Hi
Taking the original theme of a man at his lowest ebb hitting the drink, you could go back to it's a Wonderful Life with Maureen O'hara playing the guardian angel role.
if you wanted to you could take the action away from Bedford Falls and make it Two Gun Gulch with a western theme. Duke a lone cowpuncher down on his luck with holes in his boots and his last bullet in his belt.
Is he contemplating suicide we will never know because in a saloon he meets a blowsy good time girl working as a show girl (Maureen O'Hara) She sidles up to him and asks him if he is alright, he tells her to leave him alone. But she persists and eventually he tells her that he is a failure and its better if he had never been born.
She then tells him what would have happened if he hadn't have been born showing him the story of three friends who save a baby from the desert, telling him that the baby grew up to be a town marshal who cleaned up a bad town and made it a fine place for people to live, and if he hadn't saved the baby from the desert that wouldn't have happeend. She then takes him forward and shows Rance Stoddard facing Liberty Valance and shows the two men in the street. Hopelessy outgunned Valance shoots and kills Rance, The angel then tells Duke that if he hadn't intervened to shoot Valance, because Stoddard was killed he wouldn't have become a senator, pushed through statehood. The angel shows that Liberty Valance would have taken the position of congressman and made Shinbone a haven for outlaws.
Finally showing Duke the future she projects him forward seventy odd years showing one of his decendents as a marine sergeant in the Second World War traing a platoon for the assault on Iwo Jima an explains to him that if he hadn' lived his releative would not have been born and the platoon would have probably all been killed in the attack.
The beauty of this film is that it would be cheap as most of the cast are all dead.
regards
Arthur
