I'll tell you why so serious

A different way of telling a story

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

In the Old west there are always the men who live breathe violence and the women who hold their breath. 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. Check all hardware at the marshal's office ¨. Clint finds his ex-girlfriend, a local madame (Jan Sterling) in charge of the Saloon girls( Angie Dickinson, Barbara Lawrence, among them). But the town council afraid the raw methods carried out by Clint . 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. The tale is almost grim , a pacifier comes to a town just in time to make sure its citizenry but later the events get worse . The highlights are the burning at Saloon and the climatic showdown at the ending. Phenomenal and great role for Robert Mitchum as avenger angel and bitter gunfighter, he's the whole show. Vivid and lively musical score by Alex North (Spartacus, Cleopatra), Atmospheric cinematography in black and white by Lee Garmes. The motion picture is stunningly realized by Richard Wilson (Al Capone , Three in Attic) who made good Western as ¨Invitation to a gunfighter and ¨Zane Grey¨ episodes. Watchable results for this offbeat Western.

"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. Wilson's freshman effort lacks the epic, widescreen grandeur of Edward Dmytrky's "Warlock" (1959) with Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, and Richard Widmark. Instead, "Man with the Gun" compares more favorably with the Sterling Hayden oater "Top Gun." Things get off to a quick start in "Man with Gun." Vicious gun tough Ed Pinchot (veteran heavy Leo Gordon of "Tobruk") rides into Sheridan City and shoots a dog on the street that is annoying him. The entire town is in an uproar over the shooting because it will frighten their customers. Later, a stranger in gray, Clint Tollinger (Robert Mitchum), appears in town on a horse with a loose shoe. He mends the shoe at Atkins Stable where he learns how to find Nelly Bain (Jan Sterling of "Ace in the Hole") who supervises the saloon girls. This arrangement is a little odd for a western. Nelly doesn't allow men in the door to see her girls and they are only available when they are dancing over at the Palace Saloon. An unsavory New Orleans bred hoodlum, 'Frenchy' Lescaux (Ted de Corsia of "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral"), runs the saloon for his partner Dade Holman. 'Frenchy' has a taste for the finer things in life and a $2-thousand chandelier hangs in the Palace. Tollinger and Nelly are old acquaintances and Tollinger has been following her. When he tries to contact Nelly, Nelly's maid (Maidie Norman of "Tarzan's Hidden Jungle") refuses to allow him to visit her—on Nelly's orders. Tollinger decides to stick around Sheridan City for a couple of days. While Tollinger is boarding his horse at Atkin's Stable, he runs into Doc Hughes (Florenz Ames of "The Deadly Mantis") and Doc is surprised to see him."You might call him a town doctor, too," Hughes confides in Saul Atkins (Emile Meyers of "The Line Up"), about Tollinger. "Ponca was a mighty sick town. Clint operated on it. The patient lost a lot of blood, but lived." A wealthy rancher, Dade Holman (Joe Barry of "Bell Book & Candle"), and his trigger-happy minions, particularly Ed Pinchot and Jim Reedy (Claude Atkins of "Merrill's Marauders"), have the town under their thumb. One dance hall girl remarks that they "have painted the town bright yellow." Nevertheless, a hot-headed young man, Jeff Castle (John Lupton of {"Rogue's March"), refuses to back down from Holman's gunslicks. He drives them off his property where he is building a house on land that he owns. Holman is dead set against Castle putting down roots. Meanwhile, the rebellious Castle feels that he must prove his masculinity to his childhood sweetheart Stella Atkins (Karen Sharpe of "The High and the Mighty") and she worries constantly about his welfare. 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. Naturally, 'Frenchy' Lescaux objects to these ordinances, but he willingly surrenders his knife to Tollinger. To give his actions some measure of legality, Tollinger is deputized by the local lawman, Marshall Lee Sims (Henry Hull of "Jessie James") who fixes him up with a contract with a non-intervention cause. 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. In fact, if you look closely, most of everything occurs on sets that have interiors. People walk into and out of buildings and nothing appears to have been lensed on an interior soundstage which gives "Man with the Gun" a sense of authenticity. John Lupton has the best role and Emile Meyer is uncharacteristically cast against the grain as an honest, upright citizen with a daughter. The subplot about Tollinger following Nelly Bain around to learn about his daughter Beth and the failed relationship between Nelly and he is dramatic enough but rather lackluster. We learn that Clint Tollinger learned about guns early when his father was gunned down in cold blood in his own house and the house was burned while young Clint hid in the bushes. The irony here is that Tollinger's father never owned a gun.The chief problem is that we hear a lot about the lead villain, but we don't see him until the last five minutes of this dusty little oater. The Holman character doesn't stick around long either and he never utters a word. Holman's henchmen fare no better. For example, Joe Reedy tries to kill Tollinger with a derringer concealed in his sombrero, but the wily gunfighter is far ahead of him. In other words, the villains resemble ten-pins in a bowling ally with Mitchum's savvy gunfighter knocking them down with minimal effort. The shoot-out at the end isn't as good as the shoot-out with Reedy. The bad guys try to catch our hero in a cross-fire and he outsmarts them. The plotting of the last shoot-out, especially a mysterious tin-horn whiskey peddler role in it, gives it some depth. This city slicker fellow devises his plan based on Tollinger's gallantry to the women folk of Sheridan City. Angie Dickinson shines in a small role as a dance hall girl named Kitty. Essentially, Wilson remade "Man with a Gun" in 1962 in color with Yul Brynner in "Invitation to a Gunfighter."

Clint Tollinger arrives in a small western town looking for his estranged wife, who left him and now runs the local show saloon. His presence is greeting by suspicion but when the town leaders discover the nature of Tollinger's business they propose that they employ him to clean up the town of the problem of Dade Holman's violent influence. 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. Although the plot is fairly typical of a western b-movie, the tone and edge to it means that it comes over as much more. The basic story sees Tollinger taking on the rule of Holman but it has undercurrents of pain and anger as the lead confronts his wife. 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. Mitchum takes to his character well and always seemed to enjoy the darker more complex characters that some of his westerns would serve him up with. Sterling does well with her firm character until near the end where she becomes more of a genre staple. 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. However for the vast majority it has a dark tone and feel to it that makes it much more interesting and more likely to appeal beyond the limitations of those that like the colourful b-movie westerns of the period.

there should be a sub-genre in the Western called 'the Robert Mitchum Western'. 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. 'Man with the gun' is one of his best. 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. Mitchum's regression from soft-spoken stranger to deranged murderer, with a host of dark emotions in between, is a marvel of expressive, physical acting.