Shoot Out

Plot synopsis:
Clay Lomax is released from prison after serving nearly eight years. He goes looking for Sam Foley, a bank robber who shot Lomax in the back and left him to be arrested. Learning of his release, Foley hires a trio of young thugs—Pepe, Skeeter, and Bobby Jay Jones—to track Lomax's movements. Lomax locates an old friend, Trooper, and offers him money for the name of the town where Foley is staying. The thugs catch up to Lomax and force Alma, a prostitute working for Trooper, to spend the night with them.
While on board a train to retrieve the money he promised, Lomax is told of a young girl named Decky and that she is to accompany him, with her previous guardian dead. Lomax acquiesces and takes charge of Decky, receiving the money in exchange. He takes it to Trooper and then tries to find someone who would take care of Decky, but is unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the thugs fatally wound Trooper and rob the saloon, taking Lomax's money and Alma, before continuing to follow Lomax. Lomax learns of Trooper's death and that he mentioned the location Gun Hill with his dying breath.
During the journey, Lomax and Decky bond. One night, the thugs attempt to attack Lomax, but he disarms them, and tells them to run back to Foley and tell them that he is coming for him. Later, a rainstorm forces Lomax and Decky to take shelter at the house of a woman named Juliana, who becomes infatuated with Lomax and offers to watch over Decky. The thugs then return and take them prisoner. Bobby Jay gets drunk and eventually kills Alma in his inebriation. Lomax escapes, with Bobby Jay accidentally killing Skeeter in the process.
Bobby Jay grabs Decky and flees the house to find Pepe. When Pepe insults him, Bobby Jay kills him, and Decky takes advantage of his distraction to escape. He then goes to Foley for his money, but kills him when Foley tries to reach for a gun. Bobby Jay is then ambushed by Lomax, who psychologically tortures him while demanding Decky's location. When he confesses that he has no idea where she is, Lomax places a cartridge on top of Bobby Jay's head, and tells him that either the cartridge will explode and kill him, or Bobby Jay will be fast enough to kill Lomax. Bobby Jay tries to outdraw Lomax but cannot and is shot dead. Lomax leaves the money, tells the maid to call law enforcement, and finds Decky at Juliana's house.

Tags: revenge, murder, flashback

Review:
Plot has Peck playing Clay Lomax, who is out of prison after 7 years and seeking revenge on the partner who shot him in the back during a robbery.
But Lomax soon finds he has company in the young child form of Decky Ortega (Lyn), who has been sent to him by his one time lover Teresa, sadly now deceased.Just do your little chore, punk.It took a whack from critics of the day, and even now it only seems to have a handful of fans prepared to stand up and say they enjoy it very much.
The problems are hard to argue against, Peck is not adept at playing a vengeful bastard in his later years, the villains are of the near cackling pantomime kind, and a number of cheap money saving tactics are employed by an on the wane Hathaway.
Yet the action hits the right notes, Peck's unfolding relationship with the adorable Lyn is heart warming, and the elder female characters-put upon prostitute desperately seeking a way out (Tyrrell)/plain Jane homemaker who drinks to forget her unfulfilled lot (Quinn)-are afforded intelligence in the writing.
I really liked Shoot Out. I think that comparing it to True Grit because of some commonalities of cast/crew/producer and ( vaguely) theme is unfair.
The relationship between John Wayne and Kim Darby was very different than the growing affection and dependence between Dawn Lyn's delightful Decky and Peck's tough but tender Clay.
It works best if you consider it as a sequel to "The Gunfighter" (1950), what would have happened to Peck's Johnny Ringo character had he survived and left his town rather than remain there with his wife and son.Although the negative comments that have been posted are generally accurate, the film has several elements that make it worth watching.
Unfortunately Gregory Peck did not put Aticus Finch energy into the Clay Lomax character, and even though Dawn Lyn (Dodie from 'My Three Sons') is fine as the little girl-the idea just doesn't work.
But as someone has already mentioned this is not a great script and there are 1970's dialogue issues that periodically jar the viewer back to reality, making it impossible for this thing to ever really get going.On the plus side Robert Lyons gives a nice 'really out there' performance as the wacko bad guy.
Also the production designer did a good job on the overall feel of the film, there several absolutely great visuals (check out the shot of Dawn Lyn standing on the train station platform), and there is a very original non-formula climax.
