Harry Carey’s rough-hewn but noble Cheyenne Harry character gets mixed up with high society in the rather grim fragments of this 1919 semi-Western. Carey goes to Chicago to stop a meatpacking tycoon (Barney Sherry) from stealing his property. In one refreshingly seriocomic segment, the tycoon’s family invite Harry to dinner and display the strange habit of eating their peas off knives; Harry, confused, does the same, only to realize they did it to mock him. He steals the company payroll and the tycoon’s daughter (Kathleen O’Connor), who participated in the mockery. Carey’s rugged charm shows up the conceit and hypocrisy of his social “betters,” including a foppish British aristocrat, and eventually he wins the girl’s love. Orson Welles once observed that the proudly Irish-American Ford had “chips on his shoulders like epaulets,” and A Gun Fightin’ Gentleman is a reflection of the raw resentment the young filmmaker felt against snobbery and social prejudice. Exhibitors Trade Review called this “the kind of picture that Harry Carey and Jack Ford can do better together than any other actor and director in the world.”