NR | 1h 20m | Western | 1955
Revenge has always fit in the great American Western like cowboy boots in well-worn stirrups. It boils down to a man who gets robbed, framed, betrayed, or beaten. He might be left standing over the body of someone who rode beside him, and he has to set wrongs right again.Those kinds of stories had more room to breathe in the Old West because pursuits took more time. Men with vengeance on their minds had to ride all over the place.
They bothered strangers with their questions. They followed trails through heat and brush; they lost them and found them again. They hoped the next town had someone talkative (or drunk) enough to point them in the right direction. A revenge plot could stretch from valley to valley without feeling padded because a lot of interesting things could happen along the way.
These films worked because the men doing all the chasing had been wronged in ways many viewers could understand, even when their pursuits started eating into their souls.
Shotguns and Grudges
Deputy Marshal Clay Hardin is close to trading gun smoke for a cushy government post when old trouble rides back into town. Ben Thompson (Guy Prescott), an outlaw with six years in prison behind him, comes looking for the lawmen who put him there.
Marshal Mark Fletcher (Lane Chandler) tries to handle the matter himself, and that choice leaves Clay with a dead friend via shotgun blast and no appetite for the safer life waiting for him.
Clay rides after Ben through Arizona Territory, where the hunt starts picking up unwanted cargo. Abby (Yvonne De Carlo), a saloon dancer trying to shake loose from a bad life, gets pulled into Clay’s path, and bounty hunter Reb Carleton (Zachary Scott) joins the chase with reward money on his mind.
A Tough Little Western
Director Lesley Selander had already put a lifetime of work into B Westerns by the time he made “Shotgun,” and the picture benefits from that studio craft. He knew how to get angry men on horses and send them toward gunfire without stopping every 10 minutes to explain things. The movie starts with murder then keeps Hardin moving with a shotgun in hand and a hard-set attitude.
The locations also help the production. Cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks gives the frontier scenery a rugged look, with red rock, dry brush, cactus, and enough dust to make viewers reach for water.
The romance between Hardin and Abby is puzzling. Clay rescues Abby after finding her tied up beside one of Thompson’s outlaws, who’d been left to die. A short time later, she nearly helps that same outlaw kill Clay. Then, around a campfire, Clay embraces her like they’ve already settled several arguments that viewers never saw.
When Abby begins warming to him, Clay turns weirdly casual and tells Reb Carleton that he can have her. Later, when Reb ogles Abby while she bathes (fully clothed), Clay slugs him, and the movie drops into one of the longest fistfights I’ve seen in a Western.
“Shotgun” won’t fool anyone into thinking he’s stumbled across some sort of lost masterpiece. However, as a compact revenge tale with lots of gunplay, scenery, and a cast of pros who know the assignment, it’s pretty good entertainment.
