Dead or alive

The Tin Star

(1957)

Anthony Mann directs an interesting mélange of clichés of the Western and of other genres with a few surprising, even unprecedented, features. When bounty hunter Morg Hickman slowly leads a pack horse carrying a corpse into the squeaky clean town, to the demonstrative dismay of the law-abiding townspeople, you think for a while that Henry Fonda is practicing for his much later villain of C'era una volta il West, but no, Morg turns out to be standard Fonda: no-nonsense, morally uncompromising; if he has no particular preference for the second option on the wanted poster, he administers the first because experience has taught him that he must, not because he relishes killing.

The nonhypocritical population of the town numbers three: the pure but callow sheriff (Anthony Perkins), the woman who loves him but won't marry him until he gives up the badge (Mary Webster), and the wise old doctor (John McIntire). Pushed by prejudice to the outskirts of town are the Mayfields: Nona (Betsy Palmer), who is both a rather boring trope as the good-hearted woman capable of seeing through to the bounty hunter's good heart, and a character I've never seen in a Western before: the loving widow of an Indian (who was, of course, killed by bigots in the town); Kip is her "half-breed" son, who brings Morg home with him like a stray dog (and later brings home an actual stray dog).

Mann also deals with the whole dead-or-alive issue with some originality: Sheriff Ben has much to learn from the sadder-but-wiser bounty hunter, but Morg is also called back to his own idealism by the young believer. If that sounds a little too much like a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, it mostly avoids excess schmaltz until the final reel, when it ladles on the treacle two-fisted. Still, until that almost unwatchable conclusion, it's a pleasant surprise.