Pre-Code Parade: BORN RECKLESS (1930)

It's called a "John Ford Production" but who directed it? We're told that it was "staged" by Andrew Bennison. What this seems to mean is that Bennison played that short-lived role of the early talkie era, the dialogue director. Folks at Fox Film apparently weren't sure of Ford's ability to direct dialogue, or else Ford, more interested in free-range camera movement in the manner of his erstwhile studio stablemate F. W. Murnau, couldn't be bothered with the dialogue scenes. There's definitely some impressive camera movement here for a 1930 film, along with the sort of dense set design typical of Fox's late silents. The camera lurks through the narrow, crowded streets of the main city set early on to establish the protagonist's milieu. The art direction is impressive without quite being convincing, and that goes for the story, too.

Ford and Dudley Nichols adapted what apparently was a popular novel by Donald Henderson Clarke. Louis Beretti was well enough known that star Edmund Lowe could be identified as the novel's title character in some movie advertising, though Fox didn't see fit to name the film after the novel. Beretti is a neighborhood hood who goes to war and survives to make a fresh start back home. He keeps his criminal career secret from his old-world parents, switching from dapper gangster duds into a worker's overalls before coming home for spaghetti dinner. The cops aren't fooled so easily and Beretti is brought in for questioning. At the suggestion of a drunken reporter (Lee Tracy, shortly before his brief breakout to stardom) the authorities give Louis and his buddies the option of enlisting -- it's 1917 and bands are playing "Over There" everywhere -- with the promise of pardons if they make good as soldiers. The real idea is to burnish the police chief's reputation as a patriot, but whatever the ulterior motives involved Beretti is willing to give war a shot.

The next section is a botch that nearly cripples the film and can probably be blamed all on Ford. War is supposed to change Louis Beretti in some way, but Born Reckless never follows him into combat. Instead, we get a lot of Fordian shenanigans in boot camp and behind the lines featuring some of the usual suspects like Ward Bond. John Wayne is supposed to be in the picture somewhere, historians claim, but I didn't notice him. A subplot is set up in which Beretti befriends a wealthy young man determined to prove himself in combat despite coddling from his parents, but after the establishing scene we don't get the payoff until Beretti narrates it to his friend's widow after the war. The military sequence plays like the road to a dead end, and having reached it Ford and Bennison simply give up and go back to the U.S.A.

Beretti has a longing for the widow, whom his dead buddy apparently talked up quite well, but before our hero can make a move we learn that Joan Sheldon (Catherine Dale Owen) has already hooked up with a new beau. While I missed John Wayne's passing presence in this picture, there was no mistaking an unbilled Randolph Scott as the new beau. At 32, Scott is as young as I've ever seen him. He's still paying his dues here, playing little more than a handsome profile who has no more than a few words of dialogue in his few scenes. But enough of him. Beretti goes more or less straight, opening up a niteclub whose presumed violations of Prohibition appear to bother no one. But his old friendship with the local underworld big shot, cleverly named Big Shot (Warren Hymer) deteriorates as Beretti is torn between respectability and his old crowd.The plot threads tie together when Big Shot, returned from a stretch in stir, makes a new racket of kidnapping, snatching Joan Sheldon's child. Beretti rescues the kid before a final showdown with Big Shot. Both scenes are nicely shot, the rescue introduced with a tracking shot of Beretti walking across a field to the kidnappers' hideout. The showdown is a slow burn leading to an explosion, Lowe and Beretti chatting at a bar with an odd, evasive formality that distantly anticipates the technique of Leone and Tarantino before they abruptly open fire on each other as the camera retreats through the bar's swinging doors. There are definitely pieces of a superior gangster film here, but it looks like Ford didn't know how to put them together. Part of the problem is Edmund Lowe's much too laid-back performance as Beretti, but you can't blame him for the film's faulty construction; he may have had as little proper direction as the movie as a whole did. Despite any ambiguity in the credits, Born Reckless is often unmistakably, and in this case unfortunately, a John Ford film.

