This is a unique, gunfighter western movie; unique concept.
DEATH OF A GUNFIGHTER is a underrated, forgotten gem of an Old West gunfighter movie. It's unique because the time setting is not quite, old west.
SPOILERS ***** SPOILERS ***** SPOILERS
It is the year, circa 1900, in a growing, large town, Cottonwood Springs, in the American West. The American Old West is actually gone. The twentieth century has arrived and along with it, twentieth century technology. In the typical western town setting, we see examples of modern technology, existing side-by-side with vestiges of the American Old West, such as, primitive gasoline automobiles chugging and honking down the hard-packed earthern main street. The local lawman, marshal Frank Patch, dozes in an empty cell with a clunky electric fan to cool him in the torrid summer night's heat. In a night shoot-out inside a large horse barn, the type typically seen in almost every cowboy western movies, the marshal turns a switch, lighting up an electric bulb hanging from the middle of the lofty barn ceiling. The newborne twentieth century co-exists uneasily with the lingering 19th century. Most townspeople still used fluid fuel table lamps that they have to light with a match. The local, large saloon and gambling hall would still look normal for a 1880 western town.
The problem for most of the leading townspeople is that they consider their hard-bitten, tough-as-nails lawman, marshal Frank Patch, an archaic embarassment, a throwback to the barbaric Old West they so desperately want to leave behind. One of the town's leading citizens doesn't even like the lawman/cowboy clothing marshal Patch wears, likening it to something on the cover of a dime-store western paperback book. Everyone's wearing 1900-type suits while the marshal still looks like he stepped out of the year 1880. The bigger problem for them, so they think, is that lawman Patch has a lifetime contract and Patch won't take the obvious hint and retire. It's not that Patch is a bad man. He's an effective, honest, ethical lawman who doesn't bend the law for his own ends. Yet he's typical of the rough, violent Old West, the kind of lawman who doesn't hesitate to punch out lawbreakers. Many of the townspeople think marshal Patch is too violent, too quick to pull his six-shooter. One townsperson reminds everyone of how desperately they needed Frank Patch twenty years ago when a gang of cowboy roughnecks bullied and rampaged through their young town. But everyone else ignores him.
This 1969 movie, in my opinion, was ahead of its time. It's so relevant today that continues the public conflict over how much law-and-order is enough and when is it pistol-whipping.
The final straw is at the movie's beginning. Frank Patch is ambushed in the horse barn by an angry local man who harbored a decade-plus grudge against the marshal. It's so obvious to the moviewatcher that Patch had no choice but to shoot his assailant in self-defense. But for the leading townspeople, they spread the rumour that the shooting was unnecessary. This is the beginning of the end for marshal Patch that lasts through the whole movie to its sorrowful climax.