YMMV / The Night of the Grizzly

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Menacing Bounty Hunter Cass Dowdy doesn't appear until about halfway through the film, but his chilling performance and occasional Pet the Dog moments make him one of the film's best-liked characters.
  • Lazy Bum general store helper Hank is fairly incidental to the plot, but his Friend to All Children moments and Jack Elam Playing Against Type make fans fondly remember him.
  • Mr. Benson is Out of Focus for the second half of the movie, but his role as a generous aversion of the Morally Bankrupt Banker archetype makes him a fan favorite.
• Magnificent Bastard: Jed Curry is a rich man who covets Big Jim Cole’s land, which he once owned, so that his sons can have a ranch of their own to work. He puts up a gracious front in dealing with Cole, offering him a reasonable price for the ranch. He lambasts his sons for antagonizing Cole and refuses to bail them out of trouble at every turn. He shows a darker side by using his position as a bank shareholder to forcibly stop a policy of accepting personal items as collateral and giving Cole an unfair mortgage when he needs money to replace his stock after a bear attack. Curry posts a reward to attract professional hunters to pursue a killer bear and keep amateur hunters from dying. When Cole seeks the bounty, Curry eggs on Cass Dowdy, a Bounty Hunter who hates Cole, by offering him cash and telling Cass that losing the reward will ruin Cole and cause his land to go to Curry. Even after Cole kills the bear and saves his ranch, Curry is no worse off than before due to his efforts to remain inside the law and keep his feud with Cole from becoming personal.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Cole's niece Meg is one of the least important or developed characters in the movie, and many people agree this is a shame, as she shows some promise in her UST-filled interactions with Curry’s younger son and the comic moment where she takes a drink from a spiked punchbowl.
• Values Dissonance: It's far less likely a child would be named Gypsy in the modern day, when the word is seen as a racist slur.
• Values Resonance: Cole expresses disapproval about how Bounty Hunter Cass Dowdy killed fugitives in cold blood even though all but one of them were guilty and sent Cass to prison in the Back Story for one of the murders despite their working relationship. In an era where unjustified police shootings remain a serious problem and often go unpunished, Cole's attitude has aged well.