The Gunfighter

Bob Dylan and an apology to Gregory Peck

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I’ve never been a fan of Gregory Peck, always finding him wooden, dull, and unconvincing.  Some people find this incredible.  When we did our episode for Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics on The Omen, I called him the “worst famous actor of all time” or words to that effect.  I even quoted someone on Leterboxd named bombsfall, who describes him as “the human equivalent of a giant oak desk.”  I can hear it already: what about Atticus Finch?  Surely you don’t think he was like a giant oak desk when he played Atticus Finch!  Actually, I do, but that isn’t his fault: the part is written in such a way that all he needs to do–all he can do–is look good in a white suit (which he does) and speak in the same–stern–clips–of voice–for the whole thing.  The praise for his performance in Mockingbird is exactly like the praise for Dustin Hoffman’s in Rain Man: both actors do the same thing for the entire film, even if they do it well.  Tom Cruise has the harder role in Rain Man because he has to convince the audience that he has changed by the end.  Because nobody changes in Mockingbird, there’s not even someone to contrast Peck’s metronome of a performance.

So when I attended a screening of The Gunfighter (1950) last week, I did so purely out of devotion to Bob Dylan, whose 1986 “Brownsville Girl” mentions “this movie I seen one time / About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck.” Because of the song, I already knew the ending; if you don’t and still want to see it, here’s your spoiler alert.  I had never seen The Gunfighter out of aversion to its lead, but when I saw it would be playing at my local theater, I figured I might as well.  Maybe it would add something to my life as an amateur Dylanologist.  For Bob, I’d sit through it.

What a pleasure to be proven wrong!  What a performance by Gregory Peck!

Peck is Jimmy Ringo, a wandering outlaw who returns to the town (more like the street) of Cayenne to see the pregnant wife, Peggy, he left behind when he had to flee; we never learn why, but know that he had to have been involved in some bad business.  Like Shane, he’s tired of his life as a gunfighter and is tempted by the thought of one less dangerous.  But when you’re Jimmy Ringo, every snotnose in the West wants to pick a fight to test your reputation.  This happens early in the film, before Ringo even gets to Cayenne, when a young El Paso hothead named Eddie picks a fight with Ringo in a saloon.  (Eddie is the stock character who exists solely to pick a fight with the toughest guy in the bar and gets what the audience thinks he deserves.)  He’s shot before the viewer sees Ringo pull the gun: one second it’s not in his hand and in the next, it’s smoking and Eddie is on the floor.   At least the redshirts on Star Trek never swagger and look for trouble.  

Ringo’s former partner (Millard Mitchell, who two years later would play R.F. in Singin’ in the Rain) has become the town marshal; he and a friendly bartender (Karl Malden) who also knew Ringo from the old days convince us that, as was the case with Eddie, Ringo never shot anyone who didn’t need it—or maybe didn’t really need it.  Complications ensue: Eddie’s three brothers vow to avenge him and move toward Cayenne as Ringo begs for a meeting with Peggy, which she finally grants at the exact time when Ringo’s promises to reform are undermined by his need to take care of Eddie’s brothers.  We’ve seen this get-out-of-town-before-they-arrive setup before and will see it again, more famously, a year later–but what makes The Gunfighter terrific are its final moments: the brothers are disarmed and Ringo is set to leave and return after a year to bring Peggy and their son to the ranch he hopes to buy.  But Hunt Bromley, another would-be touch guy with a wispy mustache, wants to prove that he’s faster than Johnny Ringo and shoots him, twice, in the back.  As Ringo is taken off of his horse and lies in the street, he shocks the viewer and all the witnesses by saying, “I drew first.”  Bromley smirks and says “You don’t have to do me no favors, pappy.”  For a few seconds, the viewer is led to think that Ringo’s lie is an act of mercy—a way for him to end the cycle of violence.  But it’s not: it’s a vindictive act, a way for the dying man to shift the focus of that cycle from himself to his killer:

If I was doing you a favor, I’d let them hang you right now and get it all over with. But I don’t want you to get off that light.  I want you to go on, being a big tough gunny.  I want you to see what it means to have to live like a big tough gunny.   So don’t thank me yet, partner.  You’ll see what I mean.  Just wait.

It takes Peck seventy seconds to say those words, much longer than it took you to read them, even if you read them aloud with feeling.  The whole time, he’s glaring at the kid with a lifetime of hatred for the loudmouthed losers who get in people’s faces.  It’s an incredible moment: his stare, his struggle to get the words out, and the scorn in “partner” are perfect.  In her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit says that the babbling grandmother “would have been a good woman if it was someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.”  Whether or not Bromley will become a good man under that pressure is uncertain, but no one would put any money on it.  The most we know is that the film’s title now applies to him as he rides out of Cayenne, after being (to quote Dylan’s song) beaten to a “bloody pulp” by the marshal for good measure.  (That’s also there for the audience: Bromley may now live under an abstract self-induced curse, but the film still needs to show him getting his ass whipped.)  

