Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Gregory Peck made six films with director Henry King, two of them Westerns: this one and 'The Gunfighter'. The film starts off in Rio Arriba, a small town close to the Mexican border, where Jim Douglass (Peck) arrives in order to see four bad guys hanged the next day.   I guess these are the bravados of the title although I'm not sure it's an appropriate description, since according to my dictionary a bravado is an obsolete word for a swaggerer. Certainly at the start of the film they're not doing a lot of swaggering in their prison cell but things do look up for them when they escape, taking with them a young woman, Emma  as a hostage.  The rest of the film concerns the efforts of the posse to rescue Emma and bring the bravados to justice, dead or alive.   Very quickly Douglass takes charge of proceedings, and one by one he catches up with the bravados and kills them, but not before trying (in vain) to get them to confess to murdering his wife some six mon...

This 1950 Western starring Gregory Peck really deserves more love;  it's at least as good as the much more acclaimed 'High Noon' with which it bears some similarities. It's about Jimmy Ringo, a gunslinger who would like to put his past behind him, but finds that to be impossible given his celebrity status as maybe the fastest gun in the West.   In the opening scene, a young kid is keen to get into an argument with Ringo just to prove how tough he is.  When he's foolish enough to draw on Ringo that's the end of him. The young punk has three older brothers so now Ringo has to skedaddle.   The next day he ambushes the three brothers and removes their horses, before moving on to Cayenne.  Ringo reckons he has just enough time to carry out his business there before the brothers catch up with him, which creates a ticking clock for the rest of the film. The Marshal in Cayenne is a former partner-in-crime of Ringo's, but even so he wants Ringo to leave town be...