Day of the Evil Gun is a pretty good Western, imaginatively written by veterans Charles Marquis Warren and Eric Bercovici, filmed on locations in Mexico and starring Glenn Ford and Arthur Kennedy as older men riding together through a bleak and hostile environment, encountering Spanish landowners, hostile Apaches. a town decimated by cholera, and military deserters. They are searching for Ford's wife and two young daughters, who had been captured by the Apaches, two months before Ford returned from two years of unexplained wandering, and his wife had promised to marry Kennedy, on the assumption that Ford was dead.
Day of the Evil Gun was originally meant for TV. By 1968 most television was in color and Thorpe's widescreen movie tended to keep the action in the center of the screen, an all-too-common practice in the days when VHS versions were mostly panned-and-scanned, something now that has fortunately been mostly eliminated, with DVD's usually in the proper aspect ratio. Thorpe does use the zoom lens judiciously and only for things seen in the distance and he does sometimes use the widescreen effectively, especially with overhead shots of the deserted village where Kennedy and Ford are held by the army deserters.
The film is filled with fatalism, irony and regret, as Kennedy now sticks with Ford because, as he says, "I should have done something" when Ford's family was captured, one of the reasons he is helping Ford now, though they never discuss what will happen if they rescue the captives. Ford, the former gunfighter (perhaps) eschews using his gun during their trek, while peaceful farmer Kennedy does all the killing en route to rescue the captives.
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