While there’s no denying Clint Eastwood has played some of the fastest gunslingers in Western movies, there are plenty of gunfighters played by other Western stars. The Man With No Name and the High Plains Drifter are just a few characters he built his reputation on for being quick-drawing guns-for-hire, but there have been plenty of other actors, from John Wayne to Glenn Ford, who have also done impressive things with a pair of six-shooters. Like lawmen, gunslingers were a common archetype in the American Frontier but allowed for a little moral ambiguity.
Because of their propensity for dark and violent pasts, only particular actors took on this sort of character. For someone like Gregory Peck, who had a tendency to only play heroic parts, they offered a different challenge to change his reputation as a performer. Gunslingers were an important archetype that helped shape the mythos of the Wild West, and have remained an enduring part of the Western mark on cinema with their internal conflict, penchant for violence, and particular moral code.
Terence Hill’s Trinity
Terence Hill’s Trinity, the gunslinger at the center of They Call Me Trinity, Trinity Is Still My Name, and other films in the franchise was often underestimated. Along with his brother Bambino (Bud Spencer), he’d defend settlements for hire from gangs and bandits in a hit series of Western comedies that spoofed the popular Spaghetti Western tropes of the ’70s, where his skills with a side iron were never the main focus until the final gunfight. After he hadn’t been taken seriously for most of the film, his reflexes would always save the day.
Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo
Gregory Peck was a great Western star like Eastwood known for playing righteous protectors, but in The Gunfighter, he played a gunslinger known to be a quick draw with a reputation that made even faster enemies. With young guns constantly looking to pick a fight with the veteran shootist, Jimmy Ringo had to find a way to stay alive long enough to get back to his estranged family. He couldn’t avoid his violent past forever, and the final confrontation between him and the young sharpshooter Hunt Bromley (Skip Homeier) forced him to prove why the kid should have never tried to make a name for himself.
Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday
Aside from being known for his erudite way with words, Doc Holliday was known for being one of the fastest guns in the American Frontier alongside his pal Wyatt Earp, deputy marshal of Tombstone. In Tombstone, he joins the Earp brothers in protecting the small town in Arizona from Johnny Ringo (a notorious gunsel himself) and his gang. Holliday was known to fire eloquent refrains as fast as he emptied the chamber of his Colt Single Action Army revolver, which he was incredibly deadly with even while suffering from acute tuberculosis.
Robert Vaughn’s Lee
The 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven, considered one of the best Westerns ever made, starred Yul Brynner as a gunslinger who assembled a team of seven gunmen to defend a Mexican village from Calvera and his banditos. One of these men is Robert Vaughn’s Lee, known at one time for his incredible marksmanship but who has since lost his nerve and spends his time avoiding gunfights. At the moment of truth, when Calvera’s men have abducted several villagers, he stares fear in the face and rescues them all in a dizzying barrage of bullets.
Charles Bronson’s Harmonica
In the Western epic Once Upon a Time in the West, Charles Bronson plays a mysterious gunslinger simply named “Harmonica” who gets caught between a cattle baron and a farmer’s railroad feud. The baron sends Frank (Henry Fonda), the original Man in Black to hunt down anyone trying to defend the farmer’s rights, and Harmonica intervenes. Their showdown is one of the most famous in Western history, and while Frank is ruthless, he can’t match the gunslinger’s vengeance-fueled accuracy.
John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon
John Wayne didn’t play that many gunslingers due to their status as antiheroes, and while The Shootist features one of his most famous stabs at such an unsavory archetype, that role was an aged gunfighter far past his prime. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance he plays Tom Doniphon, a man at the center of a mystery involving who shot outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), him, or Senator Stoddard (James Stewart), intent on making a name for himself with a heroic origin story in a small Western town. As questions arise as to who really pulled the trigger, it’s clear that Doniphon’s swift reflexes saved the day