-“You and I have nothing in common”
-“Everybody dies”

Jack Arnold can do a lot with a small budget, as those who saw his masterpiece fable “The Incredible Shrinking Man” can testify. In a similar vein is the existential Western No Name on the Bullet. Very few great Westerns were shot on the studio soundstage in their entirety – the Western needs those landscapes – but this movie is an exception, in many ways.

A notorious professional contract killer walks into town. Who is the target? A lot of people have a guilty conscience and become dangerously paranoid.

Audie Murphy is fantastic as the confident psycho everyone is scared of. Calm and collected, well-spoken and philosophically inclined, “disarmingly articulate on question of morality” (says Dana Reemes in Directed by Jack Arnold), he thinks he is the only honest and brave man there is until he meets the town doctor, which he decides is an equal. They discuss the ethics of murder for most of the movie until they naturally shoot at each other.

Meta moment: Could the Audie Murphy character be Death itself?

The original trailer: