The Gun and the Pulpit - 1974

I completely forgot I even saw this movie.  I was at work here, watching the film Mausoleum from 1983 (as one is apt to do) when I recognized the actor Marjoe Gortner, who is in both films.  I had a sudden thought - I never reviewed The Gun and the Pulpit!  Shit!

So here I am, it's about three or more days later, and I'm going to do my best to remember this western entry from my 1970's boxset.  I'm also breaking in my new keyboard, which so far is a bit weird, but I might get used to it.  The Gun and the Pulpit is another 70's made for TV thing, and also again, something which was going to be the pilot for a potential series.  And much like Good Against Evil, maybe I'll talk about what the show would've probably looked like.

In the beginning of Gun and Pulpit, criminal and rascal Ernie Parsons (Gortner) is going to be hung for killing someone.  He's innocent of this particular crime, and when a young girl comes to vouch for him, Ernie escapes.  He finds a dead preacher, dons the outfit, and sees the preacher was heading for a nearby town.  Ernie goes in his place to find the town under siege from the big bossman Mr. Ross, who has a whole consort of local hotshots who are doing his dirty work.  Now it's up to Ernie to confront Mr. Ross and get the town back into gear and stand up for itself again.

The cast is wide and packed with known performers.  Taking front and center, Marjoe Gortner plays a extremely confident main character in Ernie.  Slim Pickens plays a friend who knows his true identity.  David Huddleston is Mr. Ross, and Estelle Parsons and Geoffrey Lewis fill out some other roles in the film.  The acting here is on point, and so is the setting of Arizona pretty much as... Arizona.

The whole of this movie is that one will come away from it feeling fine.  Again, being only 75 minutes long it goes by fast, and there's not a lot of opportunity for things to get bad.  There is some awful dialogue written in though, and Ernie is a major creep to the barely 18 year old girl Sally Underwood.  When she tells him she's 18 he gives her a solid look up and down and mumbles out "You sure are."  Ugh.  Gross fuck.

Conceivably, much like in Concrete Cowboys, Ernie would wander from town to town, getting mixed up in whatever was going on.  He still wears the cloth of a preacher in the end, so he'd use that guise to basically: flirt with more young girls, shoot more baddies, rebuild destitute communities, and even the odds against the ills of the world at large.  Sure.  Sounds fine.

Don't have much else to say.  It's innocent enough, and it works out fine.  I'll give it 2.5 stars.