Fighting Bill

A prairie cyclone of fists and moral reckoning, Fighting Bill detonates inside a dust-blown whistle-stop where the saloon’s cracked mirror reflects more than faces—it refracts a nation’s bruised conscience. William Fairbanks, all coiled sinew and laconic swagger, materializes as the eponymous drifter whose knuckles speak fluent retribution; Alice Saunders counterpoints as the schoolmarm whose chalk-stained fingers trace lessons fiercer than bullets. Between them, a ledger of unpaid debts: a murdered deputy, a child’s marble in a blood-puddle, a piano that keeps playing the same rueful chord every midnight. The film unspools like a tintype fever dream—high-contrast chiaroscuro, sweat-glistened close-ups, locomotive roar mixed with hymnal silence—until the climactic shoot-out inside a church whose bell refuses to toll. When the smoke clears, the survivors discover that justice, like tumbleweed, has no fixed address; it merely relocates the scar.