Angel and the Badman

Quirt Evans is a gunfighter. His horse collapses in front of a farm and he is wounded. The family who take him in are Quakers; they carry no weapons, they shoot nobody, and they help whoever comes. Penelope looks after him. Quirt stays until he is healed. He learns to work in the field, sits at the evening table, and passes days without drawing his gun. But there is a reckoning waiting outside; a man named Laredo and an unfinished quarrel. The marshal is waiting too, for Quirt to kill someone one day and hang for it. James Edward Grant writes and directs; he was a screenwriter and this is his only work as director. John Wayne plays Quirt and Gail Russell plays Penelope; Harry Carey and Bruce Cabot are in the cast. It is an American production, made in 1947. John Wayne produced it; it is among the first things he made with his own company. The matter it treats is giving up violence; a community that does not use weapons is put at the centre of the western shape. The narrative does not mock the Quaker faith and does not offer that faith as a solution either. The film sets up its showdown and does not give the result as expected. The character Gail Russell plays is the side that makes the decisions; Quirt reacts in most scenes. Harry Carey is one of the old names of the western and the marshal here belongs to the last part of his career. Its limit is age; the narrative is slow, the message explicit, and the ending too tidy. Who it is for: viewers who like classic westerns and John Wayne's films. Who it is not for: it is slow, didactic, and the ending easy.