James Reasoner recommended this film one week for TODD MASON\'S OVERLOOKED MOVIES and I decided to look it up. Oh, if you haven’t read James’s excellent review, do so. It made me want to check it out. I wasn’t at all familiar with this one and apparently not a lot of other folks either. There are only two reviews on the IMDB listing of the film.

I noticed in the credits it said introducing Angie Dickinson. She looked very young, as James noted, and, if not her first role, it was certainly the first where she got billing.

Todd wondered if this might have helped Arness’s selection for the role of Matt Dillon. A Batjac production, John Wayne’s film company, some early rushes, also Todd’s idea, might certainly have helped. The release date of the movie was the year after Arness started Gunsmoke, so the time frame seems right and one thing I wondered about watching GUN THE MAN DOWN. I saw one scene with Arness riding I swear I remember being used frequently on old episodes of Gunsmoke. The buckskin he rode for most of the film certainly looked like the one he used early in the series as well. I wasn’t able to find anything about that, other than Arness rode a lot of different horses on the show, none with names, as was fashionable in westerns of the period. There was mention of one episode where a horse was referred to as Buck though.

Enjoyed this one. It was more of a psychological drama than shoot-em-up, with Arness using his head, and fists, more often than a gun, though he did use it when no other way was possible.