Man with the Gun

Plot synopsis:
Clint Tollinger arrives in town, and is recognized as the "man in grey", a gun for hire who had a reputation for cleaning up other towns. After 14 killings in a year are followed by a night shooting and the burning of a house under construction, and the town marshal tells the town council he's not sure what can be done, the council hires Tollinger as their new "town tamer". The marshal deputizes Tollinger, then tells him he is on his own. Tollinger begins by warning two known gunmen to leave town. He then begins to disarm everyone in the town. Then in an unseen confrontation he kills the two gunmen he'd previously warned to leave town.
A group of gunmen shoots up a poster warning of the gun ordnance at the edge of town. As they ride in, they yell that they are looking for Tollinger. Forewarned by the shots, he gets the drop on them from the loft of the town stable with a shotgun. He orders them to drop their guns and they do so. One trades small talk with him while reaching for a derringer in his hat, but Tollinger shoots him.
At a social event, one of the town women advises Tollinger that his job won't be finished until the dance hall girls also leave town. She criticizes them for dancing and carrying on, unaware that Tollinger is an old friend to the madam who manages them. But not all is well in their relationship. When Tollinger warns Nelly Bain that her girls also have a curfew, she replies that she knows what happens in a "Tollinger-tamed town". She tells him she and the girls will be moving on further west, and asks him for suggestions. She asks for the name of any town where he won't be. But there's a hidden history between the two of them, and everything isn't what it seems.
Two gunmen from a large cattle spread ride into town to tell Tollinger that they've detained Jeff Castle for trying to build a house on disputed land. They appear to have set a trap, inviting Tollinger to the ranch to pick him up, where they will have the advantage. Tollinger arrests the two for carrying guns in town. Some of the town's citizens suddenly have second thoughts, worrying that others from the ranch will come in and shoot up the town. But the arrest proves a good tactical move; the other ranch hands deliver Castle into town, trading him for the two prisoners.
Nelly Bain tells Tollinger something she's kept from him since he arrived in town, that their daughter had died, and Tollinger takes it badly. His patience and calm demeanor suddenly gone, he resolves to clean up the town the quick and dirty way; he burns the saloon, which is owned by Dade Holman, the cattleman who had sent the gunmen.
Holman sets up a trap for Tollinger, and rides into town in a surrey to see that it works. Tollinger kills his assailant but is shot by Holman. Castle shoots Holman, and at the end Nelly and Tollinger (who apparently survives) kiss and are reconciled.

Tags: revenge

Review:
Clint Tollinger arrives in a small western town looking for his estranged wife, who left him and now runs the local show saloon.
The solution may be just as bad as the problem but they take the risk.With a nice dark character with a lot of anger and pain in the front of the film this western is enjoyable tough.
We meet Tollinger as a gentle, quiet man but gradually we see him to be violent, heartless and full of bitterness; it is solid development that is at the heart of the film's dark tone.
Of course it still follows the genre traditions and will appeal to fans of such while also having enough else going on to make it differ from the Technicolor westerns of the same period.Wilson is responsible for the dark tone as both writer and director; shot is stark black and white he frames some interesting shots and is not afraid to be aggressive or shocking considering the period.
Support behind these two is roundly good but the film is very much Mitchum's and he knows it.Overall it is a solid western that gradually gets down to just going where you expect it to.
A famous ¨town tamer¨ named Clit Tollinger(Robert Mitchum) comes hired by the citizens to rid the gunslingers ( Leo Genn, Claude Atkins, among others), Baronland's hoodlums.
There he meets the blacksmith (Emile Meyer) , his daughter (Karen Sharpe), her boyfriend(John Lupton), the marshal(Henry Hull) and the Saloon owner (Ted De Corsia).
Clint as lawman is appointed deputy to bring peace and puts some cartels saying the following : ¨ Warning , wearing of guns or other weapons in town is banned.
Clint finds his ex-girlfriend, a local madame (Jan Sterling) in charge of the Saloon girls( Angie Dickinson, Barbara Lawrence, among them).
At the end the kingpin landowner appears and attempts to murder Tollinger with his own hands.This is a tremendously exciting story of a sheriff-for-hire who had only one more killing to go.
It begins as a slow-moving Western but follows to surprise us with dark characters and solid plot.
