Watch The Stranger Wore a Gun For Free

Too much of everything

best movie i've ever seen.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

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

This could have been improved upon,like forgetting 3-D tricks.It is a good character study for those of us wanting to learn about Quantrill's Raiders from Civil War days.Hate when people harp on miscasting of George Macready in Westerns.Yes,he has a very un-Western accent,and he is well-dressed,but he was an actor,and turns in another fine performance,unlike Lee Marvin,the guy I loved seeing get killed.No redeeming social value in his character.Bedoya was funny,but annoying.Randy looking older than Macready,who was actually about the same age.Good action,Vlaire Trevor okay,Ernie Borgnine did well,but I object to the questioning of Macready in any Western.He did well in them on the big and small screen and was convincing as a villain to me.He was more than a one role throughout his career actor,like Scott,unlike a Tom Cruise,Gary Cooper,Walter Brennan.

There are quite a few surprises in this film. First of all, it keeps you guessing especially as regards Randolph Scott's character, whose motivation is difficult to discern. It's hard to tell if he's a bad guy or a good guy sometimes, as he manipulates two different gangs of unsavory characters. This does not anticipate Yojimbo or A Fisftful of Dollars. Both of those films, plus this film, all derive somewhat from The Glass Key, which was filmed twice before The Stranger Wore A Gun was released in 1953. (In 1935 with George Raft and 1942 with Alan Ladd.)Those films were based on Dashiell Hammett's novel of 1931. In any case, this film has its own tale to tell, and the performances of Scott, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine are solid. The film suffers somewhat from the 3-D effects which are kind of lame in the 2-D format we have to suffer on our TV sets. People who don't remember the 3-D craze will probably think the director was weird. All in all, the film's offbeat style and great ensemble cast make this well worth watching a time or two. It is by no means an ordinary run-of-the-mill Western.

Randolph Scott plays Jeff Travis, who worked as a spy during the Civil War for the lawless Quantrill's Raiders. One of the last jobs Travis took part in resulted in innocent victims being slaughtered. Travis leaves Quantrill and heads west to Arizona, where he takes a job spying for a stage company trying to protect their gold shipments. In reality the stranger with gun savvy is working with a strong willed loyalist(George Macready) to the Confederation trying to discover where scads of gold is being hid.Scott is his typical stoic self and has strong support from the alluring Claire Trevor and Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Joan Weldon and Alfonso Bedoya.

I saw this movie in a naval base movie theatre, in, I think, 1956. It was the first thing I recall seeing Lee Marvin in. This guy just absolutely fascinated me. Randolph Scott had been a "Semi-hero" of mine in the late thirties and the forties. In this movie, he was so old, and so slow drawing his gun, that they had to speed up the film to make it look like he was drawing his gun fast. Lee, on the other hand didn't need any "camera" tricks to make him look fast. Lee Marvin, as he was dying from having been shot by this amazingly slow lawman (Randolph Scott), looked down at his two hands, as if to say, "Hands -- how could you have failed me". I thought, facetiously, "Boy oscar is written oll over that!" Really a neat scene. That began a continuing admiration for Lee Marvin,, who could do bad guys, good guys, good guy-bad guy (Cat Ballou), Comedy, Drama, Action, He was a craftsman, and a master at it.