Last week when James Arness passed away, I decided to watch something of his I’d never seen before. I wound up watching GUN THE MAN DOWN, from 1956, which must have been made about the same time Arness was starting work on GUNSMOKE. It’s a pretty good hardboiled Western.
The script by Burt Kennedy starts off with a fairly standard premise. Arness plays Rem Anderson, a young man who falls in with bad company, in this case a couple of bank robbers played by veteran movie heavies Robert J. Wilke and Don Megowan. When the job they pull goes wrong and Rem is wounded, his so-called partners abandon him to the law, taking with them not only the loot from the bank but also Rem’s girl, a soiled dove named Jan who is trying to leave that life behind (played by a very young Angie Dickinson).
Well, Rem gets sent to prison for a year, and when he gets out, you guessed it, he tracks down the men who double-crossed him so that he can get his revenge on them. This leads to a war of nerves in the town where the two bank robbers have settled and used the loot to become the owners of a successful saloon.
Actually, GUN THE MAN DOWN is maybe a little too leisurely as it tries to build suspense by having the characters sitting around and waiting for all hell to break loose . . . which it inevitably does, of course. But if the script is a tad weak, the movie has plenty of other virtues to make up for it, first and foremost among them a very solid cast. Arness, as always, is a powerful physical presence. During one brawl, he picks up a buggy (!) and hits a guy with it. Granted, there wasn’t a horse hitched to the buggy at the time, but still, that’s pretty impressive. Wilke does a great job portraying sleazy, sweaty desperation, and the town’s two lawmen are Emile Meyer, who was so good as the old cattle baron Riker in SHANE, and Harry Carey, Jr., a welcome presence in any Western movie.
The black-and-white photography is very good, too, and the movie’s low budget gives it a stark, stripped-down look that adds to the noirish atmosphere.
GUN THE MAN DOWN is also interesting because it was the first film directed by Andrew W. McLaglen, the son of legendary character actor Victor McLaglen, who went on to direct several of John Wayne’s later films. The Wayne connection is no accident. Wayne and Arness were good friends (we’ve all heard the story about how Wayne recommended Arness to the producers of GUNSMOKE after turning down the role of Matt Dillon himself, and you’ve probably seen the intro Wayne filmed for the first episode of that series), and GUN THE MAN DOWN was produced by Wayne’s company, Batjac Productions. The presence of Angie Dickinson playing a somewhat shady lady and Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez as a hotelkeeper, along with the general air of tension in the movie, makes GUN THE MAN DOWN seem a little like a dry run for RIO BRAVO, which came along several years later. Other than that the two movies aren’t alike, but I can’t help but think those roles might have helped Dickinson and Gonzalez get similar parts in the later film.
I don’t think GUN THE MAN DOWN ever quite lives up to its early promise, but it’s still a brisk (76 minutes), well-made, and very entertaining Western. James Arness gives a fine performance and is great fun to watch in it, as always. If you’re a Western fan and haven’t seen this one, you really should.
This is actually my favorite GUNSMOKE opening, rather than the more famous showdown(s). By this time in the series, the characters are not only old friends with each other, they're old friends of ours as well. This opening just seems very heartwarming to me.
Also, Jim Meals has contributed an excellent piece about the GUNSMOKE radio series over on the Western Fictioneers blog. I highly recommend that you check it out.
One of my all-time favorites is gone. When I wrote about his series THE MACAHANS and HOW THE WEST WAS WON a few weeks ago, it didn't even occur to me that he might not be around much longer. James Arness just always seemed indestructible to me. Rest in peace.
THE MACAHANS is a TV miniseries from 1976, the heyday of that format. It’s a big, sprawling Western about Timothy Macahan (Richard Kiley) who is moving his family, including wife Eva Marie Saint and their three children, to a new home in the West as the Civil War is about to break out in the East. This move is aided by John’s mountain man brother Zeb (James Arness). It’s a good yarn, full of colorful characters and action and dominated by Arness’s gritty portrayal of Zeb Macahan, who’s a lot rougher and every bit as dangerous as Matt Dillon.
The ratings for THE MACAHANS must have been pretty good, because the mini-series became a regular series the next year, retitled HOW THE WEST WAS WON (no relation to the 1962 epic movie of the same name, except in subject matter). Richard Kiley’s character had died in the war, leaving his plucky widow and three children (one of whom, Luke, was played by Bruce Boxleitner in his first major role) to survive on the frontier, still with the occasional helping hand from the old-timer Zeb. The series was launched with a 3-hour TV movie with a slew of guest stars and a vast tale of the Indian Wars.
What really sets HOW THE WEST WAS WON apart, other than the high production values and the greatness of Arness, is the fact that during its first and second seasons it was the only Western nighttime soap opera in history. Storylines continued from week to week, and episodes often ended on cliffhangers. Livia and I watched this regularly during the early days of our marriage, and we were riveted. This was great stuff.
When the series returned for a third season, someone at the network must have monkeyed with it, because the soap opera format was gone for the most part. Nearly all the stories were stand-alones, and while they were still very good, the series had lost something, in my opinion. Many of the viewers must have shared that opinion, because ratings declined and the series came to an end. It was a great run, though, especially during the first two regular seasons.
Now, here’s something you don’t know. Livia and I were both James Arness fans from his long run on GUNSMOKE, and we were really taken with his portrayal of Zeb Macahan. So one day a few years later, Livia called me at the bookstore where I was working and said she wanted to write about a character who was an old cowboy who worked as a private eye in 1920s Hollywood. Great concept, and what sealed the deal for me was when she said, “And he looks like James Arness in HOW THE WEST WAS WON.”
The character was Lucas Hallam, of course, and if you think about how he’s described in the books (all of which are available on Amazon for the Kindle, he said in a not-so-subtle plug) and watch the YouTube clip, you can see the resemblance. When Hallam’s working on Western movies, he always looks like Zeb Macahan. Of course, when he’s sleuthing, he usually doesn’t wear the buckskins . . . in which case he still looks like James Arness. That’s something that’s never been revealed before now, as far as I remember.
Which doesn’t have all that much to do with THE MACAHANS/HOW THE WEST WAS WON. The series isn’t available on DVD, but hopefully it will be someday. If you’re a Western fan and ever get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. It’s one of my favorite Western TV series ever.