Mitchum's brilliant, idiosyncratic, usually undervalued Westerns import his film noir persona to etch some compellingly dark character sketches, and bring an elegiac world-weariness more familiar from the films of Sam Peckinpah.
Directed by Orson Welles protege Richard Wilson, it is a stark, monochrome beauty, full of chilling silhouettes and terrifying outbursts of savage violence, as Mitchum comes to tame a town terrorised by a monopolist with a private army.
Clint Tollinger arrives in a small town looking for his estranged wife and news of his daughter, tho he finds her, the chance of any sort of reconciliation is very slim.
As they are living in fear of a mysterious landowner who is stripping the town from them bit by bit, they hold a meeting that chooses to hire Tollinger to rid the town of it's unsavoury elements.Man With The Gun seems to be either a forgotten piece or a vastly under seen one, for at the time of me writing this, it has just over 200 votes and a paltry 9 user comments written for it on IMDb. It's a shame on either score because although the production values scream out that this is a "B" movie Western, this is a fine entry in the Western genre.
That the piece takes on a rather standard plot theme of an harangued town turning to an avenging dark angel, probably hasn't done the film any favours over the years, I myself read the synopsis and thought it's just another in the line of similarly themed pictures.
Yet I was pleasantly surprised to find a darkly dramatic picture boasting many enjoyable moments, both technically and as a functioning story.Robert Mitchum is in the lead as Tollinger, perfectly cast, he strides thru the picture like some brooding menace.
The rest of the cast are very much in Mitchum's shadow, so really it's solely with the big man that the films acting credentials are high.
but Man With The Gun's minor failings are with its villains, and sadly de Corsia is lacking any sort of villainesque menace.The score from Alex North is excellently layered (fans of Spartacus will certainly be pricking their ears up) and the cinematography from Lee Garmes is highly impressive when one realises that the majority of this picture was shot on the studio lot.
Directed and co-written by first time director Richard Wilson, Man With The Gun holds few surprises for the genre, but it's dark in tone, violent and above all else, highly watchable.
Man With The Gun. There are westerns and there are westerns with many actors and then there is a Robert Mitchum western....in this film Mitchum plays a no nonsense, hard as nails character as a so called "town tamer"....he follows his estranged wife played coldly by Jan Sterling as she is the madame of a group of dance hall girls...Mitchum wants to make amends with his ex-wife Sterling but she is cold as ice toward him.
Mitchum accepts the job as a combo sheriff and "town tamer" and then manages to shoot up the whole place and fight with anyone who gets in his way....he does not believe in taking any so called prisoners.
Along the way Mitchum defends a local young man and his wife who are being terrorized by the local hoodlum who runs the town from his distant ranch.
In the end a good gun fighting scene with a set up dance hall girl and a town misfit played by Leo Gordon who along with the local kingpin rancher tries to wipe out Mitchum.
Very good western.This was the first time writer Richard Wilson directed a film, also this was a first for Samuel Goldwyn Junior as a producer.
Robert Mitchum comes to this town dominated by outlaws and is hired as a town tamer, but people are worried that he will go too far, also about the harm that he will do to the town´s businesses.
In Man With the Gun Robert Mitchum plays Clint Tollinger, a man who hires his gun out to clean out lawless towns in the west of which there seems to be a never ending supply.
But he comes to this particular town in search of his estranged wife, Jan Sterling who since she left him has taken up the occupation as Madam of the local bordello.
Of course the girls which include Barbara Lawrence and the still unknown Angie Dickinson are still called dance hall girls, but the Code was slowly cracking.It's by chance he gets drawn into the town politics involving a big cattle baron who runs roughshod over every thing and every one in the general vicinity.
The town council hires him to clean out the place of gunmen and sheriff Henry Hull makes it official by making him his deputy and giving him a free hand as per Mitchum's terms.
The results ain't pretty.Mitchum's a grim, bitter man heading the cast of a grim and bitter western.
There's quite a history behind it as the movie shows.Man With a Gun is a good western, but I have to say I was let down by the climatic gunfight at the end.
If Mitchum didn't suspect he was being set up before he did with gunman Leo Gordon following him, he was not the smart guy we'd been led to believe.Of course if you want to see what I'm talking about then by all means see Man With a Gun..
But it is a well crafted b Western, with an interestingly brooding storyline complemented by acting veering from the good to corny.Robert Mitchum slopes into wide open town looking for his wife and news of their daughter, and stays for a time as town-tamer.
