Heaven with a Gun
Preacher Jim Killian (Ford) arrives in a town divided between cattlemen and sheep herders. Killian is not just any preacher. He is a former gunslinger who has set upon a different path.
Leelopa (Barbara Hershey), an American Indian girl who looks up to Killian, becomes a target of opportunity for one of the cowhands, Coke Beck (David Carradine). (The actors became real-life wife and husband three years after the movie's release.) Coke happens to be the son of cattle rancher Asa Beck, and when Coke is stabbed to death through the neck, the cattlemen blame Killian.
Madge McCloud (Carolyn Jones), the whiskey-drinking madam of the town's saloon and brothel, acts as Killian's conscience. After a gunslinger working for the cattlemen tries to kill Killian and four cowhands burn the church, Killian straps on his gun and prepares to act alone.
Madge tells him that he must make a decision to be either a gunman or a preacher — he must choose between Heaven and Hell, else he risks the trust of the community. She tells him that trying to be both is a worse sort of Hell. But there is also a pending showdown between the cattlemen and the sheepherders over water rights, and somehow Killian must be in the middle of it, whether armed or not.
violence