just watch it!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Boring

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The Dennis gang ride into the town of Plainview and set about robbing the bank. However, during their escape Alvin Dennis (John Pickard) is shot and killed by a one in a million lucky shot by mild mannered store keeper Jack Wright (Fred MacMurray). Further compounding the gang's misery is that Alvin was carrying the money and so the town have managed to reclaim what was briefly taken from them. Jack, in spite of his protestations, is hailed a hero by all and sundry, even picking up a substantial reward. But led by a hate filled Bob Dennis (Skip Homeier), the Dennis gang are plotting revenge and have Jack firmly in their sights. Jack is about to find out just who his friends are in the fickle town of Plainview.Yeah yeah yeah, At Gunpoint (AKA:Gunpoint!) is for sure a variation on the High Noon theme, and yes it proudly stands in its pulpit sermonising a moralistic viewpoint. Its central theme one that has been used a number of times in Westerns both prior and post this Allied Artists Pictures release. But so what? If a story, and the potent universal messages at its core, is worth telling, then tell it. As long as it's told well and not bogged down by poor technical aspects, then that surely is enough for the discerning genre fan? At Gunpoint is directed by Alfred L. Werker and is written by prolific Western story teller Daniel B. Ullman. It's a Technicolor/CinemaScope production with Ellsworth Fredericks on photography duties, and the wonderfully named Carmen Dragon provides a bracing score. Supporting MacMurray and Homeier are Dorothy Malone as Jack's increasingly fretful wife, Walter Brennan as a loyal Doctor friend who likes a tipple, while Whit Bissell is a welcome secondary character addition.So many good things to recommend here, it may be a simple fable, but it's lit up by high quality acting and thrives on the moody atmosphere constructed by Werker. MacMurray was always hit and miss, particularly in the Western genre, but when he got it right, or perhaps when he had an understanding director? He was real value for money. Such is the case here. His Jack Wright is an honest man reluctantly put up on a pedestal, thus he quickly becomes a scared man. Naturally fearful for his wife and child, he doesn't hide that he himself is no hero, and has no wish to become one. MacMurray perfectly plays it restrained, thus it is heartfelt and believable. Homeier was always best when playing a snarly villain and here he delivers just that, a villain hell bent on revenge, an avenging brother whose actions speak louder than words. Werker was an old pro, a jobber director, and here he was coming to the end of a career that would span 32 years. He offers up some nice tonal delights here. Witness the dusty storm that descends upon Plainview, it coincides with the town residents having a change of attitude. Then there's his framing of the Dennis gang as they come for revenge, it's impossible not to think of them as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. While the final shoot out, and the twist in the horse tail, is awash with tension and crowned by a remarkable bit of stunt work. This a fine film that belies its "B" movie roots. One that will hopefully find more fans as the years roll by. 8/10

Fred MacMurray is a peaceful shopkeeper who kills one of the Dennis gang with a lucky shot. The rest escape. MacMurray becomes a hero throughout the state of Texas. The remaining five members of the gang determine to kill him. The other town residents know it and begin to avoid MacMurray. They offer to stake him to a new store in far away Amarillo. Should MacMurray hide his tail between his legs, pack up his loving wife and adorable kid, and skip town? Are you kidding? This is a routine 1950s Western. There must have been hundreds of them ground out, intrigues and drama in a studio-built town with one dusty main street, flanked by a dozen building fronts made of wooden planks. Here, the core issues of Heartland America were on display -- bravery, cowardice, love, treachery, and the question of what you do with a neighbor in your tidy suburb who refuses to mow his lawn as often as everyone else. The 1960s were a transitional period, turbulent and full of excess and challenge. By the 1970s, the issues had changed to corruption and street crime and the milieu in which these dramas were played out was changed to the city streets.But this is from the 1950s. And was released five years after the wildly successful "High Noon" with Gary Cooper as the upholder of reticent righteousness.In "High Noon," a couple of gunmen are returning to town to kill Cooper because he "sent up" the viperous Frank Miller. In "At Gunpoint," the same number of gunmen are coming back to town to kill Cooper, I mean MacMurray, because he accidentally shot a gang member who was