Warlock (1959)

Second viewing; first seen on January 11, 1987.

The town of Warlock is suffering constant outlaw raids, with deaths, vandalism, and the latest deputy (somehow, the town is not qualified to have a marshal, so he is the top local law enforcement authority) being run out of town. Responding to that, a majority of townspeople hire a gunslinger to get rid of those troublemakers. The situation changes a bit when one of the outlaws defect from his bunch and becomes the town's new deputy. An important subplot involves the gunslinger's sidekick and a woman whose fiancé was shot by the gunslinger.

The theme of barbarism vs. civilization is one of the most important ones and has been frequently dealt with in fictional narratives. The Western genre has been quite amenable to it, and this film is one of the more successful works to deal with it. It is a perfectly structured one, which pivots on a character's physical handicap to develop its analysis. I wonder whether this would be considered acceptable by our present-day political-correctness police; at any rate, back in 1959 nobody raised any objections to the fictional assumption that physically handicapped persons might become morally handicapped as well.

Seen in pan-and-scan.

Rating: 76 (unchanged)