The Budd Boetticher Collection

One of the great pleasures of the last couple of years of my film viewing has been the rediscovery of the American Western, a genre that once held little appeal for me aside from the obvious classics like Stagecoach and High Noon. But starting with the postwar Westerns of John Ford and moving to the Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher Westerns of the 1950s and finally on to the lesser known examples of the genre from 1945 through the early 1960s, I've come to appreciate a genre that I once had little regard for. How satisfying and unpretentious these films—stripped to the basic elements of characters in conflict, uncomplicated themes, and the starkly iconic landscapes of the American West—seem to me as examples of the best in American cinema of the time in comparison to the ponderous message and social issue movies that got so much attention and praise.

For the last two years—ever since the box set of Westerns from Columbia written by Burt Kennedy, directed by Budd Boetticher, and starring Randolph Scott, who also co-produced, was released—I've slowly been working toward seeing all five of these films, a task I just recently completed when I watched 1960's Comanche Station (a shot from the opening is pictured above), the last film in the series. The series actually got off to a start with Seven Men from Now (1956), a movie not included in the box set (probably because it was released by Warner Bros, not Columbia.) In that film Scott plays a former sheriff who systematically tracks down the seven men who killed his wife during a holdup. Seven Men from Now introduced many elements that Kennedy and Boetticher would return to in the Columbia movies. Shot in widescreen and color, it deals with a pursuit and revenge theme with Scott as the nemesis of evildoers, features a supporting cast of highly capable character actors, and has as the chief villain an actor not well known at the time but destined to become famous for this type of role, here Lee Marvin. And as in all of the later films, it moves step by step toward the inevitable climactic showdown between Scott and his adversary, what Andrew Sarris describes in The American Cinema as "the deadly confrontations of male antagonists . . . man to man in an empty arena on a wide screen before a very quiet, elemental camera."

AN OVERVIEW OF THE FILMS

The Tall T (1957)
***^½


The Columbia series got off to a strong start with this film, based on a story by Elmore Leonard. Scott plays Pat Brennan, a rancher who hitches a ride on a stagecoach driven by an old friend (Arthur Hunnicutt, in a colorful Walter Brennan-like turn). The coach has been hired by a pair of newlyweds, Willard and Doretta Mims (John Hubbard and Maureen O'Sullivan) to take them on their honeymoon. When the coach stops at a relay station, Scott and his companions are confronted by three outlaws. The cowardly Willard, who has married the middle-aged heiress Doretta for her money, proposes that the outlaws collect a kidnap ransom from her rich father. The leader of the gang, the smooth-talking Frank Usher (played with quiet menace by Richard Boone), rides off with Willard to collect the ransom, sending his two henchman away to their hideout with the two hostages. Once there, Scott must devise a scheme to outwit the gunmen and disarm them before Usher returns, and he must persuade the terrified Doretta, dispirited by her new husband's betrayal, to help him.

With its several unmotivated murders of harmless people (including a child), kidnapping, attempted rape, and coolly sadistic villain, this is probably the most overtly violent of the five movies. Whereas in the later films, violent acts committed against innocent victims have already taken place before the film begins or else exist as a threat that might happen in the future, here that violence occurs during the film, making it all the more disturbing. The film presents a spectrum of Western manhood, from the cowardly, unprincipled fortune-hunter Willard to the fearless but equally unprincipled villain Usher to the courageous man of honor played by Scott. Like most Westerns, these films are male-centric, having few important female characters—typically one in each film—who tend to be rudimentary types lacking the psychological definition of the male characters. The Tall T is distinguished by having in Maureen O'Sullivan's Doretta Mims the most fully developed and most touchingly portrayed female character of the series. The Technicolor cinematography is by Charles Lawton (The Lady from Shanghai), who shot three of the films. Also featuring Henry Silva and Skip Homeier.


Decision at Sundown (1957)
**^½


Sundown is the name of the small town where the movie takes place. At the beginning, Bart Ellison (Scott) and his best friend Sam (Noah Beery, Jr. in a very warm performance) ride into town searching for Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll), the man who Elllison's wife deserted him for before later committing suicide and who Ellison blames for her death. Sundown is one of those Wild West towns run by an unscrupulous strong man, with the sheriff under his control and the townspeople intimidated into a state of collective cowardice, and that man is Kimbrough. The day Ellison arrives, Kimbrough is set to marry a young woman named Lucy Summerton (Karen Steele, who appeared in several other films directed by Boetticher, including one more in this series). Ellison manages to stop the wedding, telling Lucy that he plans to kill her fiancé by sundown that day. When Kimbrough orders his men to kill Ellison, Ellison takes refuge in a stable, where he plans to stay until he meets his foe in the street for the showdown. The rest of the movie details Ellison's efforts to avoid Kimbrough's schemes to have him killed and stay alive for the gunfight at sundown.