DVR Diary: THE DOOLINS OF OKLAHOMA (1949)

This is the one where Randolph Scott dies at the end. Since his character dies in at least one other movie, Fritz Lang's Western Union, I should clarify that this Gordon Douglas picture is the one where Scott's character is killed by the law. Scott co-produced it with his regular colleague Harry Joe Brown under the Producers-Actors Corporation rubric, for release by Columbia Pictures. It brings us back to the question: did Scott know what he wanted from westerns? Most people accept that his earlier productions weren't as good as the films that Budd Boetticher directed for him between 1957 and 1960, and the story of the real-life outlaw Bill Doolin may be as objective a test as we can have of what Scott and Brown brought creatively to the Boetticher films. That's because Doolins was remade, or the Doolin story simply retold, as the Audie Murphy film The Cimarron Kid, directed by Boetticher. I haven't seen this quasi-remake, but the synopsis indicates a heavily bowdlerized version that leaves the protagonist alive at the end. Boetticher can't be blamed for that, of course, but by default that leaves Doolins of Oklahoma as the darker, better film.

Scott was in a noirish mood at the time. His previous film was a modern-day western, The Walking Hills, that's highly regarded by many reviewers and reads in descriptions much like a noir. The Doolins of Oklahoma is a kind of folk noir, definitely a folksier noir than most, leavened with comedy yet inexorably bound for tragedy. The subject of Kenneth Gamet's screenplay is the gradual destruction of one of the West's last outlaw gangs. It starts discouragingly with portentous narration by George Macready, who soon appears on screen as a character in the story. It should be our first hint of where Doolins is going that the scarfaced Macready, usually a heel in movies, is one of the good guys, a lawman dedicated to bringing the Doolins to justice. Bill Doolin was an associate of the legendary Daltons who formed one of a number of gangs to call themselves the Wild Bunch. After the members are introduced, they're shown making a major score, tipped off by a soft-spoken, well-educated waiter (Noah Beery Jr.) known as "Little Bill" to Doolin's "Big Bill." Beery's historical counterpart was called "Little Dick," but Code Enforcement wasn't going to let that stand. In any event, after the robbery the gang disperses with plans to rendezvous several months later. During that hiatus, fugitive Doolin meets and falls in love with Rose (Louise Albritton), marries her and decides to settle down. But just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. Wanting him back, members of the Wild Bunch circulate a wanted poster exposing Doolin's true identity and he has no choice but to leave with them.

That betrayal turns out really to be the most villainous thing anyone does in the picture. The remarkable thing about Doolins is that it's really a film without a villain. Bill sometimes gets into scrapes with his men -- Douglas, who has an admirable number of tough westerns to his credit, including The Charge at Feather River and Rio Conchos, stages a brutal fistfight after Doolin refuses to let his men backshoot the Macready character -- but no one in the gang emerges as the Bad Guy on whom Doolin can dump his sins. It's not going to be that easy, but at least it won't be complicated in the usual melodramatic way. Instead, there's a resilient bond of forgiving friendship uniting the Wild Bunch, at least until they start dying. Little Bill uses Ben Franklin's famous saying to sum it up: they have to hang together or hang separately. Doolins is arguably ahead of its time in its episodic if not quite elegiac account of the doomed gang's adventures. It can take time for outright comedy when outlaw groupie/wannabe Cattle Annie (Dona Drake) charges into the picture. This miniature berserker was a real-life member of the gang, and Annie herself, living into the 1970s and her own nineties, is pretty definitely the last of the Old West outlaws, expiring shortly before her own moment in the cinematic sun. Drake steals the picture whenever she's in it, whether pursuing Little Bill romantically or begging with ardent bloodlust to help the gang shoot their way out of a trap -- Doolin locks her in a shed instead. The entire siege is a piece of amiable mayhem, though not without real danger. The almost rollicking tone only makes the gradual shift in tone more profound.

