Watch The Fastest Gun Alive For Free

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Glenn Ford is "The Fastest Gun Alive" but bad guy Broderick Crawford thinks he is and that's about all you need to know. Russell Rouse's western may be predictable but is also so single-minded, so concerned with nothing other than Ford's ability to draw a gun quicker than anyone else, that it actually exerts quite a grip. It's not particularly well-written or directed, (Rouse was never a name to conjour with), but it has a fine cast, (as well as Ford and Crawford, others involved include Jeanne Crain, Russ Tamblyn, Allyn Joslyn, Leif Erickson and John Dehner), and is superbly photographed in black and white by 13 time Oscar nominee George J. Folsey. It may not be one of the great westerns but it certainly is a good one.

Glenn Ford plays a storekeeper whose friends and neighbors think of him as a wimp. Finally he has enough and decides to show them how good he is with a gun, which doesn't make wife Jeanne Crain too happy. Then gunslinger Broderick Crawford comes to town. He's obsessed with being the fastest gun alive. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking nobody says anything to Crawford about Ford's ability with a gun, he leaves town without incident, and the movie ends abruptly. Well, you're wrong.This is a very good western that has what I feel to be Glenn Ford's finest acting work. His agitated and conflicted performance is unlike anything he had done up to that point. Crawford is a mixed bag here. His acting is spot-on but he seems physically wrong for the part. An overweight 45 year-old is hardly the image that springs to mind when one thinks of a headstrong gunslinger that needs badly to prove he's the best. Perhaps someone younger and leaner would have been better. John Dehner, who played one of Crawford's cohorts, would have probably been a better fit. Still, despite my problems with his casting, Crawford gives his all and does well. Jeanne Crain does fine also. Russ Tamblyn has a somewhat out of place dance number but it's still enjoyable to watch. Overall, it's a solid western. Not at the top of my list of favorites but a good one nonetheless. Ford's bravura performance alone would be worth recommending it.

There was a time when Westerns pretty much ruled the movie screens. And many (perhaps even most) were pretty forgettable. There were occasional great Westerns (e.g., "Rio Bravo"), and others that were at least significantly above average. This is one that is quite above average.I have to get one gripe off my shoulders first, though. Russ Tamblyn. Fine performer particularly remembered for "West Side Story". But even at a barn dance, his dancing here was really out of place...despite being very good. Whose bright idea was this??? As I was watching this film, it occurred to me that it is almost the reverse of "High Noon". Here, Glenn Ford is reluctantly forced into a confrontation by a gun fighter who always seeks out those faster that he. And where are the people who are pushing our hero into a confrontation? In a church.Except for a gunfight at the beginning of the film, and the one climaxing the film, this is more a psychological Western. Why is Glenn Ford so gun shy when he's clearly the fasted gun alive? The cast here really is very good. Glenn Ford was a dependable leading man. Perhaps just under the level of actors like Cary Grant and Clark Gable. But he rarely let us down in any role, and he certainly didn't here. He carries the film and is why it's better than the average 1950s Western. Jeanne Crain is always a pleasure to watch, and she balances the need to be a forceful wife who will not tolerate her husband's addiction to guns, without being an unreasonable nag. Broderick Crawford is the primary villain here...the role he was best at. This film followed on the heels of his success in the syndicated television series "Highway Patrol". As a couple of our reviewers pointed out, he seems a bit chubby to be so fast on the draw, but he knows how to be menacing. As mentioned earlier, Russ Tamblyn is fine here, but totally out of place in the plot. Allyn Joslyn (whom I usually remember as one of the bad angels in "The Horn Blows At Midnight") is the loud mouth here, and is quite good at it. John Dehner is fine as another of the bad guy trio. I was a little sad to see one of my favorite character actors as the third bad guy, and he was rather wasted here -- Noah Beery, Jr.If you've become wary of Westerns, as I have, I recommend this one to you. It's clearly above average and has a good story with more drama than the typical shoot-em-up cowboy flick.

There have been any number of movies about gunslingers who have hung up their guns and forsworn violence, only to be reluctantly dragged back into the game. Some have been good and some, like "Shane", have been very good.I don't know of any movie other than this one that paints a fast draw as a disease. With Glenn Ford, peaceable storekeeper in a one-horse town, it's pathological, an obsession that breaks out and overcomes him every four years or so, much to the distress of his wife, Jeanne Craine.He's the fastest gun in the West, see. And he KNOWS he is. Yet here he is, locked away with the cracker barrels, selling dresses to ladies who complain that he's ordered the wrong color. It makes him edgy. The good people of the town of Cross Creek don't know of his latent status so they're puzzled by his increasing irritability. I mean, the poor guy has done his best to settle down but he suffers from what the German ethologists called "Funktionslust," the pleasure one takes from doing what one does best. He can help himself no more than Peter Lorre could keep away from little girls in "M." Yep, he's a sick man alright.Help is on the way. Three no-goodniks, led by the growling and bejowled Broderick Crawford, ride on into Cross Creek shortly after Ford has given up his pose as the peaceable storekeeper, had a couple of shots of whiskey, and demonstrated his uncanny skill with a six gun. Crawford has just killed a man in another town. He had no reason to, other than that he'd heard the man was fast, and Crawford takes pride in being the fastest gun in the West.A lot of movies seem to take pride in debunking the myth of the fastest slinger of six shooters. In John Wayne's last movie, "The Shootist," it wasn't being the fastest draw that enabled you to survive. But this movie doesn't debunk the myth. It IS the myth! It places the entire fantasy right in your lap, as a gift. The fastest draw wins. It's a fabrication of the kind most of us outgrow after the age of fourteen.Of course nothing was ever so simple, however much we like to think it was. As an adult, I doubt that very many lives depended upon the speed of the draw, anymore than they did with the swords the preceded the guns. A good guess is that a greater willingness to kill kept one alive.The metaphor here is a sporting contest. It's presented as an event in the Special Olympics For Imbeciles. But the idea of the fast draw contest is so endearing for some of us that actual contests have been staged. Not with real bullets of course, but with supreme accuracy in measurement. A man enters a circle, facing a light bulb. When the bulb goes on, the man draws a six gun and fires, and a photographic device measures the time it take him, as in a horse race. These contests were held within the last twenty years or so. What was going through the minds of the contestants as they played this game? Did they dream of living in the Old West, of being Glenn Ford, outdrawing others, and putting notches on their pistol grips while the dead bodies were still warm? Ford is his usual reliable self in a silly role. Jeanne Craine is still beautiful but her beauty is almost hidden behind a mask of 1956 make up. But what a supporting cast! From top to bottom, it's studded with recognizable names and faces, sometimes almost in cameo roles.They needed all the help they could get to put over this impossible and dangerous fantasy. As mythos, this goes beyond raising Lazarus, somewhere into the neighborhood of Atlantis and Mole People.