Day of the Evil Gun

A Western directed with lazy assurance, and scripted by Charles Marquis Warren as something like a cross between The Searchers and Peckinpah's The Deadly Companions. Glenn Ford is an ageing gunfighter, tired of the macho kick, who returns home after three years only to learn from a neighbouring farmer (Kennedy) that his wife and two small daughters have been carried off by Apaches. Kennedy claims that the wife intended to marry him, presuming her husband dead; and in uneasy alliance the two men set out on the trail. Their odyssey, with the two men subtly changing places as the farmer begins to revel in the hunt and the gunfighter leaves him to get on with the killing, is studded with pleasingly bizarre encounters: a minister's wife brooding in a darkened room over her experiences as an Apache captive; Indians who disarm them with lassoes and stake them out to die from buzzard's beak; a cluster of burning shacks that turns out to be a town in the death-throes of cholera; a Mormon ghost town that harbours a sinister band of Confederate deserters. No masterpiece, but distinctly effective.