On Monday, January 21, at the Portage Theater, the Northwest Chicago Film Society presents yet another essential 35-millimeter screening of a rare classic: Chicago native Phil Karlson’s undervalued 1958 western Gunman’s Walk. A familial drama about the freewheeling, combative Ed Hackett (Tab Hunter) and his tumultuous relationships with his enabling father, Lee (Van Heflin), and his conciliatory brother, Davy (James Darren), the film is a lyrical tragedy with Shakespearean ambitions. It ranks among the best westerns of the late 1950s, a transformative era in which directors began to tamper with the genre’s established symbols and archetypes—where Native Americans had been represented as savage, untrustworthy others, for instance, they came to function as stand-ins for the burgeoning civil rights movement.
This progressive vision of racial harmony would go further with Karlson’s scathing political noir The Phenix City Story (1955), which depicts, among other things, a white community’s oppression of an African-American minority; like They Rode West, it also advocates nonviolence. The Phenix City Story tells of a series of events that took place in Phenix City, Alabama, a small town riddled with organized crime, police corruption, and racism. After failed attempts by its citizens to thwart vigilantism with more vigilantism, the town rallies around a gallant lawyer who runs for state attorney general and vows to bring the criminals to justice. Nugent wasn’t involved with the film’s script—Daniel Mainwaring, who helped write the likeminded Joseph Losey film The Lawless (1950), coauthored alongside Crane Wilbur—but his presence is felt in Karlson’s expertly expressed moral outrage.
Directed by Phil Karlson
