Nathan Juran's A Good Day for a Hanging.

A Good Day for a Hanging, 1959 is a superior routine Western, distinguished by a low-key performance by Fred MacMurray as a reluctant sheriff and a precise and rigorous visual style by Nathan Juran, who was originally an architect and then an art director on such films as John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, 1941.  The routine and B Westerns were coming to an end around this time, gradually being replaced by TV Westerns, where Nathan Juran, screenwriter Daniel Ullman and cinematographer Henry Freulich soon found themselves.  Many people have an image of Westerns based on Bonanza and Gunsmoke, which is unfortunate, because TV Westerns represent a retreat to the sound stages after years of outstanding use of exterior locations for Westerns by Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and, especially, John Ford, who brought the sound Western outdoors with Stagecoach in 1939.  A Good Day for a Hanging starts out with beautiful plains and mountains, as a gang gathers for a bank robbery, and then, after the robbery, moves to a powerfully choreographed chase as the robbers are pursued out of town by a posse. The rest of the movie is set in town, where a gallows is being built for one of the robbers who shot the marshal.  It is 1878 in Nebraska and a fence has to be built around the gallows because a public hanging is now considered "cruel and unusual punishment."

As in many Westerns questions of right and wrong are discussed, including whether the robber to he hanged (played as something of a juvenile delinquent by Robert Vaughn) deserves some leniency for his deprived childhood; he grew up in Springdale, where the robbery took place, and he and the sheriff's daughter still fancy each other -- she even tries to smuggle in a gun to him. The grizzled MacMurray tries to insist on hanging for Vaughn while the townspeople take up a petition for leniency to the governor, to which MacMurray responds "the whole thing's just wrong." There is some additional intensely effective choreography as MacMurray gets into a fistfight with Vaughn's defense attorney (who MacMurray thinks is being paid with the stolen bank money) and a final shootout, as Vaughn tries to escape and is shot on the gallows where he was originally to be hanged.