It would dignify The Forty-Niners (1954) unnecessarily to call it a noir Western. Despite the hard-rock narration of its federal marshal gone incognito among claim-jumping cutthroats to flush out a couple of killers for hire, it is at best a Western procedural whose moral deserts far more closely resemble a frontier case of Crime Does Not Pay (1935–47) than anything helmed by Andre de Toth or Fritz Lang. Like so many such narratives of relentless virtue, it only perks to life once vice enters the picture. A noir might have known to start with him.

The Forty-Niners was the Western swan song of Wild Bill Elliott, one of the premiere B-heroes of horse opera since its silent days; he would close out his career with a cycle of detective pictures for which this film makes an improbably semi-documentary gateway, the scene-setting of its title crawl chased immediately by an interior monologue which punctuates the action like clippings from a police gazette. "On the afternoon of February 11, 1849, United States Marshal John Sanford was traveling from Sacramento to the town of Placerville . . . Walker paid for his crime on the scaffold on July 2, 1849." Dustily denim-jacketed, Elliott's Sam Nelson belongs to the roll-your-own school of laconically rugged lawmen, his bona fide toughness signaled by all the bait he doesn't rise to until inevitably some wannabe shootist pushes too far and finds himself facing the business ends of Sam's reverse-holstered stag-handled six-guns faster than he can wipe his nose. This dead shot can nevertheless hold off a thickening mob without dropping a man; he stowed his tin star the better to pass as a gold-fevered pistoleer, but admits after months of scraping the boomtowns of northern California for the slim lead of a free-range bunco-steerer alleged to have cut himself in as middleman on the hit, "Looking mean was no problem because that was the way I felt." He drinks as a matter of hospitality, not machismo. When he pins on his emblem of office again, it is the calm force behind his statement that in the matter of killers, "I can be one, too, if I have to." It is not in the film's favor that we never doubted it. The bread and butter of undercover stories is the tension between the face and the mask and at no point in his impersonation of a gunman of negotiable morals is Sam ever really challenged to break his code—he talks a cold game, but when actually faced with the commission of conscienceless murder to discharge his end of a deal, the plot bails him out by blowing his cover before a confrontation would be anything but clear-cut self-defense. Even his possession of a sense of humor confirms rather than tempers his white-hat status when it's as straight as his face. There may be shades of grey among the three-card twists of the screenplay, but none of them belong to Sam Nelson.

What Alf Billings looks like at first, then, is a dash of the grit and irreverence the film cannot afford to vector through its stand-up protagonist, displaced as is the tradition onto the less exemplary persons of the supporting cast. Rescued by Sam from the consequences of being caught with more than the usual number of queens in a deck, he establishes himself instantly as the kind of grandiloquent tinhorn whose diction operates independently of his fortunes, brushing off his near-lynching—safely behind him as he drinks another man's coffee and stretches his feet out at his fire with the signature complacency of tricksters and cats—with the expansive assurance, "My good sir, you are looking at a man who has been shot at and missed by experts." The trail he's left of small-time larcenies west of the Mississippi doesn't fit him for an involvement with violent crime, but he doesn't demur at associating with professional killers and cracks himself up answering, "Sam, I think I can truthfully say that no one alive likes gold any better than I do." As he matter-of-factly engages the services of the savior he doesn't realize plans to field him as a Judas goat before arresting him as an accessory, his charm and his calculation so neatly balance that he seems capable of anything from expedient double-cross to quixotic alliance, one of those disarming no-goods so often found in Westerns made by Randolph Scott with Budd Boetticher or James Stewart with Anthony Mann, but not usually played by Harry Morgan anywhere. The results are tantamount to handing the film to its character man on a platter with fries on the side. Even as Sam works to suss out the reasons for their contradictorily accommodating and hostile welcome in Cold Water, Alf is spinning them off like a dynamo as he makes for the main chance: recognizing the proprietor of the town's flourishing saloon and its sheriff as the couple of skunks he once hooked up with a none too choosy mine owner in need of anonymous guns, he wastes no time blackmailing them for what he airily estimates as "half—of everything." The ultimatum is all the more audacious coming from a sawed-off drifter without a carpet bag to his name, standing his ground as coolly as a high-roller. True to form, he has an ace up his sleeve: a letter in incriminating detail prudently secreted as insurance against reprisal. But he's also got his cardsharp's face, as undistinguished and misleading as the Iliad's Odysseus who never looks like much until he starts to talk: "You still think I'm bluffing? Pull the trigger and find out." Sam side-eyes the brains and the scruples of any man who would take Alf on as a partner in good faith, but especially when set against the venal nerves of John Doucette's Ernie Walker or the hair-trigger swagger of Lane Bradford's Bill Norris, the high-flown little cellar-dealer doesn't look so bad. At least he pays his debts and laughs without malice when his honesty is insulted to his face. He has one other quality, too, which is sprung on the viewer just as The Forty-Niners seems to be shaping up to a kind of shell game of Sam and Alf at unsuspecting cross-purposes in the matter of the murder investigation. I had never seen it from his actor before, which just feels like further evidence of the oversights of old Hollywood. He makes an honest-to-God romantic lead.

