General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Death of a Gunfighter

Death of a Gunfighter is a 1969 American Western, 94 minutes long, produced by Universal Pictures and directed in practice by Robert Totten and Don Siegel, though its screen credit reads "Allen Smithee", the pseudonym created for directors who decline to take credit for a film¹^•². It stars Richard Widmark as Marshal Frank Patch, an old-style lawman pushed out by a Texas town that wants to modernize, with Lena Horne, John Saxon, and Carroll O'Connor in supporting roles¹. The film is remembered mainly as the first movie credited to Allen Smithee, a distinction that grew out of a directorial dispute during production².

Key fact	Detail
Release	May 8, 1969 (United States); 94 minutes; color; 1.85:1 aspect ratio³
Director credit	Allen Smithee, a pseudonym for Robert Totten and Don Siegel; Totten directed 25 days and was replaced by Siegel¹
Significance	The first film credited to "Allen Smithee", the Directors Guild of America pseudonym for directors who disown a film²
Source	Screenplay by Joseph Calvelli, based on the novel Death of a Gunfighter by Lewis B. Patten⁴
Principal cast	Richard Widmark (Marshal Frank Patch), Lena Horne (Claire Quintana), John Saxon (Lou Trinidad), Carroll O'Connor (Lester Locke)¹
Production	Universal Pictures; producer Richard E. Lyons; cinematographer Andrew Jackson; filmed at Old Tucson, Arizona¹^•³
Reception	Metascore 69; 75% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 8 reviews⁵

Spoilers

Plot

In the turn-of-the-century Texas town of Cottonwood Springs, Marshal Frank Patch is an old-style lawman serving a town determined to become modern. When he kills a drunken man named Luke Mills in self-defense, the town leaders decide it is time for a change and ask for his resignation. Patch refuses, on the ground that the town had promised him the job for as long as he wanted it. Fearing for the town's future, and uneasy that Patch knows all of its dark secrets, the city fathers conclude that old-style violence is the only way to rid themselves of the unwanted lawman⁶.

Kino Lorber's synopsis describes the same arc from Patch's side: after 20 years of service, he is betrayed by the very town he worked to protect, in a community that no longer respects him⁷. A reviewer for The Digital Bits notes a structural irony in the script: from beginning to end Patch fires his gun only in self-defense, yet by the end he has killed at least a half-dozen of his fellow townsmen and driven another to suicide².

Production and the Allen Smithee credit

Robert Totten directed the film for 25 days before being replaced by Don Siegel¹. Accounts of the split differ in detail. The Harvard Advocate reports that Totten quit over discord with leading man Richard Widmark, who then brought in Siegel⁸; a Rotten Tomatoes-cited account says Siegel had been the original choice but was overworked, and that in his memoirs Siegel wrote that Widmark pushed from the first day to have Totten removed⁹.

Siegel's actual contribution was limited. TV Guide calls it a "fringe" Siegel film, since he worked on it for two weeks only¹⁰, and Time Out gives the same two-week figure¹¹. According to the account circulated with the film's later home-video release, Siegel looked at Totten's footage, thought it was good, and did not reshoot a single scene; he finished the opening and closing sequences and some pickup shots, and decided he had not done enough work to take the directing credit. Totten, for his part, wanted nothing to do with the finished film⁹.

With neither director willing to take credit, an agreement was reached with the Directors Guild of America to use a pseudonym. The name was originally to be "Al Smith", but the Guild said a director of that name already existed, so "Allen Smithee" was adopted, setting a precedent for directors who did not want their name on a film³. The American Film Institute catalog records that the cutting continuity credits one "Dan Farron" as director, possibly another pseudonym for Totten and Siegel, and lists the working titles Patch and The Last Gunfighter¹. Don Siegel's archival papers at Boston University include script additions shot by Siegel dated March 18, 1969, together with a letter from the Directors' Guild noting the use of the credit "Allen Smithee"¹².

The pseudonym outlived the film. It was used for decades by directors who wished to distance themselves from a project, and the DGA discontinued it in 2000, prompted in part by the satire Burn Hollywood Burn and by director Tony Kaye's unsuccessful attempt to remove his name from American History X⁸.

Reception

Critics reviewed the film on its own terms, generally without knowing who had directed it. Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until 2013 and winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, gave it 3.5 of 4 stars and called it "quite an extraordinary western", one of the rare attempts to populate the West with real people living in real historical time; his review credited "director Allen Smithee, a name I'm not familiar with", and an editor's note added years later records that Smithee's status as a pseudonym only became publicly known afterward⁴. The New York Times critic Howard Thompson was cooler, writing that the film's tone and point, festering hatred, were not enough to make the picture matter, though he praised Widmark's "scorching vibrancy" in the lead⁵.

Aggregated scores place the film in generally favorable territory: a Metascore of 69 with no negative reviews among seven counted, and a 75% Tomatometer from eight reviews against a 58% audience score⁵^•⁹. Time Out's critic, noting that Siegel spent two weeks wrapping up what was only a fringe Siegel western, found the story of a keeper of the peace who brought order to a frontier settlement yet ended up shaming its now-civilized inhabitants interesting enough to speculate on how the film might have turned out had Siegel made all of it.⁵

Place in the Western genre

The film belongs to the late-1960s run of Westerns about aging gunfighters out of step with a changing world. Matt Brunson's review places it in the stretch when many Westerns examined aging cowboys coping with a rapidly progressing world⁹, and TV Guide notes that Siegel developed themes here that he would later explore in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist⁵. A Royal Holloway thesis lists it among the "conservative backlash" westerns of 1969, and a survey of the genre's treatment of violence notes it as a film in which the hero has violence forced upon him or renounces it¹³^•¹⁴.

The casting carried its own resonance. Lena Horne, as Claire Quintana, appears as Patch's love interest; the two characters marry on screen, and a Digital Bits review observes that this interracial marriage draws no reaction from anyone in the plot². A 1969 TIME review remarked that Horne's appearance in the film recalled a 13-year absence from Hollywood¹⁵.

Legacy on home video

Universal released the film on DVD on July 27, 2011¹⁶, and Kino Lorber later issued a Blu-ray with a new audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Dwayne Epstein⁷. The film was also featured in the 2002 documentary Who Is Alan Smithee?, which takes its subject from the credit this film created³.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026