Death of a Gunfighter

Lena Horne is one of a gallery of fine character actors (also including Carroll O’Connor) who revolve around Richard Widmark (Judgment at Nuremberg) in this “extraordinary western” (Roger Ebert). Widmark plays Frank Patch, an old-fashioned tough-guy lawman in a small Texas town that’s inching toward modernity. (There’s one car in town, and it scares the horses.) After some trouble occurs at Patch’s hands, violence is the inevitable conclusion. Horne’s got a touching non-musical dramatic role, but she does sing “Sweet Apple Wine” at the beginning and the end.