Heaven with a Gun

Plot

Jim Killian arrives in Vinegaroon, a town split between cattlemen and sheepherders, and buys an empty barn. Cattle rancher Asa Beck, his son Coke, and their cowhands regularly harass the sheepherders, sometimes fatally, and the sheepherders are close to retaliating. Both sides learn Killian is a skilled gunfighter and try to hire him, but he instead calls a town meeting. There, Killian reveals he has become a preacher and turned his barn into a church.

He promises to protect everyone and warns that no one else may kill; when two of Beck's cowhands draw on him, he shoots them to make his point. The next Sunday, everyone attends his service. Killian shows that cattle and sheep can share water without harm, arguing that people can live together peacefully. However, Beck had already hired an outsider named Mace, who after the service exposes Killian as a former criminal and convicted murderer.

Beck's faction demands Killian's expulsion, but others defend him, saying he has paid his debt. Meanwhile, Killian protects a half-Native American girl, Leloopa, whose father was lynched by Coke Beck. Coke becomes obsessed with her and rapes her in the stables. Killian beats Coke severely in public.

Reception

Howard Thompson of the New York Times gave a mixed review, noting that Glenn Ford's restrained performance as an ex-convict turned gun-toting preacher was the film's steadiest element, but called the movie a plodding, vest-pocket Western. Leonard Maltin awarded two and a half stars out of four, describing it as uneven. Dennis Schwartz gave a negative review, criticizing the film for loading the genre with cliches and violent sequences, including a lynching, torture with shears, a rape, arson, a street brawl, and saloon gunfights. He found the social conscience message awkward and the execution clumsy and leaden, making everything seem absurd and hardly believable.