Being dramatists first and reformers second, Peter Viertel and Irwin Shaw have written a rattling good play with a meaning. It is "The Survivors."… The authors are demonstrating the futility of killing. But instead of presenting it as a political argument, they have embodied it in a rousing gun drama laid in Missouri after the Civil War….

["The Survivors" begins to get down to the core of its thesis when] Steve, hesitating between principle and tradition, has to listen to the bitter arguments from both sides….

In essence those are intellectual arguments against war. But Mr. Viertel and Mr. Shaw are not wasting their breath on abstract discussion. They have written an old-fashioned frontier melodrama, with whisky, guns, a sheriff, some love scenes, a funeral and most of the familiar trappings. As a melodrama, it is exciting. As an analysis of killing, it contains a number of bitter...