What's fascinating about this film is Mitchum's cynically intense portrayal in going about cleaning the town of baddies, and the townsfolk's acceptance that his violent methods were the only ones.
Robert Mitchum, 'The Town Tamer', is as effective as always.
A western that makes many contemporary film directors blush with envy: perfect setting, intelligent dialogues, socio-psychological soundness in the script, good acting, camera direction and music without errors.
With lots of intricate subordinate plot in the overall probably familiar tale of a tough town tamer, this script by N.B. Stone, Jr., and Richard Wilson is very well served by an excellent cast, led by Robert Mitchum.Jan Sterling, a superlative actress not often enough given a character to show her talent, is second billed as a strong and tough woman who chaperones her female charges, who only dance and entertain, but who are seen by the blue-nosed women of the town as something worse.Karen Sharpe, who has never looked prettier, very girl-next-door-ish, plays the daughter of the town blacksmith who is also the town leader.The daughter is conflicted but her father, played beautifully by Emile Meyer, is not.One of the glories of this excellent motion picture is the number of other characters -- I hesitate to say "minor" because they all figure in the story -- whose lives and actions are pivotal.By one of those coincidences, I just finished a novel by Louis L'Amour with a very similar plot, except the town tamer in "The Empty Land" really doesn't want his role while Mitchum's Clint Tollinger does.This might be the best script for a movie I've ever watched about a town tamer.
If I would have to describe "Man with the Gun" in a word, I would sadly have to choose 'mundane.' I say 'sadly' because not only does the movie star the great Robert Mitchum, but because it does boast a good setup, a dark tone, and some good initiative-packed promise.
This is a setup that was done many other times, sometimes worse, sometimes better such as in Clint Eastwood's classic "High Plains Drifter." There are some really good elements to "Man with the Gun" and some really mundane and pall parts as well.
The good: the performances not only by Robert Mitchum, but also by the lovely, unsung actress Karen Sharpe.
The tone is dark and a little nihilistic, and I appreciated the tactic of hiding the bad guy for the majority of the picture and to avoid the typical clichés of when the Western rancher runs in with the iron-figured gunslinger.
This is yet another film based upon one of the classic Western plots, the one about the fearless lawman or gunman who helps the inhabitants of a town or a group of homesteaders stand up against a gang of lawless desperadoes, often in the pay of a corrupt local rancher or other powerful business interests.
It is set in a nameless Western town which is being terrorised by a gang of gunmen hired by Dade Holman, a wealthy and powerful cattleman who hopes to force the local people out so he can acquire their property cheaply, and opens with a striking image of one of the bad guys shooting a little boy's dog in front of the child.
The townspeople decide that enough is enough, and call in Clint Tollinger, a gun for hire with a reputation as a "town tamer".
Robert Mitchum made a number of Westerns throughout his career, although they were not always among his best films; he tended to be at his best in film noir, playing characters who were, if not outright villains like his Max Cady in "Cape Fear", at least morally ambiguous.
Although he has been deputised by the town marshal, this is one film where the dividing line between an officially appointed lawman and a hired gun is a thin one.
The film ends with the town well and truly tamed and the audience are left to conclude that peace and justice do indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun.
In 1955 the "strong man with a gun" theme might have seemed slightly fresher than it does nowadays, but even then this film might have struck many people as an inferior imitation of "High Noon".
If you like those movies, you'll probably see much better than Man with a Gun. And, coming from a huge Robert Mitchum fan, you'd better believe me.Bob's ex-wife, Karen Sharpe, is avoiding him every time he tries to see her, and while most of the town is weary of his presence, Jan Sterling thinks he's pretty cute.
Whether he's playing a Film Noir tough-guy, or a no-nonsense, shoot-em-up cowboy - Robert Mitchum is, without question, my #1 favourite actor from Hollywood's golden years (the 40s & 50s), bar none.And, with that said - I'll tell you this - Had Mitchum not been the star of this somewhat run-of-the-mill Western-vehicle (from 1955) - Then I probably would've only given "Man With The Gun" a lower rating of 4 stars.(Anyway) - As the story goes - In this 80-minute, b&w Western - Mitchum plays Clint Tollinger a "shoot-first-ask-questions-later"-type of gunslinger, who arrives in the slutty/lawless town of Sheridan on personal business only to find himself cleaning up this filthy rats-hole 'cause nobody else has the guts to stand up to that mean, cussing hombre, Ed Pinchot, and his band of belligerent bad boys, who rule all at the point of a gun..
