Edwin L. Marin's Colt .45

Colt .45 is an exemplary Western, with a great deal of the common iconography that made Westerns so popular for so many years:  blazing guns, a lovely damsel in distress, Native Americans, a gold mine, a crooked sheriff, posses riding through the landscape, stagecoaches, et al.  It stars Randolph Scott, who made exclusively Westerns from 1948 until 1962; his last film was Ride the High Country for Sam Peckinpah after several austerely beautiful films for Budd Boetticher.  The movie Western started to die out in the 50's when Westerns became a television staple, starting with "The Hopalong Cassidy Show" in 1949, but the 50's also provided some of the great Westerns -- of Boetticher, Hawks, Ford, Anthony Mann -- by using outdoor locations and color when TV used tiny indoor studio sets and was only in black-and-white. In its twelfth season, 1966, "Gunsmoke" was produced in color and everything changed.

Colt .45 was one of a series that emphasized particular guns (others included Anthony Mann's Winchester 73 in 1950 and Andre De Toth's Springfield Rifle in 1952) and their role in the West. When Colt salesman Randolph Scott has his guns stolen by Zachary Scott (no relation) Randolph tracks down the guns to see that they are used for good by the law, as they were intended to be (shades of today's gun controversies).  When Zachary's bunch kills Indians and then impersonates them to rob stagecoaches the Indians side with Randolph, who saves one of them.  The Indians, however, are looking out for themselves because, as Chief Thundercloud says, "the law has never been a friend to the Indian." And here is a good time to mention that no matter what the casual observer may think, the Western has always been sympathetic to the cause of the Native American, from D.W. Griffith's The Redman's View in 1909 through George B. Seitz's The Vanishing American in 1925 and John Ford's Westerns of the 40's and 50's, ending with Cheyenne Autumn in 1964.

Marin's career was mostly devoted to the efficient direction of B films, meaning that he moved the camera only when he had to.  At the end of Colt .45 there is a lovely shot, after Randolph shoots Zachary, of the camera tracking rapidly toward the woman Randolph now loves, as they are already together in their minds.