Wichita

"Babylon on the Arkansas River," the town banner puts it more bluntly, "Everything Goes in Wichita." The speck in the desert is the rider atop the ridge, not a mirage but Wyatt Earp (Joel McCrea) looking for his place in the boom town. A former buffalo hunter in a land of proliferating saloons, scarcely slowed down by a bulky revolver ("Must take you a half hour to clear leather with it"), two well-timed shots are all he needs to foil a robbery. "Frontiersman Foils Felons" is the headline penned by that "great believer in alliteration" Bat Masterson (Keith Larsen), marshaling is a position grudgingly accepted. Maintaining order means disarmament, a problem in an economy built on riotous cattlemen. "Do you really think there'll be violence?" "Yes, I do." The most rigorous of Jacques Tourneur's Westerns, an impassive rationality brought to bear on frontier myth. (The model is Young Mr. Lincoln more than My Darling Clementine, and Ford returns the compliment in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with a variation on the gag of the horse in the newsroom.) "Natural-born lawman" as distinct from "natural-born preacher," just like "gunman" as distinct from "gunfighter," plus "businessman" behind it all. The saturnine mastery of the CinemaScope is epitomized with a high-angled view of drunken cowboys shooting into the night and smashing the street lamp in the foreground left of center, a little boy in pajamas watches the curious spectacle until a stray bullet fells him. "Here come the history-makers." Morality springs from tragedy, so suggests the gazette editor (Wallace Ford), so learns the shifty banker (Walter Coy). The bride (Vera Miles) is ready at the close, though the protagonist's most fateful appointment remains with the vengeful roughneck (Lloyd Bridges) last seen sprawled lifelessly across the widescreen. Dodge City is down the road, so is Ride the High Country. With Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Carl Benton Reid, John Smith, Robert J. Wilke, Jack Elam, Walter Sande, and Mae Clarke.