Another day, another western based on a Zane Grey novel.
Unlike the last movie I watched that was based on a book by Zane Grey — Thunder Mountain, which was a fun little 60-minute black and white western from RKO Radio Pictures — George Waggner’s Gunfighters gets the prestige treatment from Columbia Pictures. It’s a feature-length film (almost 90 minutes long), and it’s shot in Cinecolor.
Cinecolor was a two-color film process that was cheaper than Technicolor, and could sometimes look washed-out or unnaturally reddish, but Gunfighters looks great. For what it is, the production values are high, and legendary cowboy star Randolph Scott is always fun to watch.
In Gunfighters, which is based on Zane Grey’s posthumously published novel Twin Sombreros, Scott plays a seasoned gunman with the unlikely name of Brazos Kane.
Brazos is the veteran of so many shootouts that as soon as the opening credits are done rolling, his best friend steps out of a cantina, calls him out, and Brazos is forced to kill him. As his friend lies dying, he offers no explanation for starting the duel. In the world of Gunfighters, gunmen are like mountain climbers — ask mountain climbers why they want to climb a mountain, and they’ll respond, “Because it’s there.” Likewise, Brazos’s friend just had to know who was the faster draw.
But Brazos doesn’t want to be a part of this topsy-turvy fast-draw world anymore. As he says in one of the film’s bits of sporadic voice-over, “When your best friend tries to beat you to the draw, it’s time to put up your guns.”
But it’s the same everywhere he goes — the Texas Panhandle, Wichita, Dodge — so Brazos heads for the Inskip Ranch, where he plans to ride the range with his old friend Bob Tyrell.
And that’s just what they do. After Brazos arrives at the Inskip Ranch, he and his old buddy Bob herd cattle, bust broncos, sleep under the stars, start their days with strong coffee and hot biscuits, pass a jug of whiskey around the campfire at night, tell tall tales, and live happily for all the days of their life, making Gunfighters unique among ’40s westerns, since it contains almost no gunplay or violence.
Ha ha! Just kidding. As soon as Brazos shows up at the Inskip Ranch, he finds Tyrell’s corpse facedown in a creek.
And even worse, he’s immediately blamed for the murder, and finds himself on the wrong end of a lynch mob.
Gunfighters has plenty to recommend it. It looks good and contains some of the most impressive chases on horseback I’ve seen in a western. But for every exciting five-minute stretch there’s a boring one, and the final showdown between Brazos and the bad guys seems to take forever to get to.
I enjoyed the performances of both Dorothy Hart and Barbara Britton, who play sisters Jane and Bess Banner. Most of the humor in the film comes from the fact that the two sisters look enough alike to be mistaken for twins, and there’s plenty of cases of mistaken identity, if that’s your thing.
Forrest Tucker, who is probably best remembered for playing Sergeant O’Rourke on the TV show F Troop, makes a great sneering bad guy, but the other major villain, Bruce Cabot (of King Kong fame), never makes much of an impression.
I didn’t love Gunfighters, but I didn’t hate it, either. And you can’t beat scenes like the one in which Brazos tells a crooked sheriff’s deputy played by Grant Withers, “Never mind my shots. Count my guns.”