Robert Mitchum plays a 'town tamer' and the way things are played out we don't see the main bad guy till the very end.
Mitchum is fine in a good solid performance as the aforementioned, 'town tamer' but nobody else really seems up to the task, either in the town to be tamed or on the celluloid before us.
How Wilson managed to make 'the beautiful', Jan Sterling look so awful throughout is incredible but it is probably due to the fact she was told to play 'hard' and her features went that way.
Robert Mitchum is excellent in this film...so much so you wish he'd made more westerns.
Apart from Mitchum's character, most of the rest of the folks in the movie simply make little sense.When the story begins, a town is being controlled by a guy intent on having his own way.
None of it makes sense and it's a darn shame since Mitchum is great in this one.By the way, keep a close eye on the 'ladies of ill repute' in the film.
When a troubled stranger (Robert Mitchum) arrives in a western town looking for his estranged wife (Jan Sterling), he is made the sheriff to try and clean it up, finding out that his wife is involved in the local corruption.
This film strikes interest when it deals with the human elements of Mitchum's strong but quiet surgeon, but it seems to have a different mood each of its characters, particularly Karen Sharpe's who sometimes brays her lines.
The conflict between Mitchum and one villain in the Palace is the most memorable scene as Mitchum deals with the said villain in a most unique and unforgettable way.While this has the standard western look with sleepy town and dirt roads, the camera uses angles to traipse through it that gives it an interesting, almost 3D look.
The town's set is little better than that for TV westerns like Lawman, and the script works mostly by saying as little as possible, forcing the cinematography and direction to show rather than tell.
The familiar stock character actors (including some familiar faces like Emile Meyer who rise to their extended screen-time) all support Mitchum, whose pained charisma and cobra-quick violence are essential to the film's success.Other reviewers are right that the basic plot is formulaic, but a few variations maintained interest.
Mitchum's character warns of no formulaic redemption when he repeatedly asserts that he's nothing but a gunman and only guns can tame a town—contrasting ominously with formula western heroes who proclaim they don't want to fight, that they're really peace-loving men.
"Town tamer" Mitchum at one point runs amok in a saloon.
It also has a pretty good, if brief, "catharsis" moment at the end.Terrific supporting cast- bombastic Henry Hull (Jesse James '39, Return of Frank James '50), excellent but underused Maidie Norman, and an early Claude Akins bad-guy performance.
You are guaranteed to notice a very young Angie Dickinson (and her long legs).Mitchum manages to somehow humanize a wooden character but its just a thankless role.
Notice when he brilliantly overlays one theme over the other as Mitchum's character seems to be cracking up.This is a black-and-white set-bound psychological Western, which in other movies can be a formula for dullsville.
Robert Mitchum is a gunfighter named Clint Tollinger who rides into the Western town of Sheridan looking for his estranged wife and daughter.
Emile Meyer (Riker in "Shane") is carried over, and so is the meeting of community leaders in which they argue about hiring Clint Tollinger.Some notable features of the movie.
Howard Hawks' Western ambiance was functional as well, but the towns look lived in.
"The Night of the Hunter" actor Robert Mitchum plays a tough town taming gunfighter in "Al Capone" director Richard Wilson's modest, but deceptive black & white, 83-minute western "Man with the Gun." Just about everything about this Sam Goldwyn Jr. production looks thoroughly ordinary, but the screenplay by N.B. Stone and Wilson contains layers of subtext that aren't immediately discernible with an initial viewing.
Nobody gives a bad performance and the burly Mitchum is agreeably gruff and credible as Clint Tollinger.
Westerns about town taming heroes were a dime-a-dozen when "Man with the Gun" came out in 1955.
Later, a stranger in gray, Clint Tollinger (Robert Mitchum), appears in town on a horse with a loose shoe.
After the town council agrees to hire Tollinger for $500, our hero establishes a midnight curfew for the saloons and prohibits the wearing firearms in the city limits.
Tollinger prefers to act alone and act fast because he feels that time is not on his side.The problem with Richard Wilson's "Man with a Gun" is that there is really nothing new, but he stages everything smoothly enough.