A small town learns a hard lesson on what it means to have a fast-drawing gunman for a neighbor in The Fastest Gun Alive, an excellent Western starring Glenn Ford.
We open in Silver Rapids, where outlaw Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford) has come to challenge Fallon, the local fast gun, just to prove that he's faster - and prove it he does. The story of Fallon's killing spreads like wildfire to the small town of Cross Creek, courtesy of McGovern (J.M. Kerrigan) who can never get tired of talking about it. The locals, fortunately, can't hear enough about it, except for one: storekeeper George Temple (Glenn Ford). Temple's ordinarily a nice guy, if a bit standoffish, and some of the townsfolk sneer at him for never drinking or wearing a gun. However, lately, he's been under a lot of strain for some reason, especially as McGovern continues to tell the story of the Silver Rapids shootout. This worries his wife Dora (Jeanne Craig), who is pregnant with their first child. Apparently, the Temples have had to move from one town to another on account of Temple causing unspecified trouble, and Dora thought that here in Cross Creek, things would finally work out for them. Finally, after a rough day at the store, Temple's had enough. He calls out the gossipers, especially the ones who belittle him, about their lack of knowledge about guns, for all their talk about how good they are with them, and makes a strange claim - that he's the fastest gun alive.