Joseph H. Lewis's A Lawless Street, 1955

"A superior Western which Lewis directs with real flair," says Phil Hardy about A Lawless Street (The Western, William Morrow, 1983).  Lewis is best known for his crime film Gun Crazy (1950), a film that captures some of the madness of America, but also did some excellent low-budget Westerns.  A Lawless Street was produced by Harry Joe Brown, who followed it with intense and austere Randolph Scott Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher.  It has an impressive epigrammatic script ("a man's tongue is like a shovel, it can dig his grave") by Kenneth Gamet, low-key performances by Randolph Scott as the sheriff  and Angela Lansbury as the woman he loves who leaves him because of his violence, but returns to him after he cleans up the town of Medicine Bend.  The cinematography is by Ray Renahan, whose sensitive use of color goes back to John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939).

A Lawless Street begins with a solitary man riding into an empty town to shoot the sheriff, paid (as we find out later) by the business interests of Medicine Bend who are trying to make the town wide-open.  When Scott kills the hired assassin in self-defense the business interests bring in a professional gunman who demands a third of the town's profits, after the businessmen offer him too much over the going rate.  Meanwhile Angela Lansbury comes to town to perform, not knowing that Scott, who she married two years before, is there trying to clean up the town.  The gunman thinks he has killed Scott but the doctor rescues Scott and he rises, Christ-like, to chase the money interests out of town.  There are several sub-plots and Lansbury sings a saucy song about how her mother told her not to marry (before we learn that she is married to Scott).  Lewis has an impressive way of visualizing plot elements, e.g., the way he has a rancher, the rancher's wife, and the man with whom the wife was having an affair arranged in a visual triangle as the truth is revealed. 

In the end Scott convinces Lansbury that times are changing and that this is the last town, of many, that he has to clean up.  Scott and Lansbury ride off together; Scott leaves his gun behind