It was in the later Westerns Murphy made for that studio that he really came into his own, playing the tight-lipped, quietly intense loner who was fast with a gun - an image that Clint Eastwood would appropriate for himself in a series of Italian spaghetti Westerns. No Name on the Bullet (1959), in which Murphy plays a hired gunman who rides into the sleepy town of Lordsburg with a mission, could have been a model for Eastwood's "Man With No Name" trilogy with director Sergio Leone. Impassive yet deadly, Murphy's hired assassin disrupts the town with his presence, creating an atmosphere of paranoia as various townspeople with secrets to hide become convinced the gunman was come to kill them. Murphy's target is eventually revealed; it's the town judge (Edgar Stehli), now dying of consumption and confined to a wheelchair. Their fatal confrontation is played out in a surprising and unconventional denouement.
Unlike most of Murphy's earlier Westerns, No Name on the Bullet has a philosophical edge which makes it closer in tone to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) than a six-gun oater like Destry (1954), a distinction noted by author Don Graham (in his biography of Murphy entitled No Name on the Bullet). For one thing, Murphy's angel of death is balanced against Luke (Charles Drake), the town's physician who is committed to saving lives. Similar to the chess game played between Death and the knight Antonius in The Seventh Seal, No Name on the Bullet occasionally pauses to compare the contrasting viewpoints of these two men. Murphy has no use for the townspeople, stating "They're going to die anyway. Best you can do is drag out their worthless lives. Why bother?" But Luke counters with "I'm a healer. I've devoted my life to it and I intend to continue. Right now I've got one big public health problem, and I'm looking at it."
Like Eastwood's flinty drifter in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Murphy is equally deadpan and expressionless throughout most of No Name on the Bullet except for his eyes. And this was true of Murphy off the set as well. According to frequent co-star Morgan Woodward (Ride a Crooked Trail (1958), Gunpoint, 1966) in Graham's aforementioned biography, Murphy's "eyes almost seemed to dance. They had a deadly gleam, a deadly wild look. I would not have wanted to cross him". It's this suggestion of inner violence ready to erupt which makes Murphy's performance in No Name on the Bullet one of his best.
Murphy, however, wasted little time on analyzing his acting or reading critical notices; he saw movies as little more than profitable work for hire. But he was well served on No Name on the Bullet with Jack Arnold in the director's chair and Gene Coon providing the screenplay. Arnold, best known for sci-fi/horror genre efforts such as It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), has enjoyed a critical resurgence in recent years with film scholars re-evaluating his work. On the surface, much of Arnold's work was typical B-movie product for the studio but on closer inspection entries like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and No Name on the Bullet prove to be more thematically complex and thought-provoking than any ordinary B-picture. As for Gene Coon, most sci-fi geeks know him as one of the major scenarists on the Star Trek TV series; he introduced the Klingons to viewers in the first season episode "Errand of Mercy."
Producer: Howard Christie, Jack Arnold
Director: Jack Arnold
Screenplay: Gene L. Coon, from a story by Howard Amacker
Cinematography: Harold Lipstein
Music: Herman Stein
Art Direction: Alexander Golitzen, Robert Emmet Smith
Film Editing: Frank Gross
Cast: Audie Murphy (John Gant), Charles Drake (Dr. Luke Canfield), Joan Evans (Anne Benson), Virginia Grey (Roseanne Fraden), Warren Stevens (Lou Fraden), R.G. Armstrong (Asa Canfield), Willis Bouchey (Sheriff Buck Hastings), Edgar Stehli (Judge Benson), Whit Bissell (Thad Pierce), Jerry Paris (Harold Miller), Karl Swenson (Earl Stricker).
C-77m. Letterboxed.
by Jeff Stafford
