Man with a Gun is an intense Western about love and violence. The low-key Clint Tollinger (Robert Mitchum) is hired by a town dominated by a cattle baron(Joe Barry) and his gang to be the "town tamer," a term I had never heard in any other Western. Mitchum gets more and more violent when he finds his former wife Nelly (Jan Sterling) in the town and she tells him his daughter is dead. After Tollinger burns down the cattle baron's saloon in anger the baron comes into town and shoots him and is in turn shot by a local homesteader, Jeff Castle (John Lupton) who had feuded with Tolliver when Castle's fiancee (Karen Sharpe) seemed to fancy Tolliver.
The film is filled with veteran chacter actors --Leo Gordon, Claude Akins, Emile Meyer -- and photographed in blackand-white by Lee Garmes, who worked on his first film and 1918 and did a number of films with Josef von Sternberg in the thirties The film takes place almost entirely in the town of Sheridan which, as Tolliver says, has a large cemetary for such a small town, and Garmes uses curtains and other devices to separate Tolliver from the citizens of Sheridan who hired him. The subtle score is by Alex North and the film is written by N.B. Stone, Jr. (who wrote Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, 1962) and director Richard Wilson, who directed a handful of films in the 50's after working with Orson Welles for many years.
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