The Wild Bunch is whittled down by death and capture until only Big Bill and Little Bill are left. Doolin gets the idea that they might lose their pursuers by doubling back to old haunts. He returns to the town he had settled in, thinking to hide out in the home he presumes abandoned, only to find Rose living there still and still carrying a torch for him. Doolin's ready to move on at once, but Rose wants to stay with him -- to join him as a fugitive if necessary. The time to decide is short, as Doolin has once again underestimated the law. While Little Bill provokes a horse stampede to cover their getaway, but falls under the hooves himself, Big Bill and Rose prepare to flee, but Doolin has a Pathos of Renunciation moment, realizing that the hard life of a fugitive isn't right for his love. Instead, he will cover her escape back to the safety of normal life by forcing a one-sided showdown with his pursuers -- and I told you how that turns out.

Scott's films with Boetticher sometimes hint that there's little more than a hair's breadth of difference between Scott's heroes and his foes. They are alike men who want the same things from life, but the doomed villains are the ones who never figured out a way to get it other than violence. They could just as easily be victims of circumstance; the thought seems more compelling once you've seen Scott himself walk a last mile in those doomed shoes. I'm not sure that Boetticher could have done Doolins better. He most likely would have done without the narration, and doing so would improve the picture, but Douglas pretty much nails the mood Scott and Brown were after: a slowly mounting sadness, but not at the expense of the spirit of action and adventure, the thing that would be missed, except in the imagination, when the Doolins of history were all gone. The Doolins of Oklahoma took me quite by surprise in the best possible way. Perhaps a unique item in the Randolph Scott filmography, in a way it's a little gem of a western.

DVR Diary: THE DESPERADOES (1943)

Randolph Scott first worked with producer Harry Joe Brown in 1941's Fritz Lang film Western Union. Charles Vidor's The Desperadoes was the next film in a long association that culminated in their partnership in the production of the 1950s Budd Boetticher westerns that are now Scott's signature work. They didn't work together again until 1948's Coroner Creek, and from that point Brown was primarily Scott's producer. Now that the Boetticher movies set the standard for their work, their earlier films inevitably look like rough drafts for the finished classics to come. They're the sort of rough drafts that need a strong if not ruthless editorial hand, since there often seems to too much going on compared to the austere ensembles of Boetticher and writer Burt Kennedy. But it's fair to question whether Scott and Brown were always aspiring to an ideal finally if not only realized by Boetticher. Desperadoes, for instance, is better understood not as a precursor of, say, The Tall T, but as a reflection of the new respectability of westerns after 1939. The legend of 1939, of course, is that John Ford's Stagecoach gave a low-grade genre a respectability it hadn't enjoyed since silent days. People still print that legend, but the western had begun its comeback before Stagecoach and Ford's film arguably wasn't even the most influential western, at least in the short term, from 1939. There's less of Stagecoach in Desperadoes, for instance, then there is Destry Rides Again, if only because Columbia Pictures commissioned an original screen story from Destry's author, the pseudonymously prolific Max Brand. The Destry influence ensures that there'd be more comedy here than in later Scott-Brown westerns. There's also a strong dose of another 1939 western, the Errol Flynn oater Dodge City. That film's influence is threefold. First and most obvious is the glorious Technicolor. Second is the presence of Flynn stooge Guinn (Big Boy) Williams as comedy relief. Third is the prominence of a barroom brawl, the scale of which was a major selling point for Dodge City -- in that respect arguably the most influential western of the famous year. This adds up to a much bigger, busier, often goofier movie than those Scott and Brown ended up making late in their careers.