the brother of another.The rest of the story is familiar. The gang sneaks in at night and murders the town marshall. Everyone knows they will come back and take care of MacMurray too. As in "High Noon" the town gradually marginalizes the well-meaning shopkeeper and his family, but he refuses to leave town because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. His wife, Dorothy Malone, plays Grace Kelly and disparages his attempts to maintain his self esteem but, unlike Kelly, she's quickly won over. We see the gang riding into town for the final show down. We see the scared MacMurray behind a couple of barrels on the street corner, taking a few shots at them that miss their marks by seven hundred yards. The gang trot on towards MacMurray, grim and determined.Now, this is not the kind of movie that has any tricks up its sleeve. That's the whole point -- it should be comforting in its predictability. For instance, one of the character we meet at the beginning is the harmless, smiling, younger brother of Malone. There's no particular reason for his being there. He's always in the background being pleasant, but this story concerns MacMurray and Malone -- not MacMurray and Malone and Malone's BROTHER. Discerning viewers, those with the aficion for old movies, will recognize immediately that this character is DEAD MEAT. And so he is.Well, for the gang to continue its trot up the powdery street, right on up to the helpless Fred MacMurray, whom they then shoot full of holes, is unacceptable. Not because it wouldn't happen in real life but because it would surprise and challenge the audience. The only alternatives are (1) MacMurray to have four MORE lucky shots left in his Colt, or (2) the townsmen relent and capture or kill the gang. There are no other possibilities that don't involve supernatural intervention. No power on earth could force me to reveal which alternative the movie chooses.Oh -- those viewers with the aficion for old movies will recognize a lot of faces in the supporting case: Walter Brennan, Whit Bissell, the miscreant Jack Lambert, Harry Shannon (cf., "Citizen Kane"), John Qualen, and Frank Ferguson.Social psychologists will note the illustration of one of the more surprising findings of cognitive balance theory. Take a person who holds attitude A and opposes attitude B. Tell him that you'll pay him to act AS IF he holds attitude B. After he argues for attitude B long enough, he'll lose his belief in A and genuinely switch to B. In "At Gunpoint," the townspeople are friendly to storekeeper MacMurray. After the first shooting, they begin to avoid him out of fear for themselves and their families. Pretty soon, after they've acted as if he had the plague, they come not to like MacMurray very much and want to get rid of him. They begin with attitude A, act AS IF they held attitude B, and finally FEEL attitude B. They don't even congratulate him when his reward check comes, and they don't say thanks when he buys them a ceremonial drink at the saloon. Have you non-psychologists grasped the point? Good. That will be ten cents.

Director Alfred L. Werker's frontier drama "At Gunpoint," with Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Malone, and Walter Brennan, qualifies as one of the best post "High Noon" horse operas. Just as Gary Cooper had to defend himself against three ruthless gunmen in "High Noon" (1952), Fred MacMurray incurs the wrath of an entire outlaw gang for killing their bandit leader. In both films, the hero must stand alone because his friends had abandoned him. Although this western appears blandly routine, "At Gunpoint" emerges as a sturdy, realistic western with a first-rate cast and an imaginative storyline with a surprise ending. Compared with traditional westerns where the gun-toting hero is a lawman or an outlaw, the "At Gunpoint" hero looks definitely non-traditional. Rarely do we see storekeepers elevated to a status of heroic prominence from the obscurity of the periphery where such characters are confined."At Gunpoint" opens with the five-member Dennis gang riding into the sleepy little town of Plainview, Texas, where they rob the bank. During the robbery, an overzealous bank teller tries to thwart them and they gun him down. As they are riding out of town, the bank robbers kill elderly Marshal MacKay (Harry Shannon of "The Tall Men") before he can get off a single shot. Amid all the gunfire, storekeeper Jack Wright (Fred MacMurray of "The Texas Rangers") retrieves MacKay's six-gun and miraculously nails gang chieftain Alvin Dennis (John Pickard of "Black Horse Canyon")with a single shot. Another courageous citizen George Henderson (Frank Ferguson of "Rancho Notorious") knocks Dennis out of the saddle with a couple of extra shots. The remainder of the gang has to high tail it rather than get caught in a crossfire. Not only does the Dennis gang lose their leader, but also Alvin Dennis was carrying the bag with the