Image: A white cowboy hat. RandomKatze, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
Support Your Local Gunfighter is not a sequel to Support Your Local Sheriff!, and it is all the better for refusing to be one. Director Burt Kennedy reunited James Garner with much of the same company — Harry Morgan, Jack Elam and a gallery of wonderful character actors — but gave them new characters, a new town and a new joke. This time Garner plays Latigo Smith, a gambler and confidence man travelling by train through frontier Colorado with a formidable woman named Goldie, who intends to marry him. Latigo, who intends no such thing, slips away at a mining town called Purgatory, and immediately finds himself mistaken for someone else. In a Garner film, being mistaken for someone else is rarely good news and always good comedy.
The mistake is the engine of the plot. Purgatory is fought over by two mining owners: Taylor Barton, played by Harry Morgan, and Colonel Ames, played by John Dehner. Each believes Latigo is the notorious gunfighter Swifty Morgan, hired by the other side, and each tries to hire him. Latigo, who is many things but not a gunfighter, decides to play both sides against each other, recruiting the amiable drifter Jug May, played by Jack Elam, to impersonate Swifty while he pockets fees from both camps. It is a loose parody of Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, in which a stranger walks into a divided town and profits from its divisions — except that Latigo is less a cool samurai than a charming coward with excellent timing.
Garner is perfectly cast as a con man who cons mostly by being likeable. Latigo Smith is not a villain; he is a survivor. He likes cards, he likes women, he likes a comfortable life, and he dislikes hard work, gunfights and marriage in roughly equal measure. Garner plays him with a twinkle that makes the audience complicit: we know he is lying, the town does not, and we root for the lie to hold just a little longer. His scenes with Suzanne Pleshette, as Patience Barton, Taylor’s fiery daughter, give the film its romantic spine. Patience sees through Latigo faster than anyone else, which is precisely why he falls for her. Their sparring — she is sharp, he is slippery, both are honest about wanting more than Purgatory offers — is the film’s warmest pleasure.
Kennedy directs with the easy confidence of a man who knows the western inside out. The town of Purgatory, with its competing mines, its saloons and its ever-present threat of violence, feels lived-in rather than constructed. The comedy comes from character, not from slapstick: a misheard name, a bluff that goes one step too far, a supposedly fearsome gunfighter who turns out to be a nervous drifter in a borrowed reputation. Jack Elam’s Jug May is a delight, a man happy to pretend to be dangerous as long as nobody asks him to prove it. Joan Blondell, Marie Windsor, Ellen Corby and Dub Taylor fill out the town with the kind of seasoned professionalism that was once the backbone of Hollywood. And when the real Swifty Morgan finally arrives, played with looming menace by Chuck Connors, the film earns its climax honestly: Latigo must face, at last, the consequences of his own story.
There is a melancholy undercurrent to Latigo that Garner never lets go of. Like many of his characters, Latigo is a man running from commitment — from Goldie, from responsibility, from any future that requires him to stay still. Purgatory, with its name promising neither heaven nor hell but a long wait in between, is the perfect place for him. The comedy works because we sense that Latigo’s freedom is also a kind of loneliness. He is good company, but he has no home. His eventual decision to stop running, to choose Patience and to face Swifty rather than flee, feels earned rather than imposed. Garner had a gift for these quiet turning points: a look, a pause, a decision made without a speech.
The film also shows Garner’s skill as a comic actor in an ensemble. He never tries to steal a scene from Elam or Morgan or Pleshette; he lets them shine, knowing that his own performance gains from their energy. That generosity was a hallmark of his career, on television as much as in film. He understood that a leading man who listens is more interesting than one who shouts, and Support Your Local Gunfighter is full of listening — Latigo listening to both mining bosses, weighing their offers, calculating his odds, and trying, always, to stay one step ahead of the truth.
Compared with its predecessor, Gunfighter is looser and less tightly plotted, and Garner himself later said it was not as good as Support Your Local Sheriff!. That honesty is part of its charm. What it lacks in tightness it makes up for in atmosphere and company. It is a film to watch on a relaxed evening, to enjoy for its jokes, its faces and its star’s effortless charisma. Latigo Smith may not be the hero Calendar needed, but he is exactly the rogue Purgatory deserves: a man who talks his way into trouble, talks his way out of most of it, and discovers, almost by accident, that he would rather be honest with one person than rich off a whole town.
The film also rewards attention to its small details: the way Latigo counts his winnings, the way Jug May straightens up when he is supposed to look dangerous, and the way Patience watches Latigo with a mixture of suspicion and affection. These are the touches that separate a routine western comedy from a film worth revisiting. Kennedy and Garner trusted their audience to notice them, and that trust is repaid on every rewatch, when new jokes and glances reveal themselves in scenes that first seemed merely cheerful.