as pundits on this forum and elsewhere keep saying. To think so, you must practically ignore most of the "A" Western pictures produced in the 1940's. Does Red River (1948) with its tough, brutal, overbearing antihero and its grand epic story seem to you to have been made for children? No, and neither were any of the "A" Westerns of the same era. "Adult" can't mean sexual situations here, because there was no hanky-panky in The Gunfighter. But there was a plenty in Duel In The Sun (1946), Peck's first Western and a text book example of the way Old Hollywood movie makers knew how to steam your eye glasses without really showing much! And if show and tell is required, get a load of Marlene Dietrich's outfit in the opening scene of The Spoilers (1942). Some very immature types think "mature" means displaying a nihilistic attitude. If that's you, check out Lust For Gold (1949 -- see my review). You can wallow in its angst and love it! But that wasn't the attitude The Gunfighter had anyway. If "mature" requires a dark, brooding, doom-laden, noir-type story, take a gander at early Robert Mitchum opus Pursued (1947), or Ramrod (1947). Are we talking a concentration on character development, adult, even sexual situations, complex dramatic development, try Canyon Passage (1946), Whispering Smith (1948 -- see my review), or The Sea Of Grass (1947 -- see my review). Below is a partial list of others embodying more or less the same "mature", "adult" approaches to the Western genre.Yellow Sky (1948), Abilene Town (1947), Station West (1948), Honky Tonk (1941), Silver River (1948), Barbary Coast (1935), Cimarron (1931), Dakota (1945 -- see my review), San Antonio (1945 -- see my review), California (1946 -- see my review), My Darling Clementine (1946), Flame Of Barbary Coast (1945), Blood On The Moon (1948), Colorado Territory (1948), and of course Stagecoach (1939). And many others.The Gunfighter was following an established tradition, not setting a new one. But it is a fine example. A true classic from the waning days of Old Hollywood's Golden Era! In a few years, they wouldn't be able to make 'em like this one any more.