For all that, Scott fans can see glimmerings of the sort of story he and Brown told much better later with Boetticher and Kennedy's help. The Desperadoes is about a young man at a crossroads, a gunman who gets a chance to choose between outlawry and civilization, with Randolph Scott as a benign adviser. It's like a crossover of western movie universes when Scott meets a very young Glenn Ford as the gunman. Ford was hired to rob a bank in Red Valley, UT, by a livery stable owner (Edgar Buchanan) acting on behalf of the bank president himself, who hopes to profit by keeping his ill-gotten personal gain secret after compensating depositors for half their losses. Ford runs late, however, so the banker hires local thugs who mess things up by killing three men. Ford's belated arrival -- he horsejacks the sheriff (Scott) in the desert on the way to town -- gives the conspirators an opportunity to clean things up by framing and killing Ford. But Buchanan's interests are compromised when his daughter (Evelyn Keyes) falls for Ford, who already seems intimate with the local saloon queen, "The Countess" (Claire Trevor), who'd been harboring Ford's dynamite-happy partner (Williams) in anticipation of Ford's arrival. Apart from the most blatant bad guys -- the banker and his preferred goons -- there's an admirable complexity to most of the characters. Scott's sheriff, for instance, is unusually forgiving of Ford for stealing his horse and beating him up in the stable -- the gunman only fails to get away because Keyes trips him twice and brains him with a wooden bucket. He knows the kid and wants him to have a chance to change his life. The problem is, the kid sees Keyes (whose violence against him in the stable proves the exception) as his key to reform while Scott, seeing the malevolent forces swirling around Ford provocatively, thinks the kid's only chance is to leave the town and the girl.

The Technicolor cinematography of George Meehan and Allen M. Davey really is glorious when they go on location. Desperadoes is always a good-looking A western for its time. Its big handicap, or so it must seem in retrospect, is its inconsitency of tone. There's a moral seriousness to Ford's dilemma that Kennedy and Boetticher certainly would have developed more strongly. In 1943, however, Vidor and screenwriter Robert Carson feel compelled to make their film an all-around entertainment by loading it with comedy relief, from the inanity of 'Big Boy' Williams (Trevor calls him a "big zombie [!]" after he nearly blows up a hotel room) to a slapstick barroom brawl in which Williams features all too prominently. Carson's script, if not Brand's story, is also overelaborate, throwing in a few too many aribitrary plot twists to push the film closer to the 90 minute mark. At one point Williams robs a bank for no apparent reason other than to force Ford out of town with him so they can get captured and condemned to hang -- and that happens only so Scott can let them escape and put himself in legal jeopardy, so Ford and Williams can go back to town to free him. Too much? I thought so, yet the actors all acquit themselves well -- even Williams's stupidity is appropriate for his role -- and the film remains likable, at least if you're a western fan. But it testifies to the legacy of Randolph Scott and Harry Joe Brown that you can't help imagining how much better Desperadoes might be if it was a reel shorter, the way Scott and Brown might have done it when they had more creative control and more creative collaborators. You can imagine them making this film and thinking they could do better -- and you know they will.

DVR Diary: 7TH CAVALRY (1956)

Joseph  H. Lewis is remembered for his films noirs, the best known of those being 1950's Gun Crazy and 1955's The Big Combo. As that wave ebbed, Lewis wrapped up his theatrical career with four westerns before becoming a TV director. The best known of these may be the last, 1958's Terror in a Texas Town, an eccentricity highlighted by Sterling Hayden bringing a harpoon to a gunfight. Surprisingly little attention goes to the two Lewis directed for Randolph Scott, considering how Scott's reputation has grown thanks to the rediscovery of his films directed by Budd Boetticher. The films Scott made with Andre de Toth, before the Lewis pictures, seem to have fared better with posterity. Yet Lewis would seem like a perfect match for Scott, given the director's ability to get the most out of a B budget. In fact, 7th Cavalry is on a larger scale than most of Scott's work in the Fifties. This is partly because Lewis filmed at the same location fort used in Anthony Mann's Last Frontier and often made just as impressive use of it. This film has sweep if nothing else; shot by Ray Rennahan, it looks great. The problems begin with the story it tells.

Scott plays Capt. Tom Benson of the 7th Cavalry, returning to the fort with his bride-to-be only to find it largely abandoned. He'd been ordered by Gen. Custer, a romantic at heart, to go fetch the lovely lady (Barbara "Della Street" Hale) rather than ride with him to the Little Big Horn. Benson soon learns what he missed, and learns that people hold his luck against him. Many believe that he must have had an inkling of Custer's doom, since everyone now finds the general's foolhardiness obvious, and requested leave out of cowardice. Among those with their suspicions is the officer chairing the court of inquiry into the Little Big Horn debacle, Benson's prospective father-in-law. Benson himself defends his honor and Custer's; he won't accept the likes of Benteen and Reno questioning his hero's tactics, and he'll have no one question his own courage.

