Your Honor

Finishing up Heroes and Villains month, we have a cowboy movie, with a stoic hero, a wacky sidekick, and an oily villain.

But let’s start with the women folk.

There are three female characters in Decision at Sundown. We meet Lucy on her wedding day, at the chapel, getting ready to marry our oily villain. Her gown isn’t white, but its an awfully pale blue, so let’s round her up to virgin.

Ruby is the other woman we hear from - the oily villain’s mistress. She’s taking his wedding in stride, mostly. She knew he wasn’t going to marry her and doesn’t want to make any trouble - but she does plan to go to the wedding. Oily Villain agrees - since he can’t really stop her without making more of a stink about - but he insists she not make a spectacle of herself by sitting up front.

Enter our hero, the cowboy, Bart.

The cowboy is an American hero - at least, we've laid claim to him for the last century. From the Virginian on down, we know the story. A feller leaves the east behind for the wide open spaces of the west. Out there, there isn't so much law, but cowboys live by a code of honor, so they don't need as much law.

And Bart tells us, more than once, how a man should act like a man and how that means he has to kill the villain, no matter what. As a cowboy, you see, he even has to warn the villain, give him a fair shot - so to speak - to defend himself.

This kind of cowboy embodies an honor society. In an honor society, men establish and maintain honor through feats of bravery and women do so by defending their chastity. Bart needs to avenge his dishonor - since Mary, his wife, killed herself after taking up with the villain.

It turns out, though, that Mary fell down on the second count. While Bart was a war, she took up with more than one man. The villain was just the last before she killed herself. When Bart realized that his beloved wife was a tramp, killing the villain became optional.

And Ruby put a stop to it by shooting the villain in the arm, so he couldn’t hold a pistol.

It’s not like Bart could shoot an unarmed man.