From the Rental Vault: Lawman

One of the things that makes modern societies possible is the rule of law. Ideally, it holds everyone equal. Those who have money are the same in its eyes as are those who have none; those who are well-known gain no more traction against it than do those known to no one but their own friends and family. A flawed humanity means such a system remains ideal instead of fully realized, but it's the goal at which a society has to aim in order to guarantee equality of all and the protection of their rights.

But the law is just a code -- it requires people to enforce it as well as accept it. When that code is held higher than the people it is supposed to protect, it can become an idol that in the hands of its worshipers eliminates the very protection it was meant to provide. Jered Maddox (Burt Lancaster), the town marshal of Bannock, may very well be such a man when he rides into the town of Sabbath to seek the cattlemen whose drunken spree in his town left an old man dead in 1971's Lawman. But those men work for Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb), a local cattle baron who owns most of the town, including the Sabbath town marshal, Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan).

In the hands of director Michael Winner -- who would later direct Charles Bronson's Death Wish and a 1978 remake of The Big Sleep -- Bronson takes a different tack than the oligarch in standard Westerns. He says he will make restitution for the damage and the death, offering more than anyone would get if the men stood trial -- Maddox acknowledges that the Bannock judge's verdicts can be bought easily. But Maddox demands the letter of the law be followed, and violence begins to spiral out of control.

Winner, an English director, was gifted with an amazing cast in his first American movie. In addition to Lancaster, Cobb and Ryan, we find Robert Duvall fresh off his emerging roles in True Grit and M*A*S*H* and just before he would earn an Oscar nomination for The Godfather. Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman, plays one of the townspeople who has his own past with Maddox.

Although Lawman offers a lot to think about concerning the need a society has for humanity, mercy and justice to find ways to co-exist with the law, it offers a number of tantalizing asides in the form of some of those other characters that can frustrate because they're offering too much to be dismissed as background but not enough to justify the time spent with them. Winner's movies were frequently lauded for their style but faulted for their lack of discipline in just that sort of way. Lawman succeeds because its top-level cast forces real characters from Gerry Wilson's scattered script and Winner's rabbit-chasing direction, but in different hands it could have done a lot more than just succeed.