To vindicate himself, Benson volunteers for a detail to retrieve the bodies of Custer and the other fallen officers from the battle site. This is asking for trouble, since Sitting Bull's forces now believe that the dead Americans have infused the site with "medicine" that will inspire them to further victories as long as their bodies remain where they fell. Benson complicates his own mission further by recruiting a band of convicts and malcontents who seem ready (the one played by badass specialist Leo Gordon in particular) to frag him at any moment.

A soldier undertaking a perilous mission to refute charges of cowardice can't help reminding me of a better film, Robert Rossen's They Came to Cordura from 1959. The contrasts are drawn more starkly in that picture, in which Gary Cooper must escort a group of Medal of Honor candidates back from Mexico during the expedition against Pancho Villa -- the heroes all proving themselves rather rotten people while Cooper virtually martyrs himself in search of redemption. In 7th Cavalry the Scott character's courage is never really questioned by the audience, and he never really faces the sort of ordeal that would prove his courage beyond doubt to his detractors. In short, he doesn't suffer, apart from taking some lumps in a fistfight with the beefy Gordon. Worse for the theme, Benson owes the accomplishment of his mission not to his own extraordinary bravery but to a deus ex machina contrivance. The late Harry Carey Jr. arrives at the fort and announces himself as an eyewitness to Custer's order to Benson. He can vindicate Benson on the spot, but rather than do something practical like give a deposition to the court of inquiry, he rides out to find Benson. Along the way, an Indian kills him but fails to capture Carey's horse. This beast happens to be Custer's second-favorite steed, which makes its way to the Little Big Horn, where Benson's little crew is surrounded by Sioux warriors. Sitting Bull thinks it'd be wrong to shed more blood at the battle site, but has nothing against starving the bluecoats by trapping them there. Leo Gordon tries to break through the cordon, passes through and gets an arrow in his back. It looks bad for our hero until the horse arrives. Somehow the Sioux recognize this as Custer's horse, and take it to be the ghost of the horse he rode in on. They interpret its appearance as a confirmation that the bluecoats should take the body of "Long Hair" home after all, so they leave.

Lewis supposedly had qualms about the historical accuracy of the story; whether he expressed them to Scott, who was co-producer of the film with his usual partner Harry Joe Brown, is unclear, as is whether this has anything to do with Lewis never working with Scott again. The actor may simply have preferred Boetticher after doing Seven Men From Now with him for John Wayne's production company that same year. It's worth noting that Scott and Boetticher avoided subjects on the scale of 7th Cavalry, and did nothing nearly as silly. Lewis's film remains visually impressive but the screenplay's already-outmoded (?) reverence toward Custer and its patronizing attitude toward Native superstition leave it with the old-fashioned formula westerns that Randolph Scott belatedly and triumphantly outgrew.

BELLE STARR THE BANDIT QUEEN (1941)

"The usual conception of Belle is all wrong. She was a beautiful southern girl whose recklessness ran away with her."

- Irving Cummings, 1941.

We last encountered Belle Starr in the appealing form of Jane Russell in Allan Dwan's 1948 oater Montana Belle, but you'd hardly recognize the lady in Irving Cummings's more ambitious 1941 epic. Neither version of Ms. Starr hews very closely to the known facts of her outlaw career, but the 1941 model, a Twentieth Century-Fox production, has a distinctive archetypal parentage. While the Dwan model is a generic female outlaw, the Cummings version shows the influence of two popular films from two years earlier: the same studio's Jesse James and the Selznick superproduction Gone With the Wind. While the film is supposedly based on a Burton Rascoe novel of the same name, its Belle Starr is the bastard offspring of the movie James and Scarlett O'Hara, and comes off more like Jesse James as some modern writers see him, as an anti-Reconstruction terrorist, than like the nebulous Belle Starr of history. Belle Starr the Bandit Queen is a highly romanticized tale that employs top studio talent -- the Technicolor cinematography is by Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, and Alfred Newman is credited with the score -- in the service of outright evil.