bank's loot in it when Wright and Henderson plugged him. Naturally, everybody in Plainview is proud of Wright's sharp shooting and both Wright and Henderson get their faces on the front page of the local newspaper. When Alvin's hot-blooded brother Bob (Skip Homeier of "Tomorrow The World") learns the identities of the two men who shot and killed his Alvin, he vows vengeance. Meanwhile, Plainview holds a celebration at the saloon to honor their heroes. In one of the film's best lines, Wright jokes about the circumstances of his shooting: "You're looking at the man who shot the notorious Alvin Dennis from a distance of half a mile... with a slingshot." Initially, the townsfolk want Jack Wright to follow in Marshal MacKay's footsteps as their next lawman, but he refuses because he owns and operates the only general store in town, so they persuade family man George Henderson to accept the badge. On the way out of town after the celebration, George runs into Bob and his fellow gang members and they gun him down in cold blood.After Henderson's murder, the townspeople live in fear that the Dennis gang will return and kill Jack Wright. They are so afraid of this prospect that they don't want to be around Jack any more than they must so they stop shopping at this store and they forbid their children from playing with his son. Things calm down for a couple of weeks while a Federal marshal (Harry Lauter of "Three Outlaws") arrives in Plainview to write a report about the bank robbery and to see that Jack received his reward money for killing Alvin Dennis. Despite the repeated requests of the town fathers for the Federal marshal to stick around, the lawman dismisses their anxiety and suggests that the Dennis gang has probably left the state. After all, he points out that posses are scouring the countryside for them. Late one evening, Bob Dennis rides into town, knocks insistently at the door to Jack Wright's store and shoots the man who comes to the door. Unfortunately, the man who answered the door was Jack Wright's brother-in-law Wally (James O'Hara of "Death of a Gunfighter") and Jack's wife Martha (Dorothy Malone of "Basic Instinct") is traumatized because she realized that the gunman thought that Wally was Jack.What sets "At Gunpoint" apart from most westerns is its sense of realism. Nothing happens here that couldn't happen in real life. Jack Wright knows that he made a lucky shot, despite the congratulations that he receives from his fellow citizens who insist that he is a crack shot. In the end, when the Dennis gang comes after Jack and he has a gun in hand, every bullet that he fires misses them. Jack was an everyday person before the shooting and he is still the same after the shooting. Most films would have made him a crack shot with no practice after he shot the outlaw. The cowardly town citizens who begin to shun him after they realize that the gang is waiting for the opportune time to shoot him resemble the pusillanimous citizens in "High Noon" who refuse to help their lawman that requests their help after the three gunmen begin to stalk him. The ending in "At Gunpoint," however, differs considerably from "High Noon" and that is one of the film's saving graces. The Fred MacMurray character never considers himself an accurate shot, but he realizes that he cannot run from the Dennis gang. The suspense and tension that Werker generates in this modest but top-notch western between the time that Henderson is shot and the gang returns is a tribute to his talent as a director.

Acting and production (including music) are top notch. Screenplay is well written. Entire cast is made up of major stars and great character actors which made this an entirely worthwhile "Saturday Matinée" in its day. Although not noted, this is a color film of about 81 minutes in length. There are some on-screen shootings & deaths ... but no blood; it could easily have received a "General Audience" rating.A pirated VHS tape version of this film was distributed in the USA in 1992/1993 by "Dominican Releasing, Puerto Rico" under the title "SMOKIN' BARREL"; This version (shamefully) cut-out all original titles and credits and simply replaced them with the two-worded opening title "SMOKIN BARREL" and a two-worded closing title "THE END"; there was no other information. The quality of this tape, recorded in the EP mode, was extremely poor visually with blurred images and in high contrast; it was almost unviewable (although the sound was acceptable). The tape's box had numerous errors in the credits ... crediting Vaughn Monroe & child actor Billy Gray (I) as being in the film (they were not) ... and leaving off one of the two main stars ... Fred MacMurray ... as well as the actual child star Tommy Rettig. It also states the film is rated "R" (believe me, AT GUNPOINT is NOT an "R" film). Avoid "Smokin Barrel" ... but definitely see any other good quality legitimate versions of this very good film.