The production has excellent overall unity and someone really paid attention to continuity issues (watch how the progress of the water dripping on the cabin table is matched to the time sequence of the scene).What stayed with me through the years and motivated me to watch this again was the first film performance of Susan Tyrrell, as the dumb but plucky saloon girl.
This film from a novel titled ¨The last cowboys¨ and adapted by Marguerite Roberts (True grit) deals with Clay Lomax (Gregory Peck) , he leaves the prison and seeking vengeance of his former partner named Foley (James Gregory) who double-crossed him .
Lions) who along with other gunmen (Pepe Serna and John Davis Chandler) abduct a prostitute (Susan Tyrell) and after that , they go out in pursuit Lomax .An average Western revenge story plenty of violence , action and shoot'em up ; though the veteran director Hathaway is uninspired and the ending is pretty predictable .
The movie displays a wide plethora of secondary actors usually seen in Western genre : Jeff Corey (True grit) as an old brawler in wheelchair , the usual Arthur Hunnicutt (El Dorado), Paul Fix , Rita Gam (Tomahawk) , Willis Bouchey's last film and the habitual cocky nasty named John Davis Chandler .
Henry was an excellent filmmaker who directed several classic Westerns , such as ¨True grit¨ , ¨Sons of Katie Elder¨ , ¨Nevada Smith¨ ,¨Rawhide¨ , ¨How the west was won¨ (also with Gregory Peck) , among others .
This film also co-stars the great character actor James Gregory who also never gave a bad performance.
It's also not a great western for Gregory Peck who in his day has given us classics like The Gunfighter, The Big Country, and The Bravados.
Gregory Peck plays a man just out of prison who's looking for his partner from a bank robbery who shot him and took all the loot.
A lot of the plot scenario has not been well thought out in Shoot Out. The cast struggles, but their hearts are clearly not in it.Best in the cast is Susan Tyrell who plays a prostitute who takes up with the three punks.
She's a 19th century version of a Valley Girl and she pays big time for her stupidity and very bad taste in men.Definitely not one of the better films for Henry Hathaway and Gregory Peck.
I admit that it's not the best western ever made, by a long shot, but it's worth watching just for the fine performance of Robert F.
Shoot Out (1971) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Western from the same producer, screenwriter and director of True Grit has Gregory Peck being released from prison after seven years and heading off to kill the man who shot him in the back during a bank robbery.
Gregory Peck looked like he was sleepwalking, and Dawn Lyn as the little girl was annoying, at best.
Gregory Peck occasionally played ambiguous, morally conflicted characters in films like "Moby Dick" and "The Bravados", but rarely played outright villains, "The Boys from Brazil" being an exception.
(The novel on which it was based had a different title, "The Lone Cowboy").Peck's career went into something of a decline in the late sixties and early seventies; few of his films from this period are of top quality; "MacKenna's Gold" is another sub-standard Western from around the same time.
Now young Dawn Lyn was obviously an adorable child, but she was the sort of adorable child who would have been more at home in a sweet family comedy than in a hard-boiled revenge Western, and the scenes in which she appears do not blend in well with the rest of the film.
Willis) and screenwriter (Marguerite Roberts) and had a similar theme in that they teamed an ageing male star with a young girl, although the character played by Kim Darby is rather older than Decky.
This is a disappointing follow-up to the same writer-producer-director team who made TRUE GRIT (1969) – here tackling another Western with child interest, but replacing John Wayne with Gregory Peck.
Not a genre stalwart like The Duke, perhaps, but he did manage some 12 appearances in Westerns between 1946 and 1989 – sometimes to striking effect as in DUEL IN THE SUN (1946), THE GUNFIGHTER (1950) and THE BIG COUNTRY (1958).Anyway, the film is a standard revenge tale which starts with Peck being released from a 7-year prison sentence (caught after he was shot by his own partner, James Gregory, as they were fleeing the scene of a bank robbery); on his way to town, he is told to pick up something from an arriving train – which turns out to be a little girl, the daughter of an old flame of his who has since passed away!
The relationship between weathered cowboy Peck and the cute yet spirited girl is nicely handled; this, however, serves to render the star’s character mellow as opposed to mean – and, consequently, diverts attention from the central plot (which sees Gregory hiring a trio of brash young gunman to follow Peck’s movements).The cast is divided between old pros and new talent – the former including Jeff Corey (as a crippled bartender brutally murdered by the reckless gang) and Paul Fix, and the latter, Pat Quinn (from Arthur Penn’s ALICE’S RESTAURANT [1969] – as a widow who shelters Peck and the girl, but falls foul of his pursuers) and Susan Tyrell (soon to be Oscar-nominated for John Huston’s FAT CITY [1972] – as a prostitute who tags along with the villains).