Something will sound familiar to classic film fans as soon as the movie starts. The title music is taken from Newman's score for John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln -- or at least that's where I first heard the particular piece of music I think of as the Ann Rutledge theme. Take a break to check out this scene from the Ford film to hear what I mean. prlosolvidados uploaded it to YouTube.

Call me sentimental, but using this music as the theme to Belle Starr the Bandit Queen strikes me as just a bit blasphemous. But Cummings goes for the tears right from the start. He opens in romantically desolate fashion with a black man and his son (or grandson) plowing a field in what used to be the yard of a Missouri mansion, shadowed by the ruins of marble columns. The plow digs up a long-buried rag doll, and the old man guesses it must have belonged to Belle Starr when she was a little girl long ago. Who is Belle Starr? the boy asks. Why, she's what white folks call a "leggend," the old-timer explains, and a "leggend" is someone who never really dies.
We then travel back in time to see the mansion in its old-time splendor, when it was the home of the well-to-do Shirley family. The Shirleys have survived the Civil War in good shape and their faithful Mammy Lou (Louise Beavers) has stayed on. Still, vivacious Miss Belle Shirley (Gene Tierney) resents the Yankee occupation, except for an old beau of hers, Major Tom Crail (Dana Andrews). She resents even more the arrival of carpetbaggers, black and white. We see her disgust when she goes to town. Because the status of slave marriages is in doubt, hucksters are selling their services to perform marriages for a price so freedpeople won't be living in sin. That's the least offense. White men are promising the former slaves that the white estates will be broken up and the land given to the blacks -- and that blacks will be able to walk on the same sidewalks as whites. Cummings cuts to a shot of three fairly attractive black women done up in arriviste fashion giving the camera come-hither looks. He presents them as if their presence were outrageous or obscene -- as if that's how we're supposed to feel about it -- and some 1941 audiences certainly did.

Going on her haughty way, Miss Belle observes a wanted poster offering a reward for the capture of Sam Starr, an unreconstructed reb carrying on guerrilla warfare against the occupation. She applauds Starr's efforts within earshot of one of the outlaw's incognito comrades (Chill Wills), and before long Sam himself (Randolph Scott) is presenting himself at the Shirley mansion -- on the same night that the family is having Major Crail and other officers over for dinner. Belle insists on having a place set for Starr, whose men eventually take Crail hostage to ensure Sam's safe exit. However, a white trash lurker about town, Jasper Trench (Olin Howard), has seen this and tipped off the federal troops. A complicated situation ends with Crail reluctantly carrying out an order to burn any home that harbors outlaws. With the Shirley mansion put to the torch, Belle vows revenge and joins forces with Starr's guerrilla band. She proves useful in many ways, not least by being a natural crack shot. She demonstrates this by daintily putting a bullet dead-center through the leaf of a tree, then knocking the leaf off its stem with the next bullet. Starr is practically goggle-eyed, or as nearly goggle-eyed as Randolph Scott can get, by this display of prowess.
Belle is soon riding at Sam's side, taking the fight to the carpetbaggers. By way of illustration, Starr's band is shown chasing wagonloads of defenseless black people across a bridge. In a slapstick moment, one utterly victim falls off a wagon and has to scramble aboard another before he's run down. Sure, they go after the occasional federal supply train as well, but it looks like Belle's default mode of resistance is ethnic cleansing. Call me a PC killjoy, but the thought of audiences applauding these scenes is chilling.

To the writers' credit, the script has Belle begin to question her war against the Yankees -- not because of any atrocities perpetrated upon blacks, of course, but because Sam, her new husband, has started recruiting riffraff into his band, most notoriously the Cole brothers, who are living off the land by robbing ordinary (presumably white) Missourians. That's beyond the pale -- not what Belle was fighting for, but Sam writes it off as wartime expediency. His attitude seems to confirm the suspicions Belle's brother had expressed earlier about Sam's character -- perhaps an echo of the fact that the real Sam Starr was a Cherokee Indian. Belle quits the fight and gives Sam his ring back, but when she learns that Sam and his men have been set up for an ambush, she drops everything to ride to his rescue -- only to be shot from behind by Jasper Trench. Spoilers follow for those who care...

