Utah Blaine 1957: Movie with theme of good guy gunslinger taking on bad wealthy guy and his gunslinger-goons and rescuing town & ranch areas from their grip

Utah Blaine 1957 Western Rory Calhoun, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHWUMHY1HsA, movie ends around 1 hr. 15 mins into the video. The rest of the video can be ignored.

The movie is based on a novel by Louis L'Amour. I have read quite a few Louis L'Amour books in my college student days and perhaps a few years after that as well. It was interesting to see a movie based on one of his books.

I found the movie theme to be of great interest. I must also say that the movie does seem more fictional than resembling reality of those days. Nonetheless, the theme is great.

A bad wealthy guy is greedy and wants to own all the land in the area. As the area is a frontier area, the land claims office is not well organized and neither does the area have any proper law and order. There is no sheriff as far as I can recall from the movie - I think that is one of the hard-to-accept aspects of the movie. I mean, one could have a sheriff who is under the power of the bad wealthy guy but that town having no sheriff seems unusual to me. But then I am no expert in US Wild West history :-) .

So the bad wealthy guy hires a lead gunslinger and other gunslingers to intimidate or even kill land owners whose land the bad wealthy guy wants to swallow up. The bad guys do their killing by claiming to be vigilantes for law & order! I think this is also an important aspect of such stories. The bad guys use 'law & order' vigilantes cover to illegally kill (murder) those that oppose them!

The good folks in the town are just too scared to take them on. Thus essentially the whole town is ruled by the bad wealthy guy and his hired goons.

In comes the hero, the good gunslinger who takes on the bad guys, with some later assistance by a friend. The movie has a powerful scene (around 14 mins. into the video) where the bad wealthy guy laughs at the challenge given by the good gunslinger who now has been hired by one of the ranchers whose land the former wants to swallow up. Then the bad wealthy guy who is mounted on a horse whereas the good gunslinger is on the ground, rushes his horse at the latter. I think that scene very powerfully shows how bad rulers try to crush those who dare to oppose them. The good gunslinger rushes out of the way and gets his guns out in a flash, fires at two of the goons who thought of using their guns against him, killing one and injuring another, thereby establishing to the bad guy and his goon-gang that he is a force to reckon with. The bad wealthy guy and the remaining goons ride off, to continue the fight later on.

Slowly the good guys in the town who essentially were scared of taking on the bad guys earlier, get the courage to rally around the good guy gunslinger and his friend. That turns the tide. The climax is a shootout between the good guys and the bad guys with the good guys winning.

I think this theme of bad rulers using their wealth to hire goons to dominate and exploit others in the area they rule is so true, across time and across many regions of the world where law & order is weak (and I think that in many rural areas as well as some urban areas of many countries of the world, law & order is weak even in our early 21st century times today). The good guys have to lead fearful lives and avoid angering the bad ruler and his goons. Therefore the few times when such bad rulers and their goons are challenged and defeated by good guy heroes (with the hero being capable of violently fighting and defeating their lead goons), it becomes a hit story.

I think this movie set in Wild West times depicts this theme very well.

The movie has a wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Blaine . An extract from it:

After saving a rancher from hanging, cowboy Mike "Utah" Blaine learns that his enemy Rink Witter is now a hired gun working for wealthy Russ Nevers, who is out to own every piece of land in the territory.

Utah teams up with Angie Kinyon, another murdered landowner's daughter, and rancher Mary Blake to maintain lawful ownership of their properties. He has a fistfight with Gus Ortmann, a large and popular fellow in town who misunderstands Utah's purpose. Witter then pulls a gun, but Utah's old pal Rip Coker shoots it from his hand.

Mary's cattle are stampeded and Gus is killed trying to protect her. The townspeople rally to Utah's side so that, when Nevers and Witter confront him, dozens of guns end up aimed at them. Utah ends up with a ranch of his own and with Angie as well.

--- end wiki extract ---

[I thank Wikipedia and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above extract(s) from their website on this post which is freely viewable by all, and does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever.]