A gang of thieves sneak into a frontier town, intent on murdering two US marshals. When they only manage to kill one, his surviving partner abandons his post to take revenge: shotgun in hand. Shotgun boasts a gritty premise, the kind that would become increasingly popular among westerns in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, however, the film pulls a lot of its punches. The result feels very middle-of-the-road and ordinary.

The film is an Allied Artists production; the studio produced a range of modestly-budgeted films, including 30 features alone in 1955. Several of those were westerns, including some I have already reviewed like The Treasure of Ruby Hills and Seven Angry Men. Both of those films had the same general problem as this one: the ideas are often strong and fairly innovative, but the execution is timid and by-the-numbers. When reviewing Ruby Hills I remarked that it seemed like a suitable baseline for 1955 American westerns in general – a less generous phrasing would be that it was what mediocre looked like – and I am inclined to feel the same way about Shotgun.  Director Lesley Selander was very much a work-for-hire talent – 127 films in total – and that’s reflected in the general look and pace of the film.

Shotgun is a vehicle for Sterling Hayden, whose career was fairly evenly divided between film noir and westerns. He makes for a solid and dependable gunslinger, although he lacks the presence of a John Wayne or a James Stewart. These days his most famous film isn’t a western or noir at all, but most likely Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr Strangelove.

Zachary Scott, who starred in Ruby Hills, plays a charismatic bounty hunter on the trail of the same criminals being hunted by Hayden’s character. He is a likeable presence, as is co-star Yvonne De Carlo as a former saloon worker headed for California. Guy Prescott plays the villain of the piece with a nice sense of grit – certainly more grit than screenwriters Clark Reynolds and Rory Calhoun provides him.

Sadly the cast can only do so much. There is more than a weak script for a modern audience to consider: there is also a bit of animal cruelty and generally poor depiction of Native Americans with which to contend. In the case of the animals there is a clearly distressed snake tied to a post that is then vividly shot in the head – if it’s a visual effect it’s a remarkably good one for such a modestly-budgeted production. The film’s third act is complicated by the participation of an Apache tribe, played out in brownface make-up by white actors with stereotypical accents. As always these elements are a necessary evil of watching older films – standards have changed, and I think we need to be forgiving – but one must also consider the unavoidable truth that while a product of the 1950s Shotgun is now being viewed in the 2020s.

Good actors offset some badly dated material, but at its heart this is simply ordinary filmmaking.

1955 West is a review project to watch as many western features from 1955 as possible, in order to gain a ‘snapshot’ view of the genre at its height. According to Letterboxd, there were 72 westerns released that year. You can see all of FictionMachine’s reviews of them to date by clicking here.