Belle Starr is dead for practically the final reel of the picture, which is dedicated to the making of her "leggend." Trench brings the body in to claim the price on her head and wants to buy everyone drinks before he cashes in, but word of his unchivalrous act has spread quickly and no one will share his cheer. The bartender won't even serve him. Even the black shoeshine boy regards him with contempt. Meanwhile, Tom Crail has possession of the body, but won't confirm that it's Belle, for whom he still carries a torch. He wants family members to identify the body. He gets Mammy Lou and Sam Starr, who arrive together -- whether Sam is surrendering or offering an implicit truce is unclear. Sam looks at the body, and says it isn't Belle. Mammy Lou looks, and says the same thing. Jasper is apoplectic and sees the truth of the matter, that no one, not even the Yankee officer, wants him to have the reward for backshooting a lady. But there's nothing he can do. Tom allows Sam a last moment alone with the "anonymous" corpse, on whose finger he replaces the wedding ring. He looks out a window and sees two black men in the town square talking of how Belle Starr apparently cheated death. One mentions to the other that the whites are already calling her a legend. Again, what does that mean? The answer in this case is that Belle can change her shape; she can turn into a red fox and slip away when the soldiers think they have her cornered. Sam regards this scene with approval and the film ends.

The insistently lachrymose tone of Belle Starr the Bandit Queen only makes its ugly aspects more grotesque. It reflects the then-prevalent consensus among American historians that Reconstruction was a "tragic era" of unjust exploitation of a defeated South, and the racist consensus that freed blacks were self-evidently unfit to participate in government at that time. Just like The Birth of a Nation, the filmmakers probably think they're doing blacks a favor, and getting themselves off the historical hook, by spotlighting Louise Beavers as a good Negro, a role model of servile loyalty. But it's no good even to write the script off as a product of its time -- this was the New Deal era, after all, and more should be expected from its artistic output. More so even than Gone With the Wind, which after all takes a somewhat critical view of its heroine's adaptation to modernity, Belle Starr idealizes a bathetic nostalgia for an utterly vanished (not to mention deservedly destroyed) world and makes a martyr out of its idealized femininity. It's also not very good as a movie. It's meant as an early showcase for Gene Tierney -- while Randolph Scott is actually top billed, she gets a title card all to herself after the lead players are introduced -- but her early Vivien Leigh impersonation never hardens into a convincing hellcat bandit. Had she brought her later Leave Her to Heaven game to this picture everyone might well tremble, but as contemporary critics noted, the picture doesn't really give her much to do once she turns guerrilla. She doesn't even come as close to being a female action hero as Jane Russell did years later; it's as if they wanted to preserve a certain saintliness in the character that might be sullied if she were shown actually shooting people. That's the horrific thing about this movie: everyone involved actually seemed to see their invented Belle Starr as some sort of avenging-angel martyr-saint for the Lost Cause -- at least one early reviewer equated the character with Joan of Arc. That's just sick, but that tone gives Belle Starr the Bandit Queen a retroactive transgressive charge that may give viewers a strange thrill today. They may even feel a little dirty afterward. Whether that's a recommendation or not is up to you.