Thirty six year old Westerns seem to be on television every week but few directed by Henry Hathaway with Gregory Peck taking the lead.
Several times, Gregory Peck got the draw on the bad guys (i.e., captured them and could have shot them).
Lyons as the psycho gunslinger hired by Gregory, and 7-year-old Dawn Lyn as the cutesy, foul-mouthed little 'un dumped on Peck when he gets released from prison for a robbery gone sideways.You also get the startle of seeing a hooker's slobber-covered boobs in the saloon's back room.
And this thing got a GP?Hathaway's talent for lovely landscapes is lost on the viewer trying to translate the grammar-challenged westernese that spills out of everyone's mouth and with the grimacing from the scenery-chewing bad-guy behavior that would make anyone long for the quiet rationality of Richard Widmark's sociopath in Kiss of Death or the social responsibility of Andy Robinson in Dirty Harry.Just to show you how stolid Peck got toward the end of his big-star career, he gets the chance to have a heart-to-heart with a farm widow (a pretty, curvy actress named Patricia Quinn), and when she opens up to him about how lonely she is, how she drinks herself to sleep every night pining away for a man in bed, Peck doesn't kiss her or make goo-goo eyes at her, he grasps her head, and I thought, "My God, he's gonna check her teeth!"It's amazing how snarky one can get when watching a bastard stink- pot western..
Ten years after Gregory Peck played America's ideal father in To Kill a Mockingbird, he thought it would be funny to take a role in which he inherits a little girl and doesn't know how to handle her.
The father-daughter scenes are really cute, and there's a bit of romantic tension with Patricia Quinn to spice things up for Greg, who's a little worn around the edges but still looks good in a cowboy hat.
The book was a story as if told by a very prim and proper elderly lady who wrote in a prim and proper style, with no contractions, for example.When Ms. Roberts merely typed the book, rather than attempting some degree of realism in the dialogue, she made "True Grit" a parody, a burlesque of a great western story with most of the characters speaking their lines in a ridiculously stilted manner.Mr. Hathaway made no effort, apparently, at improving her script and if it hadn't been for great performers, "True Grit" would have flopped."Shoot Out" was not as badly scripted, nor as badly directed, though there were lots of holes and errors, some of which could have been fixed or at least helped by better editing.Still, Gregory Peck is always good to excellent, and made a surprisingly good cowboy, for such an elegant man.Here he is sometimes upstaged by a darling and petite actress named Dawn Lyn, one of the most likable little girls I've seen in a western, and, more, very believable as the feisty orphan with a mind of her own.Also from "True Grit" is Jeff Corey, one of Hollywood's most outstanding talents, and able even to overcome Henry Hathaway directing.Another of Hollywood's greatest actors is James Gregory, often a villain, as here, although he is on screen very little, but absolutely enthralling as the inspector in the 1970s TV series, "Barney Miller."Any film or show James Gregory is in is improved by his presence.There are several female performers and at least two are great to watch, but Pat, or Patricia, Quinn is not one of them.
But it's a western, with Gregory Peck and the adorable Dawn Lyn and the hypnotic Jeff Corey.
So, production value wise, "Shoot Out" is barely distinguishable from a TV western.Peck is OK in "Shoot Out." However, his role could have been played as well or better by most of his contemporaries; Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Richard Widmark, Robert Mitchum or James Stewart would have been just as good.
"Shoot Out" may not be a great western, but it certainly better than "The Train Robbers," "Cahill: US Marshall" or "Rooster Cogburn," three made by John Wayne during this time period.
Unlike the sadistic villains of Leone and Peckinpaugh, Bobby Jay is a "child man," the kind of psycho played by Robert Evans in "Fiend That Walked the West," and, to some lesser extent, Gregory Peck played in "Duel in the Sun." Like a school bully, Bobby Jay didn't see his actions as cruel.
Worse, director Henry Hathaway fails to cover for this lack of chemistry with tight closeups, which would have helped immensely.WARNING: SPOILERSSome have characterized Peck as "stupid" for not killing Bobby Jay and his partners when he had the drop on them at their campsite.