Of course it is a coincidence even beyond the convergence of all relevant parties in the same whistle-stop that the neglected wife of Ernie Walker should turn out to be the old flame of Alf Billings, but it pays off for the film in such spades that I accept it in the same spirit as the dramatically convenient reunion of Krogstad and Kristine in A Doll's House and with similar feelings about it. The action of The Forty-Niners may bend around the duties of the manhunt, but its heart belongs to a road-worn, uncertain couple who look at each another like the second chance they never imagined deserving. For the love of irony, what was Ernie expecting from bribing and browbeating his wife into sweet-talking that silly letter out of her one-time beau? Fifteen years of slow-drinking loneliness have left Virginia Grey's Stella Walker sharply fragile, not stupid—as her evening with Alf winds down to its "real clever" close, she levels suddenly with him and as if her directness has touched off his own scratched decency, he returns the courtesy until they are sorting the botch of their past in St. Louis as much as the chance of their future beyond Cold Water. It never feels like sentimental regeneration. No amount of reminiscence can change the fact that if Alf had left any word when he lit out ahead of the law all those years ago, Stella would never have vanished in turn with a protector she didn't love. "Has it been that bad?" he can't stop himself from asking, knowing the answer like his apology. His own life hasn't been exactly charmed. Telling Stella what's really in the letter means admitting he hasn't returned as the successful man of business of his magnanimous cigars and his smart suit of clothes. Proposing to take her away on her own husband's money as good as warns her of the lean times to come in between schemes. But she's had security from a man who tired of her and what Alf is offering is far more substantial in everything it doesn't promise, just the important thing: "I haven't stopped thinking about you in all these years. We're both older now—certainly I'm not much more of a man than I ever was—but I think we could be happy." His voice is so soft without its medicine show edge, it's almost unrecognizable; his kiss of her cheek as gentle and a little gauche. With the same incongruous dignity, absently cutting a deck of cards without dealing until he sets them down like a decision reached, he'll offer Sam the first reason to trust him since the marshal saved his skin in Red Bluff: "I'm tired, for one thing. For another, I'm in love." Even the seen-it-all lawman blinks at that one. It's a tremendous performance by Morgan, building effortlessly from swindler and skedaddler to lover and even fighter, though he admits with a mordant trace of his normal insouciance that he isn't sure if the derringer he's carried for years even works. It pulls the film all off balance with itself. Despite his star billing, Elliott ends up feeling more like the frame of the story than its hero, the lens through which we can observe Alf who struggles and changes and cares after all for something more than gold. Even in a noir, it might not have been enough to save him from the unforgiving compliance of the Production Code, but a more shadow-sided movie might have been willing to acknowledge him as its protagonist first. He's such an unexpected figure in a Western so otherwise and lethally by the book. Nothing in its quick-draw climax or the legal proceedings thereafter is as captivating as Alf in his literal black hat holding a gunbelt out to Sam meaningfully, scrawling a paper for Stella with dust in his soft fairish hair, straight as a die in his own crooked way to the end. "Well, I'll take that chance."

The Forty-Niners was written by Dan Ullman and directed by Thomas Carr for Allied Artists, making a pleasant surprise of how nice its non-budget looks in the widescreen cinematography of Ernest Miller; the same truly cannot be said of the sound of its narration. I am generally minded to remove the average voiceover from its print with pliers, but this one talks over such solid blocks of its action, it suggests the production kept running out of daylight or money and deciding to shoot mitout sound until rehearsals could be afforded again. It has the runtime of a respectable second feature and can feel much slower whenever its hour and ten minutes are spent away from Stella or Alf. Viewers in hopes of the California gold rush will feel misled by the title; the repercussions of its contract killing could as easily have snaked out in the naked city of the director's choice. The problem is that the character is absolutely right when he claims, "Good Sam, you can bless the day you befriended Alfred Billings, believe me." He should never have bothered to try to go straight if he was going to steal an entire movie. This half brought to you by my older backers at Patreon.