Is this the plot of an actual movie?

Saint Fool said:

In a book I was reading, the character talks about a movie where:

A town is controlled by gunslingers. The townspeople hire more gunslingers to get rid of them. The second group of gunslingers, after deposing the first group, decides why give up a good thing and takes control of the town. Then one man with a star and a gun cleans things up.​

Now I am driving myself crazy because I think I've seen this movie, but it could be I'm just piecing together enough bits and pieces of Clint Eastwood westerns to deceive myself that it exists. (Thus proving the old adage: an idle mind is the devil's playground.)

Anyone familiar with a western that has all of these elements?

Click to expand...

It sounds similar to Yojimbo, or, if you're a bruce willis fan, Last Man Standing -- and I'm sure there's a spaghetti western version, maybe Once Upon a Time in the Old West or some such? General gist is that there's two gangs vying for control of a town, and one guy comes in, plays them against each other, finally destroying both?

Yojimbo was the basis of A Fistful of Dollars.

It's not either of those, however. In neither case was the MC "cleaning things up." He was taking advantage of the war between the gangs. The end result was just good fortune. And of course, he had no "star."

I would say the plot in the book sounds more like Silverado, minus the star.

Sounds a bit like a Bruce Willis movie from the 90s called 'Last Man Standing'. Not one of his better known movies, but I enjoyed it.

There's an old Anthony Perkins/Henry Fonda movie called The Tin Star, I believe, which is similar to this. Another oldie but goodie is the rarely seen Warlock, with Richard Widmark playing a good guy, Anthony Quinn, and in a very good supporting role, the late DeForest Kelly, 'Bones' from Star Trek.

The other movies mentioned, specifically Yojimbo and Last Man Standing, were also very, very good.

Note: Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, and even the David Carradine sword-and-sorcery movie The Warrior and the Sorceress all derived from Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest.

But, that plot's a little different from the one described in the OP. I can't think of a specific movie that fits it exactly. For a time, Hollywood was turning out Westerns like crazy.