Tue 13 Aug 2019
A Western Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: THE QUIET GUN (1957).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[3] Comments
THE QUIET GUN. Regal Films / 20th Century Fox, 1957. Forrest Tucker, Mara Corday, Jim Davis, Kathleen Crowley, Lee Van Cleef, Tim Brown. Based on the novel Law Man, by Lauren Paine. Director: William F. Claxton
Sheriff Carl Brandon (Forrest Tucker) is a man with a code. The quiet but strong type, he is the lawman of a Western frontier town. With a live and let live attitude, he does not seem to have all that much to do, other than keep things calm. All that changes when the city attorney comes to his office and tells him that he and the town are about to file an immorality complaint against rancher Ralph Carpenter (Jim Davis).
Carpenter’s alleged crime? Relations with a teenage Indian girl named Irene (Mara Corday). After all, his beautiful wife has temporarily left him due to marital troubles and it can’t simply be that the Indian girl is his servant? Can it?
Brandon warns the city attorney to let it be. First of all, Carpenter is an old friend of his. But more importantly, the good sheriff knows that provoking Carpenter will be like provoking a bear and will likely result in bloodshed. The city attorney is determined, however, to have his say and ends up getting himself killed by Carpenter.
What follows is a compelling hour or so of action and drama in which Brandon investigates what happened at the ranch and attempts to uncover the conspiracy that ends up getting Carpenter and Irene murdered before it all ends. This leads him into a direct conflict with saloon owner John Reilly (Tim Brown) and cattle rustler Doug Sadler (Lee Van Cleef).
In many ways The Quiet Gun could just have easily been a pilot for a late 1950s TV Western with Forrest Tucker cast as the lead, but the movie transcends the limitations of the small screen with some stark visuals, a hardy cynicism, and a rather dismal view of the human propensity to gossip. It would seem as if nearly every man in the town except Brandon and his deputy, the kind, but mentally slow Sampson (portrayed by Hank Worden, known for his association with John Ford).
There’s not much in this Regal Films production that you haven’t seen before – a man quietly in love with his friend’s wife; a lynch mob exacting brutal frontier justice; and a sheriff holed up in his office determined to make sure that his prisoners face a judge rather than a street mob – but one thing I noticed in The Quiet Gun is that nary a minute is wasted. This is a taut, well-edited film and one that deserves more attention.
August 13th, 2019 at 9:55 pm
I imagine that whenever Forrest Tucker’s name comes up, he’ll always be remembered for his role in F TROOP. I never watched the show. Even as a kid, I thought it was beneath me.
I did watch CRUNCH AND DES, though. That one I enjoyed.
August 14th, 2019 at 7:22 pm
Tucker was a personable actor on screen, but one I always thought fared better as the bad guy or second lead than the hero for some reason. Lauren Paine who wrote the book this was based on fared a little better when a book was filmed as OPEN RANGE with Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall, but this seems too have some of the same focus on the idea of a good man standing up to corruption
If I knew it had escaped me that Tucker did a series based on Philip Wylie’s popular POST stories about boat bums Crunch and Des.
August 14th, 2019 at 8:09 pm
Lauren Paine was the most prolific writer that no one has ever heard of. From Wikipedia:
“Paine wrote over 1000 books,[ including hundreds of Westerns as well as romance, science fiction, and mystery novels. He also wrote a number of non-fiction books on the Old West, military history, witchcraft, and other subjects. Because his publishers only accepted a limited number of books under a single author’s name, Paine adopted dozens of pseudonyms including Mark Carrel, John Kilgore, Clay Allen, A. A. Andrews, Dennis Archer, John Armour, Carter Ashby, Harry Beck, Will Benton, Frank Bosworth, Concho Bradley, Claude Cassady, Clint Custer, James Glenn, Will Houston, Troy Howard, Cliff Ketchum, Clint O’Conner, Jim Slaughter and Buck Standish among others. Many of his books, published by Robert Hale of London and distributed solely in the UK, have only in recent years been appearing in the United States, usually as large-print editions.”
When I first learned about him, maybe 30 years ago, I kind of made my small mission in life to collect as many books as I could be him. I have maybe 100, that’s all. And of those, how any have I read? No more than a dozen, I’m sorry to say. But I can tell you this. Of the westerns of his that I’ve read, a common theme in most of the is that of an honest man, usually a sheriff, standing up to bad, quietly but competently.