blacksmith who is also the town leader.The daughter is conflicted but her father, played beautifully by Emile Meyer, is not.One of the glories of this excellent motion picture is the number of other characters -- I hesitate to say "minor" because they all figure in the story -- whose lives and actions are pivotal.By one of those coincidences, I just finished a novel by Louis L'Amour with a very similar plot, except the town tamer in "The Empty Land" really doesn't want his role while Mitchum's Clint Tollinger does.This might be the best script for a movie I've ever watched about a town tamer. It has depth and darkness and a realism not often found in Westerns of the 1950s era. Excellent script and excellent cast make this a movie I recommend. And you can see it at YouTube. When I watched, it was interrupted by too many commercials, but that's a fairly low price to see it.

army. Mitchum's regression from soft-spoken stranger to deranged murderer, with a host of dark emotions in between, is a marvel of expressive, physical acting.

maintained interest. Meyer's daughter's gradual infatuation with Mitchum is never directly acknowledged by either character only by townspeople , but the audience sees her putting herself in his company or staring after him or him sometimes looking back. The villain's spy who watches Mitchum from the hotel porch is obviously up to something, but the viewer is cleverly sealed off from the scenes that expose his plot.Two parts of the script instill suspense and dread that are honest to the story's ambiguous outcome. Twice the town doctor warns that a cure like that Mitchum is offering the town may be worse than the town's disease. Mitchum's character warns of no formulaic redemption when he repeatedly asserts that he's nothing but a gunman and only guns can tame a town—contrasting ominously with formula western heroes who proclaim they don't want to fight, that they're really peace-loving men. One other oddity at the end was Mitchum's taking a bullet so the younger man engaged to Meyer's daughter can prove his manhood. Mitchum's wound seems close to the heart; his and the doctor's initial conversation sounds fatal; and Mitchum reclines in profile like a fallen classical hero. Maybe the studio insisted on a proper romantic ending, though, for then Mitchum and his long-lost wife talk as though he'll hang up his guns and they'll start over, climaxing in a kiss at "The End." B movies like this count as precious jewels and fascinating records of mid-20c culture.