I found this, the only one of the five movies not written or co-written by Burt Kennedy, the weakest of the series. One problem I had with it is that Scott spends a large part of the movie holed up in the stable. This, combined with the fact that many other scenes are also set indoors, creates a set-bound feeling. An overreliance on dialogue to put across plot points also gives the film a static quality not associated with an action genre like the Western. I have seen Westerns that rely on interior scenes and dialogue more than the typical example of the genre—I'm thinking of movies like 3:10 to Yuma and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—and in which such an approach doesn't end up being a liability. But those films had the advantage of using interiors and dialogue to pursue a novel situation, and the situation in Decision at Sundown, with a cowardly populace intimidated by a ruthless strong man and his cronies, seems quite familiar, a variation of High Noon. This time the photography is by Burnett Guffey (From Here to Eternity, Bonnie and Clyde). Also featured are many familiar faces—Andrew Duggan as the sheriff, John Archer, John Litel, Vaughn Taylor, Richard Deacon, and Bob Steele.


Buchanan Rides Alone (1958)
***


Scott stars as Tom Buchanan, returning to Texas from Mexico with a stash of gold to buy a ranch. After crossing the border at the town of Agry, he gets caught up in the machinations of the corrupt Agry family who run the town—Simon, a rich rancher who is also the town judge, his squabbling younger brothers Lew, the town sheriff, and Amos, the dim-witted owner of the town hotel, and Simon's debauched son Roy. Buchanan befriends Juan de la Vega, the son of a Mexican landowner, who shoots Roy for raping his young sister. When the greedy family learn about Buchanan's money, they accuse him of being Juan's accomplice and prepare to lynch them both. Only the intervention of Abe Carbo (Craig Stevens), the only man outside the Agry family with any real influence in the town, prevents the hanging, getting the two men a trial in which Juan is convicted and Buchanan exonerated. Spurred by a large ransom offered by Juan's rich father, many complications ensue—bribery, murder, double-crossing, sibling rivalry over the ransom money and Buchanan's gold. Working with Abe Carbo, Buchanan is able to sort things out, reclaim his gold, and restore a semblance of order to Agry before riding away, leaving Carbo in charge of the town.

With its bordertown setting, especially Simon Agry's Mexican-style hacienda, and its Mexican characters, Buchanan Rides Alone has a distinctly Southwestern flavor unique to the series. Some commentators have detected a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the material. Indeed, the cast does seem pretty relaxed given the overall seriousness of the plot. Moreover, there is a certain drollery in the Agry family's degeneracy and infighting, and Buchanan seems a bit of a trickster with his insouciant attitude to personal danger, his confidence in his ability to overcome difficulties, and the cunning way he manipulates his enemies by using their own avarice and hunger for power to play them against each other. The cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, a man associated especially with Western pictures. The cast contains no female characters of note but does include film noir and Western stalwart Barry Kelley as the sheriff, Peter Whitney as the hotelier brother (he played the hulking twins Mert and Bert in the 1945 Fred MacMurray black comedy Murder, He Says), and L. Q. Jones.


Ride Lonesome (1959)
***^½


Scott plays Ben Brigade, a bounty hunter who captures the wanted killer Billy John (James Best) and then must survive a number of threats while transporting him back to the town of Santa Cruz. He must fight off Billy John's brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef) and his outlaw gang, who trail Brigade, waiting for an opportunity to ambush him. Stopping at a stagecoach station, he encounters two more outlaws, Boone (Bonanza's Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn, in his first film role), who are after Billy John for their own reasons. Also at the station is Carrie Lane (Karen Steele), whom the chief of a group of Indians wants to claim for his squaw. Brigade and his prisoner, accompanied by the two outlaws and Carrie, head for Santa Cruz, and Brigade must now contend with Frank's gang, hostile Indians, and two rivals for the capture of Billy John. Brigade's strange behavior during the journey soon makes it apparent that he has more in mind than delivering Billy John and claiming the reward. He is in fact using Billy John as bait to maneuver his brother Frank into a trap. Frank is his real prey, for it is Frank who was responsible for murdering Brigade's wife by hanging her from a hanging tree, and it is to this tree that Brigade is luring Frank to get revenge. He does get his revenge in the end, and the film concludes with perhaps the most striking single image in the entire series—Brigade setting fire to the hanging tree and watching from nearby as the flames symbolically consume the past wrongs that have haunted him.

