Gunman’s Walk (1958)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) The 1950s were a rich period for westerns and as the decade drew to a close, films in that genre had to find something to distinguish themselves. It was a decade where more movies were shot in colour, where the role of Native Americans was being redefined ever so slightly, where having a cowboy with a gun wasn’t enough to sustain a narrative for a more demanding audience. Gunman’s Walk may not be that good of a film, but it fits in that trend in fitting a family drama in a western context, and is more nuanced about its native characters than most westerns of a few years earlier. Much of the story revolves around a hard patriarch (a good late performance from a mustachioed Van Heflin) having to contend with two very different sons: an overly aggressive and racist one (Tab Hunter, playing against type) and a more refined one who doesn’t fit his idea of what an heir should be like. One cattle drive later, there are multiple complications: One son falling for a half-Native woman (Kathryn Grant, looking great), the other accused of killing the woman’s brother. The tangled drama is enough to keep audiences interested even if they don’t like westerns, and give everyone in the cast a few good sequences to play. Gunman’s Walk remains a western, but one that’s not intolerable (if sometimes a bit dull) to modern audiences.