From the Rental Vault: Invitation to a Gunfighter

A quote attributed to George Orwell and Winston Churchill goes around every now and again, saying: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." No proof of attribution exists for either man, but the thought is probably one they'd both share. And it's often translated to the Western movie genre, in which a group of townsfolk find themselves facing a danger they can't confront on their own. They rely on a rough man or hired gun to deal with the menace.

Sometimes, as in The Magnificent Seven, those hired guns protect the powerless -- simple farm villagers facing a well-armed cadre of bandits. And sometimes, as in Invitation to a Gunfighter, the hired man is there to do the work the townspeople think themselves too good to handle -- nasty, noisy shooting -- or are just too cowardly to face.

Matt Weaver (George Segal) has returned to the New Mexico territory town he left at the start of the Civil War. Originally intending to find his father, he became caught up in the fighting as a Confederate soldier. When he gets home, he finds it's been sold as confiscated "enemy" property -- the townsfolk and their oligarch, Sam Brewster (Pat Hingle), were all on the Union side. Confrontations with Brewster and the man who bought his farm lead to violence, and the town leaders want Weaver gone -- or dead. Unable or unwilling to face him down, they send one of their number to hire a lawman, actually a gunfighter. They wind up with Jules Gaspard d'Estaing (Yul Brynner), a New Orleans-born dandy with lacy shirts, fine cigars and a swift draw. d'Estaing sets himself up at the local drygoods store, run by Crane Adams (Clifford David) and his wife Ruth (Janice Rule), who herself Has a Past with Weaver.

The townspeople's tension and frustration increase as d'Estaing takes no steps to go out after Weaver, preferring to wait him out for when he will come to town for needed supplies. In the meantime, he makes himself much more at home among the townsfolk than they like, even bumping up against the invisible color line drawn between the Anglo and Mexican residents.

d'Estaing's original confrontations with the townspeople and their leaders have a comic quality as he unstuffs a couple of shirts that desperately need it. But they escalate as he pushes more and more against their carefully built hypocrisies, and d'Estaing's intensity and own buried secrets start to dismantle his carefully-cultivated image of the cool and ruthlees gunman as well. The same themes will crop up in Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, albeit with a darker and more supernatural character.

Brynner combines intensity and grace in a way few other actors have ever managed and he plays that to excellent effect as d'Estaing. It's interesting to see Segal in this kind of action role, given the more urbane character he developed over his career, but he really doesn't have much to do in the movie until the end. Hingle strikes some familiar notes in his role as the local boss Brewster, but adds in a level of incompetence in the role that show this is probably the only town Brewster could manage to run, because it's full of people even less able and less brave than he is.

Invitation raises itself above some of the cookie-cutter Westerns of the 1960s by making some attempts to deal with issues of bigotry raised by the division between Anglo and Latino townsfolk. Although Brynner handles that weight fairly well, the rest of the movie is less adept at it, perhaps because in 1964 our nation had a ways to go in figuring out what it was going to say on those matters. Brynner is in better Westerns (the above-mentioned The Magnificent Seven, for one), but Invitation is above average at entertaining while offering a little food for thought -- even if it is more of a snack than a meal.