His death scene is great, but Peck is terrific throughout the movie.  Naturally, he’s tough (we don’t question his reputation at all), laconic, and holds still while other characters (like the obsequious bartender or troop of old ladies) flutter about him.  That’s him being the giant oak desk.  But there are several scenes in which he’s vulnerable, like when he meets Peggy and his son, or talks with the marshal about the times they rode together.  The oak desk has a lot of drawers and Peck lets us glimpse at what’s inside of them.  Much of the movie is like a play in which two or three people talk in a room and Peck maintains the center of gravity to make these scenes interesting.  The movie was so good that I forgot about the song as I watched it.

“Brownsville Girl” appears on Knocked Out Loaded, Dylan's 1986 release that is, even by us Dylan’s fans, widely-ignored except for this song.  Ian Bell, in his pitch-perfect two-volume biography of Dylan, calls the album “a lazy, execrable thing” save for this song, one of Dylan’s “most inventive, complex, and involving compositions.” The liner notes are more interesting than the rest of the songs, thanking people we expect (Tom Petty, David Geffen, Jackson Browne), some that are surprises (Frank Zappa, Jack Nicholson, Marty Feldman), and some that are inexplicable in-jokes (Baby Boo Boo,  Gal Shaped Just Like A Frog).  But “Brownsville Girl” redeems the album’s existence: it’s an eleven-minute song that, like Dylan’s other epics, is evocative and funny.  Sam Shepard wrote it with Dylan as he tagged along on the Rolling Thunder Revue, hoping to write a screenplay about it.  We never got that movie, but we did get this terrific, impressionistic song.  That it appears as the first song on side two, rather than at the end, is another classic Dylan quirk.  If there were ever an album-ending song, this is it, but Dylan seems to have no rule about this: most of his longest songs naturally conclude and reflect the albums on which they appear (“Desolation Row,” “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Highlands,” “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”), although, inexplicably, “Tempest” does not–despite its epic subject matter and being the album’s title track.  (As for “Joey,” which opens side two of Desire, that’s just a long song.)  

“Brownsville Girl” is much like “Stuck Inside of Mobile,” a combination of impressions (“your busted down Ford and your platform heels”), one-liners (“Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt”), and characters (Henry Porter, Ruby, and “the girl who ain’t you”) that surface in a monologue in which a speaker tries to wrestle some kind of sense, some pattern of meaning, out of his situation.  “If there’s an original thought out there,” he says, “I could use it right now.”  He begins with The Gunfighter:

Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck

Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath
“Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it’s like to every moment face his death”

Well, I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in
And you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain
You know I can’t believe we’ve lived so long and are still so far apart
The memory of you keeps callin’ after me like a rollin’ train

The “you” the speaker is addressing, the girl from the title, is his version of Peggy.  He’s doing something here we all do: connecting something from the movie to something from his own experience.  At some point (“one time”), he, too, saw The Gunfighter and now, thinking of his Brownsville girl, he’s reminded of it.  He’s not courting these memories: he’s “seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in.”  People who love movies experience this all the time, comparing people they meet to characters they know and using lines from screenplays as color commentary on their own lives.  There’s no off switch.  It just comes a-rolling in.  He later tells us, “Something about that movie though / I just can’t get it out of my head / But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play.”  He wants The Gunfighter to explain his own life to him, just as we look to art as a way to help us understand our own situations.  J. Alfred Prufrock knows he is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.  Is the speaker like Jimmy Ringo?  Or is he more like Hunt Bromley, now always on the move, a “man with no alibi?”  We can’t tell and are not always good judges of ourselves.  We sometimes think we’re as complex as Prince Hamlet when we are much more like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

We learn, much later in the song, where he is, physically, as he’s he’s telling us this: “I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck,” but it’s “not the one that I had in mind.”  That’s no longer playing–like his Brownsville Girl, like Peggy, it’s gone.  And while he isn’t miserable or burning a torch, he also isn’t a new man:  “You know, I feel pretty good, but that ain’t sayin’ much / I could feel a whole lot better / If you were just here by my side to show me how.”  And as the song continues with its flashbacks and half-plot (“Way down in Mexico you went out to find a doctor and you never came back,” “I saw you break down in front of the judge and cry real tears”) and moves toward a conclusion in which nothing is concluded (“Hang on to me, baby, and let’s hope that the roof stays on”), we get the final verse:

There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down

As Mattie Ross says at the end of True Grit, time just gets away from us.  Forget about remembering the name of a movie or how many times we saw it: we sometimes can’t even recognize the person we used to be.  All we know is that things used to be better.  The stars were torn down—and while the speaker is making some kind of statement about an absence of beauty in his current situation, we can also think about how that line applies to the movies.  The stars have been torn down: nobody today has the same magnitude or power as Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe—or Gregory Peck.  And, like the speaker, I’ll now “see him in anything” even if I have to stand in line in the rain.