The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)
The title of this Glenn Ford western tells it all. Broderick Crawford portrays a bank robber with a keen eye for a good shot, and his favourite pastime is tracking out other fast draws to fight with. Obviously, he wins them; if he hadn’t previously lost, there wouldn’t be a movie.
Glenn Ford owns a grocery store in the rural town of Cross Creek. Russ Tamblyn also resides there, and he has a dance routine that has nothing to do with the movie, but he really knows how to move. All the other locals think Ford is a genuine pantywaist since he doesn’t drink and doesn’t carry a pistol, but he’s really – drumroll please – The Fastest Gun Alive.
He can fire two silver dollars into the air, and he has to show it off every now and again. Trouble is, everytime he does that, he has to keep moving or he attracts a slew of jerks like Crawford, and his wife, portrayed by Jeanne Craig, who looks like she received a makeover at Saks of Tombstone, isn’t happy about it.
So the locals all pledge to keep Ford’s secret a secret, but then Crawford and his varmints show up after a heist and begin scaring the inhabitants into divulging the identify of the big gun. Despite being filled of usual ’50s Freudian motivation tropes and being horribly unoriginal, it nonetheless manages to be interesting because to Ford’s passionate performance.
But our little buddy the murderer, a pharmacy store delivery guy portrayed by John Barrymore Jr as a lip-twisting, bug-eyed oddball who’d be arrested on the street on principle, gets around by taunting the cops with clues gleaned from the comic books he enjoys. When Mobley sets out to apprehend the murderer, he mocks him on TV as a maniac and a momma’s son, hoping to push the killer into attempting to kill Nancy.
Surprisingly, this puts Mobley’s relationship with Nancy in jeopardy less than Ed’s inebriated one-night affair with Mildred… What’s most intriguing about this picture is that it gets dangerously close to portraying real people with actual sex lives, and the language skillfully communicates this even as the film scrapes the edge of censorship at the time. Add in some cheap Freud to drive the murderer, some juicy office politics, and a narrative that continues twisting in unexpected ways until the last reel, and you’ve got yourself a fairly fascinating little flick.
