From the Rental Vault (1959): The Gunfight at Dodge City

In some ways, the most interesting thing about The Gunfight at Dodge City is how it does manage to almost work when there are a lot of reasons that it shouldn't.

Most of those reasons center on the script, which takes its story in some quirky little directions and skips around enough to make it not so easily followed. It also splits its villain in two, starting with one and then leaving him alone for awhile until remembering he's around, and then introducing another one almost halfway through the movie who's not exactly the most colorful character to ever don a black hat. But Gunfight works because the actors in the middle of this herky-jerky narrative do have some great dialogue and do very well with it.

Western stalwart Joel McCrea plays William Barclay "Bat" Masterson, whom we meet as he is bringing in a load of buffalo hides for trading in Hays City, Kansas. A gunfight with a cavalry sergeant makes relocation Bat's best course of action, and so he does, heading into Dodge City where his brother Ed is the city marshal. He's pursued by Dave Rudabaugh (Richard Anderson), an acquaintance and sometimes friend who also holds a grudge. Bat finds his brother running for county sheriff against incumbent Jim Regan (Don Haggerty) and engaged to Pauline Howard (Julie Adams), daughter of a local minister who's with a group of men seeking to oust the corrupt Regan. He buys a share of a saloon owned by a man widowed by Regan's thugs, Lily (Nancy Gates), and steps into Ed's candidacy after an ambush.

Bat also steps into Ed's role as Pauline's fella, but faces a dilemma when an old friend asks him for help that will require him to compromise the strict ethical standard he's set for himself.

Again, the story is a little predictable (the good gal / bad gal choice is almost note for note the same as in These Thousand Hills) and kind of confusing in other spots. It shifts direction for no real reason or groundwork and never really fills in why later on. It wastes the venomous energy Richard Anderson brings to Rudabaugh and pushes the unfinished sketch of a corrupt tycoon played by Haggerty into the front instead. It expects an audience to buy that Adams and Gates, both 33, would be all that interested in McCrea, then 54, and also that McCrea would pick the pallid Pauline over the lively Lily.

But it also offers some good meat for this talented cast, from the opening when McCrea describes the feelings of fear and panic a gunfighter faces when he meets another man in a showdown to some of his one-liners - like his vision of law enforcement: "There'll be law. And there'll be enforcement." John McIntire as Doc Sam Tremaine steals nearly every scene he's in and can make you wish he had a few more.

Gunfight was an odd movie choice to make -- it held the same setting as the popular Western series Gunsmoke, then in its fourth season on TV and its seventh on radio. Gene Barry was playing Masterson in a TV series of the same name that had started just a year earlier. It's not particularly impressive set against either of those, but with a script and story that matched its dialogue and performances, it could have held up against either of them very well.