MovieChat Forums > No Name on the Bullet (1959) Discussion > Murphy was great in this movie!

Murphy was great in this movie!


I think it was one of his best roles. He plays a good bad guy and may have been the first one even before Clint Eastwood. This was one great performance.

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There are indeed a quite a lot of similarities between Gant and The Man With No Name.

According to all the research I have done, this is the closest role that Audie played to who he really was. In it he just had to be himself. Do not get me wrong. I respect and admire Audie. But he was a very, very unpleasant person. But why wouldn't he be? But unlike self centered prima donna celluloid heroes, Audie earned respect given to him not by pretending but by deeds.


In me are 2 dogs. 1's evil & 1's good. They fight constantly. The winner's the one I feed the most.

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I agree with the OP. As for being "unpleasant", maybe Ace had an unpleasant encounter with Audie, but I met him and spoke with him a while at the Main Street Gym in L.A. some months prior to his death (in a plane crash). He was nice and not arrogant at all.


"Did you make coffee...? Make it!"--Cheyenne.

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On the surface, Murphy brought to the acting profession good looks, his high-profile war record, and a willingness to do the work and to learn. He was used often in cardboard hero roles that used his reputation more than his potential.

Deeper and less obvious was his inner history. He had seen and survived a lot:
He knew a lot about sudden death, about suddenly losing personal friends and about making the right decisions-- sometimes very quickly -- in order to stay alive. The scripts he was given did not always play to these strong points. In a light, comedy sequence, you can see him working at it. He worked better with straight dramatic material. The best scripts he ever worked with (this one, Posse From Hell, The Unforgiven) gave him parts better suited to his personality. This is one of his very good performances.

cmvgor

"A man does what he has to do-if he can't get out of it. - Bret Maverick's Pappy

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[deleted]

He was certainly compelling as a cultured and soft spoken killer.

What do you think this is, a signature? It's a way of life!

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No Name on the Bullet is Murphy's best western, and John Gant is his best performance. Director Jack Arnold was known not to direct the actors too much (Julie Adams said that in an interview decades later), as he was more concerned with the visual composition and rhythm of his films. So Murphy's excellence here must have come from inside. He was a limited actor technically, but his instincts proved right for this role.

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