Customer Reviews

A Gunfight

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I saw this movie when new, and to this day I am blown away at the staging and the premise of the story. It was a truly "revisionist" western, when making westerns in that category became almost cliche'. Kirk Douglas is as good as usual, meaning better than most. Johnny Cash gives a suitable and able performance as the protagonist of the film. This movie is more of an "Art House" movie than a mainstream western, and I think that's the problem for many of those who've seen it and written about it. You really must view it in a different context than many standard fare movies of the western genre. I'd place this alongside "The Hired Hand" before I'd compare it to any standard western tale. I absolutely loved the duel ending, filmed as a reverie in Johnny Cash's mind as he prepares to leave town. Excellent film, but again, be warned, it's not your standard western by any means

By no means an epic, nor is it a "B" movie, "A Gunfight" falls into the category of good mainstream western entertainment with a twist. Two famous gunfighters, one semi-active one semi-retired with a family and feeling a bit stale, meet and speculate what it might be like to fight one another for a paying audience. The idea comes to fruition and that's it in a nutshell. Solid performance by Kirk Douglas, as expected, and Johnny Cash proves he's come a long way since "Five Minutes To Live". Cash performs the main title as well. A good supporting cast, including Jane Alexander and a young Keith Carradine, makes this a worthwhile pic. On second thought I give it four stars. A good DVD transfer, though I'd like to see this in widescreen in a future release.

I love this movie! I've seen it many times and am ordering a new copy today. One of the last, true westerns made when Johnny Cash and Kirk Douglas were in there prime.

'A Gunfight' has a great premise that makes the viewer watch till the end, makes each scene before the end important and then delivers on the end. Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash are super watchable in this movie. The seem grounded to the earth in their weighty roles. A rare type western' that should please film noir fans, as that's what it feels like.

I ordered this very version (PAL, United Kingdom, Video International) of this title (GUNFIGHT) from an outfit called DaaVeeDee. It was NOT widescreen 1.78:1, it was not even letterboxed. It wasn't even in the same package shown. The seller did not offer an exchange, but said it was exactly what I ordered. Buyer beware.

The Western showdown is a duel, a matching of gunplay skills in which the faster, more professional gunman wins... The logical extension of the show is without doubt a gladiatorial Roman circus combat between two fighters and such is the elemental structure of Lamont Johnson's film...

Kirk Douglas is a retired gunman sick enough of his life, and Johnny Cash is a weary gunslinger who knows that even if he wins, he will eventually lose... Both are famous, veteran gunfighters who provide their talent as the quick and the fast... The auditorium chosen is a bullfight ring...

Whether the two men are considered as gladiators or bullfighters, the film deplorably smashes the traditional conception of the showdown, twisting it from a clash between good and bad into a show of a very poor quality...

The situation exposed is certainly ambiguous, implausible and anti-climactic against popular blood lust...

The film captures the viewer with a double-ended showdown... One with Douglas as the winner, and the other with Cash...

Our feeling is that the strands of myth and honest re-creation which connect the American Western to the real American West are being cut by those whose roots are far removed from the actual frontier... To the Western purist, such tendency can only be seen with alarm... The screen showdown has been undermined and ruined... There are no white hats and black villainy anymore...

I didn't expect much from this film but the presence of Kirk Douglas, Johnny Cash, Karen Black and Keith Carradine in the cast conduced me to rent it. I must admit that the main and sole theme of Lamont Johnson's A GUNFIGHT is very good. Two aging gunfighters decide to make some money by organizing a public shootout in a bullring on the other side of the Mexican border.

The problem is that you can't present a 90 minutes movie with only one idea. OK, there is another interesting scene in the film: the arrival of a young gunman in town, played by Keith Carradine, who wants to kill one of the old pistoleros. But if you like shootouts, the definitive movie about these duels is of course Samuel Raimi's The Quick and the Dead. In conclusion, A GUNFIGHT is a curiosity whose screenplay should have been given then to an Italian director. It typically develops the kind of theme one can find in the spaghetti westerns of that period.

A DVD zone my Cash back, please.