The trials and triumphs of the small-town lawman are a distinctly American tale. The tradition stretches at least as far back as the classical Western, with films such as the 1952 classic High Noon, in which moral duty manifests in a lone man in an obscure town facing a looming threat.

It is an archetype born of a postwar American imagination, when the United States had emerged as a global superpower and bulwark against communist tyranny. Unlike the glamorous sophistication of James Bond, fashioned to revive the waning image of the British Empire, the American lawman was minimalist and prosaic.

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