Lack of good storyline.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Shoot Out is directed by Henry Hathaway and adapted to the screen by Marguerite Roberts from the novel The Lone Cowboy by Will James. It stars Gregory Peck, Patricia Quinn, Robert F. Lyons, Susan Tyrrell and Dawn Lyn. Music is by Dave Grusin and cinematography by Earl Rath. Plot has Peck playing Clay Lomax, who is out of prison after 7 years and seeking revenge on the partner who shot him in the back during a robbery. But Lomax soon finds he has company in the young child form of Decky Ortega (Lyn), who has been sent to him by his one time lover Teresa, sadly now deceased.Just do your little chore, punk.It took a whack from critics of the day, and even now it only seems to have a handful of fans prepared to stand up and say they enjoy it very much. Shoot Out is not a great film, well actually the location work is certainly great, but it is a very rich and warm Western. The problems are hard to argue against, Peck is not adept at playing a vengeful bastard in his later years, the villains are of the near cackling pantomime kind, and a number of cheap money saving tactics are employed by an on the wane Hathaway. Yet the action hits the right notes, Peck's unfolding relationship with the adorable Lyn is heart warming, and the elder female characters-put upon prostitute desperately seeking a way out (Tyrrell)/plain Jane homemaker who drinks to forget her unfulfilled lot (Quinn)-are afforded intelligence in the writing. While some of the location photography, in Technicolor, is gorgeous as Earl Rath gets excellent value out of the New Mexico and California landscapes. And hey! There's even a cameo by the always awesome Arthur Hunnicutt.I'm giving it a generous 7/10 because it's not deserving of the scorn poured on it elsewhere. If only for the central father/daughter relationship, the scenery and a neat flip-flop pay back scenario, this is recommended to Peck and Western fans. Just don't expect True Grit like some apparently did!

This is a disappointing follow-up to the same writer-producer-director team who made TRUE GRIT (1969) – here tackling another Western with child interest, but replacing John Wayne with Gregory Peck. Not a genre stalwart like The Duke, perhaps, but he did manage some 12 appearances in Westerns between 1946 and 1989 – sometimes to striking effect as in DUEL IN THE SUN (1946), THE GUNFIGHTER (1950) and THE BIG COUNTRY (1958).Anyway, the film is a standard revenge tale which starts with Peck being released from a 7-year prison sentence (caught after he was shot by his own partner, James Gregory, as they were fleeing the scene of a bank robbery); on his way to town, he is told to pick up something from an arriving train – which turns out to be a little girl, the daughter of an old flame of his who has since passed away! The relationship between weathered cowboy Peck and the cute yet spirited girl is nicely handled; this, however, serves to render the star’s character mellow as opposed to mean – and, consequently, diverts attention from the central plot (which sees Gregory hiring a trio of brash young gunman to follow Peck’s movements).The cast is divided between old pros and new talent – the former including Jeff Corey (as a crippled bartender brutally murdered by the reckless gang) and Paul Fix, and the latter, Pat Quinn (from Arthur Penn’s ALICE’S RESTAURANT [1969] – as a widow who shelters Peck and the girl, but falls foul of his pursuers) and Susan Tyrell (soon to be Oscar-nominated for John Huston’s FAT CITY [1972] – as a prostitute who tags along with the villains). As a sign of the times, too, the film features mild instances of nudity and foul language. Perhaps the best thing about it is the fine score by Dave Grusin; while certainly harmless and commendably brief (running only a little over 90 minutes), there’s more talk than action here – the film’s title notwithstanding – and it doesn’t even rise to the expected climax! I had missed out on the film countless times on Italian TV over the years (the same goes for Peck’s next Western, BILLY TWO HATS [1974]); this viewing, in fact, came via a dubbed pan-and-scan version (but, frankly, it’s not worth fretting over the lack of original language and correct aspect ratio where minor stuff such as SHOOTOUT is concerned)!

Shoot Out for all intents and purposes was the last film that Henry Hathaway directed. He did do one more, but from what I'm able to gather very few ever saw it. It's also not a great western for Gregory Peck who in his day has given us classics like The Gunfighter, The Big Country, and The Bravados. Gregory Peck plays a man just out of prison who's looking for his partner from a bank robbery who shot him and took all the loot. Peck's got an understandable mission. But he's also been saddled with another situation. Some wild oats he sowed in the person of little Dawn Lyn arrived by train, a present from her late mother.In the meantime ex-partner James Gregory is now a prosperous rancher, but he can't get any decent help. He hires three punks, Robert F. Lyons, John Davis Chandler, and Pepe Serna to locate Peck and merely keep him informed of his movements. These three are not only punks, but extremely dim bulbs. I can hardly believe Gregory can't do better than these.How Peck deals with both situations is the balance of the film. A lot of the plot scenario has not been well thought out in Shoot Out. The cast struggles, but their hearts are clearly not in it.Best in the cast is Susan Tyrell who plays a prostitute who takes up with the three punks. She's a 19th century version of a Valley Girl and she pays big time for her stupidity and very bad taste in men.Definitely not one of the better films for Henry Hathaway and Gregory Peck. And to think two years earlier, Hathaway and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts were responsible for True Grit.

This film barely held my interest, mainly because it was fun identifying the same locations where "True Grit" scenes were filmed. The most glaring was the spot where Gregory Peck and the girl camped before he got the drop on the three outlaws. That was the same place where John Wayne, et al. raided the shack where Moon and Quincy were waiting for Lucky Ned Pepper. It even looked like the same camera angle for the initial shot. Could have been cribbed from "True Grit", who knows? Other than playing "what happened on this spot in "True Grit", there wasn't much else to recommend this film. Gregory Peck looked like he was sleepwalking, and Dawn Lyn as the little girl was annoying, at best. The music was awful - it was like something out of a TV western, or even a crime show. One plus was the performance of John Davis Chandler (credited as John Chandler here), playing yet another whiny, heavy lidded heavy. He wasn't given much to do, unfortunately, since most of the bad guy attention went to Robert F. Lyons. Not worth a second look, IMHO.