IA #43: Angel and the Badman (1947)

 Angel and the Badman (1947) on IMDb

Angel and the Badman is the first film that John Wayne produced as well as starred in. Wayne starts out as an injured gunslinger who is taught the benefits of non-violence by the Quaker woman who nurses him back to health.

The final line of the movie, “Only a man who carries a gun ever needs one,” isn’t the philosophy you’d expect from Wayne and shows that there’s some thought mixed in with its standard Western action. That’s why it’s one of the highest-ranked of its genre in the Internet Archive Top 100.