Cinema: Dying in the Saddle

THE SHOOTIST

Directed by DON SIEGEL

Screenplay by MILES HOOD SWARTHOUT and SCOTT HALE

John Wayne, moving slow and seeming winded, appears here as one John Bernard Books, last of a breed. Books is a fast-draw artist, a gunslinger or, as the movie's title phrases it, a shootist. He has dispatched some 30 men over the course of a long career that is coming to a painful close just as The Shootist begins. J.B. Books comes riding into Carson City, gets examined by his friend Dr. Hostetler (James Stewart), and hears what he feared: he...

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