To my mind, Ride Lonesome is the best of the Boetticher-Scott Westerns for a number of reasons. It has the strongest cast of any film in the series. It also has the most intriguing and meticulously organized plot of the five films. From a simple beginning, complications pile on one after the other, and details that initially seem straightforward gradually build in intricacy. The device of having the hero simultaneously imperiled by threats from three distinct sources intensifies and heightens the tension of the situation. In Brigade, Ride Lonesome has Scott's most complex incarnation. The revelation that his apparently mercenary motivation is something altogether deeper and at the same time more primal than we were led to believe at the beginning of the film, that the impetus for his every move is the overwhelming need to avenge the murder of his wife, gives Brigade's actions and character unexpected nuances. His remarkable skills at reading human behavior, predicting the reactions of his opponents, and using strategy to control and direct them exceeds that ability even in Buchanan Rides Alone and The Tall T. All this propels Ride Lonesome to that unforgettable final image, with Scott in the background on one side of the frame dwarfed by the burning tree looming in the foreground on the other side. This was the first of the films shot in CinemaScope, and in this shot Boetticher and director of photography Charles Lawton went all out to use the extreme proportions of the frame to create a summative image that shows not only how bitterness has completely ruled Brigade, but also that it finally burns itself out.


Comanche Station (1960)
***


The film opens with a long shot of a lone man, Jefferson Cody (Scott), riding across a rocky vista leading a pack mule. When Cody is confronted by a group of Comanches accompanied by a disheveled white woman, Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates), he trades the goods on the mule for the woman. It seems he heard that a white woman had been captured by Indians and was actually out searching for her. While stopping at Comanche Station, the two meet up with three men led by Ben Lane (Claude Akins), a bounty hunter, who have been chased there by Indians. Cody and Lane have a history. Years earlier, Cody and Lane served in the Army, and Lane was responsible for recklessly provoking an Indian attack that wiped out the fort Cody commanded. Lane reveals that he and his men are also looking for Mrs. Lowe because her husband has offered a $5,000 dollar reward for her return to him in Lordsburg. Cody was unaware of the reward, but Mrs. Lowe doesn't believe him and loses respect for her rescuer. What Lane doesn't reveal is that the reward was offered for her return dead or alive and that he plans to kill both her and Cody before they reach Lordsburg. On the journey to Lordsburg, Cody must now contend with Mrs. Lowe's uncooperative attitude, the threat of attack by Indians, and, unknown to him, the planned treachery of Lane. It is only toward the end of the film that Mrs. Lowe learns that Cody's own wife was captured by Indians and that he has been searching for her for years, traveling anywhere he hears a report of a captive white woman.

Fittingly, the final entry in the series revisits many of the themes of the earlier films—Scott trying to redress wrongs done to his wife, a journey across barren territory fraught with danger, threats from Indians as well as scoundrels encountered by chance along the way. If it doesn't really cover new ground, it still manages to be a very entertaining variation on familiar themes. After Doretta Wims in The Tall T, the film has in Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates is quite good in the part) the next strongest female character in the series. With the complicated and shifting relationship between her and Cody, and the fact that she is a major character from the beginning of the film right up to the very end, she plays the most important part in the narrative of any female character in the series. Comanche Station was the third of the movies photographed by Charles Lawton, like Ride Lonesome in CinemaScope, and for me the real star here is the rocky landscapes surmounted by vast expanses of cloudless blue sky. (The movie was shot in the Sierra Nevada of California near Mt. Whitney.) Costarring Skip Homeier and Richard Rust (a familiar face from TV and low-budget movies whose best-known role was probably as Cliff Robertson's partner in crime in Samuel Fuller's Underworld, U.S.A.).

THE ENIGMATIC RANDOLPH SCOTT

Of the many recurring elements in the five films, the most commanding is the presence of Randolph Scott, who acts as both the moral center of the film and the force that drives its action. Scott's weathered, impassive face seems almost an icon of resolve to defend a masculine sense of honor under threat. The characters Scott plays in these films have different names and move in different circumstances, yet they might be the same individual. (He even wears the same costume in two of the pictures and in two others merely exchanges a gray shirt and tan kerchief for a blue shirt and tan kerchief.) Impelled by a single purpose, he can become nearly obsessive in the pursuit of that purpose. The nature of that purpose is clear in each of the films. What is less clear is the motivation that drives him, his very inexpressiveness effectively masking the true nature of his motivation.

Scott makes it subtly apparent how fine a line exists between the righteous duty to achieve justice through retribution and the selfish desire to exact personal revenge through destruction. But even if you can occasionally see the dark side of the man peeking out from behind the mask, he never surrenders to the darkness that runs like an undercurrent through his character, always remaining at heart an honorable man. Even though he must overcome his opponents by matching their ruthlessness and exceeding their cleverness and calculation, he never abandons his sense of fair play. And at the end of the movie, when the foe has been defeated, there is little sense of triumph, only the feeling that the man's duty is at last completed and that he can now move to whatever lies ahead.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

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Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American films.