“Bullets are very democratic. They kill good men as well as bad.”
Set in the aftermath of the Civil War,
Gun Fury sets Rock Hudson’s born-again pacifist who thinks the war could have been avoided with compromise and negotiation against Phil Carey’s bitter Southerner who lost everything in the war and now with his old comrades in arms (Lee Marvin and Neville Brand among them) has gone from robbing carpetbaggers to stealing from anyone to get it back. He may play the Southern gentleman while he’s waiting for his next job to come off, but there’s no doubt what’s on his mind when he sees Hudson’s fiancée Donna Reed:
“She can smile without making it a simper. It’s a rare quality in a woman… She’s as different from other women as cognac is from corn liquor.”
“You get the same kind of headache from either one.”
Despite his second-in-command long-term partner (and possibly a bit more) Leo Gordon’s attempts to steer the young lovers away from the stage they plan to rob, Carey naturally doesn’t just settle for the small fortune in gold it was carrying but decides to take Reed as well, leaving Hudson for dead. Just as naturally, his men don’t check too thoroughly and Hudson sets off to get her back.
Despite his war experiences, initially at least, Hudson’s clearly out of his depth. His botched attempt to thwart the robbery leaves two more innocents dead and gets him shot (a wound he recovers from with remarkable ease), so it’s no wonder that he immediately accepts the offer to team up with Gordon, who Carey left tied to a corral for the vultures to dine on at their leisure for trying to get him to leave Reed behind and now wants his own revenge (the Italian poster art by Anselmo Ballester reproduced on the cover of Twilight Time’s Bluray and its US and French variations all used an image of Hudson tied up while Reed is about to be molested by Carey, though it has to be said that Carey is the only figure to look remotely like any of the stars in this version). And, aside from an unbilled Pat Hogan’s vengeful Native American who wants to kill both Gordon and Carey for destroying his village and stealing his sister and Roberta Haynes as Carey’s cast-off Mexican lover, Gordon’s the only help he’s going to get, with the nearest sheriff emphasising that his job is limited to protecting his town while the local sheep ranchers can only sell them guns and horses because they’re so shorthanded…
The script by Maverick and The Rockford Files’ Roy Huggins and best-selling author Irving Wallace offers plenty of choice dialogue but what’s missing is the kind of dramatic conflict the opening scenes promise to compliment the gunplay it does deliver. It’s not too much of a problem imagining Hudson immediately disavowing his pacifist ideals to save his girl with no further discussion after nailing them so firmly to the mast but his alliance with Gordon is immediately accepted with no qualms and his part in the previous reign of terror overlooked with a few words about his disapproval of Carey’s actions and none of the dramatic sparks you’d expect and get if the two were played by James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy in an Anthony Mann Western. This sets its sights much lower, and with Hudson’s seriously underwritten role as righteous avenger taken for granted with no real moral challenge to his newfound post-war principles and Gordon never really forced to confront his own past actions in any meaningful way, all the script’s character development and sturm und drang is reserved for Carey, allowing him to easily dominate the film.
He may like to pretend that he’s still fighting the war and that it’s a defiant desire not to be among the army of mourners or cripples left in its wake down south that drives him, but, as Gordon is only too aware, that’s just an excuse for polite company. When the chips are down he’s out for whatever he can get any way he can get it, only to lose interest in it once he’s got it and go after something else. For him
“Ordinary men live by ordinary laws. I’m not an ordinary man. The laws I need I make for my own convenience.” The result is a good Western with a great villain rather than a great Western with several great characters, but to be fair to the film it’s clearly the kind of movie that no-one making ever intended to be more than a good evening’s entertainment for a mainstream audience, and on that level it succeeds.
NB: there is one wondrously outrageous bit of overacting from Maudie Prickett, who is absolutely determined to steal one scene even though she doesn't have any dialogue:
Like Andre De Toth’s House of Wax, this has the distinction of being a 3D film shot by a one-eyed director, Raoul Walsh, who lost his right eye and career as an actor in a freak accident (how else could you describe a jackrabbit crashing through your car windscreen?) on the set of In Old Arizona in 1928. Columbia’s 50s 3D films were often superior to their competitors – Miss Sadie Thompson boasts one of the very best uses of the format ever – but at times it feels like Walsh is trying just a little too hard to keep objects (mirrors, candles, sagebrush) in the foreground to emphasise the depth in the first couple of reels and in a couple of early shots you have a choice of focussing on the foreground or the distant mountain ranges because the other will appear ever so very slightly wrong while there are a couple of shots that have that cardboard cut-out toy theatre effect (most notably when the stagecoach arrives at the rest station). The definition is a little soft in some of the exterior extreme long shots and the colour is certainly problematic and not always convincing, especially with skin tones, as was the case in some other 50s colour 3D films, but overall the 3D effect in Twilight Time’s limited edition Bluray is more impressive than not.
There’s a pleasing sense of depth and some standout 3D sequences like the opening scene that attempts to give This is Cinerama’s famous rollercoaster sequence a run for its money with a driver’s point of view of a racing stagecoach and horses and the finale, which makes great use of the undulating landscape and sees every gunshot throw dust or splinters at the screen. Not that they’re the only things that get chucked at the audience, with rocks, logs and a striking rattler thrown at us and Roberta Haynes throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Lee Marvin. I don’t know if the film had an intermission card when it played in 3D, but there’s none included here.
As for the elephant in the room, yes there is a synch problem in the second half of the film – but it
is a compatibility problem that depends on what player you watch the film. Seen on my Sony UHP-H1 (an extremely glitch-prone and overpriced model I wouldn’t recommend to anyone unless I seriously disliked them) it’s noticeable but could be easily corrected by adjusting the audio synch on my TV settings, though obviously not every TV set has that option. However, played in my Panasonic DMP-BDT180 and it’s a different story, with the film playing in synch throughout (and after I had switched the TV synch settings back to their original setting).
The trailer is also included in both 2D and 3D versions and is a classic example of the old hard sell technique –
‘Donna Reed in a role surpassing her triumph in From Here to Eternity! Phil Carey, the new thrill man! And Roberta Haynes, the girl you've heard about and Hollywood is raving about!' Although this played on its original release with The Three Stooges short Pardon My Backfire, that’s not included, though it can be found on TT’s The Mad Magician Bluray.
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