Death of a Gunfighter

Death of a Gunfighter

1969 · 94 min · EN · PG · 6.5 (27 votes)
Dir. Robert Totten, Alan Smithee, Don Siegel · Starring Richard Widmark, Lena Horne, Carroll O'Connor, David Opatoshu, Kent Smith, Jacqueline Scott · Music Oliver Nelson

Marshall Patch... he lived by the law of the gun...

Western

In the turn-of-the century Texas town of Cottownwood Springs, marshal Frank Patch is an old-style lawman in a town determined to become modern. When he kills drunken Luke Mills in self-defense, the town leaders decide it's time for a change. That ask for Patch's resignation, but he refuses on the basis that the town on hiring him had promised him the job for as long as he wanted it. Afraid for the town's future and even more afraid of the fact that Marshal Patch knows all the town's dark secrets, the city fathers decide that old-style violence is the only way to rid themselves of the unwanted lawman.

VIBE

A somber, gritty western where an aging lawman confronts a changing world. It feels like a slow, inevitable march towards a violent, tragic end, steeped in the dust and moral ambiguity of the Old West.

grittysombertensemelancholicslow-burnrevisionist westerncharacter studygritty realismtradition vs. modernityinevitabilityviolencemoral decay
marshalsaloon owner
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