The Fastest Gun Alive

The Fastest Gun Alive is a 1956 Western about George Temple, a quiet storekeeper in a small town who has put his past as a gunfighter behind him at his wife Dora's urging. Because he refuses to wear a gun, some townspeople take him for a coward, though most respect him. His peaceful life is undone by his own tongue: while drunk, he claims to be the fastest draw around, and word of the boast reaches Vinnie Harold, a wanted outlaw who travels the territory defending his own reputation with a gun. Harold threatens to burn the town unless George agrees to face him.

The film was directed by Russell Rouse, who wrote the screenplay with Frank D. Gilroy; Clarence Greene produced it for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It precedes Rouse's The Oscar by a decade in his directing career. Glenn Ford plays George opposite Jeanne Crain as Dora, with Broderick Crawford as Harold and Russ Tamblyn, Allyn Joslyn and Leif Erickson among a credited cast of seventy. Made for about a million dollars, it returned roughly twice that worldwide, a solid result for a mid-budget studio Western.

On IMDb it holds a 7.1 rating from about 4,100 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9 from a much smaller sample of 66. Both point to a film that audiences have treated as dependable genre entertainment rather than a landmark of the Western.