However, people make similar errors in judgment all the time, and Peck could not have anticipated Emma coming on to him.Given that Peck and Lyons are dopplegangers (two sides of the same character), producer Hal Wallis would have been better served by using the money he spent for the unnecessary holdup flashback to purchase the "skinny dipping" scene from "Duel in the Sun." With a little careful picture and sound editing, he could have passed off Jennifer Jones as Decky's mother and shown Peck in, arguably his best performance, as a playful psychotic.
Inserting this flashback immediatlely following the scene of Peck bathing Decky would have worked beautifully, and better established Peck's character and unruly past.END OF SPOILERSEven given it's weaknesses, "Shoot Out" is worth a view.
After seven years in prison, ex-convict and aging gunfighter Clay Lomax(Gregory Peck)sets out on the trail with revenge on his mind.
Lomax may be a hardened man, but he shows his soft side when he becomes burdened with taking care of a cute young orphan girl named Decky(Dawn Lyn).
I didn't vote it 10 stars because of the wonderful directing, acting, dialog or story value--because quite frankly, it doesn't have any of those going for it--I voted it 10 because I enjoyed watching this film so much.This is a western starring tall and handsome Gregory Peck, and it has some scenes and dialog that are a real hoot, as well as a couple of scenes where it is blatantly obvious the characters are not really on horseback.
There is also some so-called acting by Patricia Quinn as Juliana Farrell, where she sounds like she's reading her lines out a book, rather than saying them in a natural speaking manner.Not the kind of western you see every day, that's for sure.Clay Lomax (Gregory Peck)is getting out of prison after having served 7 years for an unsuccessful bank robbery.
Since he definitely has plans to get back at his bank robbing partner, Sam Foley, who shot him in the back right at the scene of the hold-up and then took all the money, I don't know why he unloaded the weapon.That's just one of many strange behaviors on the part of various characters in this film.
Decky (Dawn Lyn)is an obstinate little girl of about six, with a mind of her own.After getting stuck with Decky, Clay learns where Sam Foley is and sets out with his young charge.On the way to Gun Hill, there's another run-in with Bobby Jay and the boys, who at this point have forced a young prostitute, Alma,(Susan Tyrrell) to go along with them.During a drenching rain, Clay and Decky arrive at the ranch house of Juliana Farrell, a widow and her young son, Dutch.Juliana wastes no time getting down to business with Clay--five minutes after they meet.
He soon falls foul of three thugs who work for the now respectable rancher, following which he has a 6-year old girl landed on him by an ex-girlfriend, the girl's mother, who has died: the child may be his daughter.This 1970 western, made by the director and production team who had made John Wayne's True Grit, turned up on TV.
It had much of the look of True Grit, filmed on similar locations at the same time of year, and benefited from an unusual story blending together the quest for revenge with the unwitting and unwilling childcare element.
Dawn Lyn as the child did well, and was considerably less annoying that Kim Darby was in True Grit a year earlier.
Think about a western where the hero goes after a bad guy along with a 7 year old girl, and the bad guy stooges follow the hero along with a woman who cooks for them and has sex with them whenever they feel like it.
Instead the showdown is actually between Lomax and Bobby Jay Jones - the head stooge.Clay Lomax is played by the formidable as always Gregory Peck.
Lomax is kind of stuck with 7 year old Decky (who is probably his daughter, but the movie never says it for sure).
The relationship between Gregory Peck, as Clay, and Dawn Lyn, as Decky, serves as comic relief between the sinister aspects of the film.
Newly released from an 8 year prison stay, the first thing that Clay wants to do is 'pay back' his bank robbing partner Sam Foley(James Gregory) for betraying him.
Meanwhile, Foley has hired 3 young men(Bobby Jay, Pepe, and Skeeter) to keep an eye on Clay's movements, with instructions not to kill him.
"Shootout" begins with an unbelievable scene; when Clay Lomax (Gregory Peck) is released from prison, he's allowed to strap on a loaded gun directly in front of the prison warden.
Seems like a more vindictive ex-con could have done some damage.Shortly after, with his mind set on revenge against the partner that double crossed him in a hold up seven years earlier, Lomax inherits young Decky (Dawn Lyn) from a former flame who died en route delivering him a message.
Gregory Peck's performance appears tired at times, though there are some good moments with his young charge.