FRONTIER MARSHAL (1939); or, Wyatt Earp Meets the Monsters

One of the first cinematic versions of the Tombstone legend, Allan Dwan's movie takes advantage of still-widespread unfamiliarity with the Wyatt Earp story to take giant liberties with it. We're already dealing with a remake, as Stuart N. Lake's biography, based partly on self-serving interviews with Earp, had already been put on film just five years earlier. Dwan's film is an improvement in that it calls Earp by his right name instead of "Michael Wyatt." That seems to be about the end of its fidelity to history. Some Western historians claim that Lake's book is a whitewash of Earp, but Sam Hellman's script pretty much tears Earp down completely and puts up a new streamlined structure in his place. It relates to history only to the extent that a man named Wyatt Earp did some shooting of folks in the town of Tombstone, but it gets lost almost as soon as you ask who he shot. Consider: this is a Wyatt Earp film in which the name Clanton is never spoken. Since then the Clantons have become an inextricable part of the Tombstone legend, but the story still wasn't well known in 1939 despite Lake's publicity, so Twentieth Century-Fox could get away with creating an almost entirely original cast of villains for Earp to dispatch. Instead of a gang of "Cowboys" lurking outside town to rustle cattle and hoorah the place every so often, Frontier Marshall roots the Tombstone evil in the Palace of Pleasure saloon, whose proprietor Ben Carter is in cahoots with a gang of stagecoach robbers led by Curley Bill (Joe Sawyer), one of the few authentic names in the story. The robberies recede into the background, however, as the script focuses on Carter's feud with the more refined Bella Union, which can hire high-class entertainment like "greatest comedian in the world" Eddie Foy (Eddie Foy Jr.).  Attempting to keep the peace is Earp (Randolph Scott), who earns his star by volunteering to subdue the drunken Injun Charlie when the current marshal (Ward Bond) chickens out. Wyatt has come to town alone, without brothers or wife, and stays to impose order despite the machinations of Carter and a spiteful saloon girl (Binnie Barnes). Complicating matters is the arrival of temperamental and tubercular gunman Doc "Halliday" (Cesar Romero -- and I didn't misspell "Holliday," the movie did), a man with a fondness for handkerchief duels and a general death wish. An appalling amount of screen time is dedicated to the efforts of Halliday's long-suffering wife (Nancy Kelly) to recall the murderous lunger to his original vocation -- not merely dentistry but a full-scale general practice, including on-the-fly surgery. The climax of the picture is Doc's rally to perform life-saving surgery on a bartender's son accidentally shot by Earp. Following this redemptive triumph, Halliday strides out of the Bella Union and is instantly killed by Curley Bill, who informs Wyatt that he can be found at the O.K. Corral, about three doors down from the saloon. So Wyatt Earp fights the famous gunfight by himself, though help arrives at the end from an unexpected source. As the curtain falls, law and justice triumph, though one character notes that Tombstone is no longer truly safe, now that the Palace of Pleasure has been replaced by a savings bank.

The challenge for a historian or history buff when faced with something like Frontier Marshal is to distance oneself from history and judge the film on purely dramatic and cinematic terms. Cinematically, Dwan directs some crisp action and the film has some nice production values overall. But the script is a disaster that leaves Earp a bystander for much of the plot while Halliday forms a triangle with his wife and Jerrie the saloon girl. As Earp, Randolph Scott is adequately heroic but has little to work with in terms of personality, while Romero only left me wondering what Anthony Quinn could have done with the role -- the closest Quinn ever came was the Holliday a clef role in Edward Dymytryk's Warlock.  Worst of all, this Tombstone movie can't come up with a proper antagonist for Earp. Carter is set up early as the "big bad," only to be eliminated two-thirds through the picture. His assistant, Pringle, seems poised to step in, but in the very next scene Earp goads him into a fatal gunfight. That leaves the barely sketched out Curley Bill as the ultimate antagonist in an O.K. Corral fight that really feels like an anticlimax after all the storm and stress of the surgery scene. That's all a double shame, not just for the movie itself but for genre movie fans, given who plays the villains.

Frontier Marshal appears to be the first true team-up of John Carradine (Carter) and Lon Chaney Jr. (Pringle). Chaney had done bits in some earlier Fox films in which Carradine had more prominent parts (e.g. Jesse James), but Pringle is one of Junior's more prominent supporting roles before his breakthrough in Of Mice and Men. It's definitely an improvement for him on his labors for Cecil B. DeMille, who left almost all of Chaney's performance in Union Pacific on the cutting room floor, reducing the struggling young character actor to a few shots as a bystander despite being a named character in the end credits. For Carradine, a rising character actor at Fox, this film was just another day at the office; he contributes nothing special to a standard villain part. By comparison, Chaney's participation in an A picture is virtually a showcase, though he only has a couple of big scenes. In the first, Pringle has kidnapped Eddie Foy and forced him to perform at the Palace rather than the Bella Union. He stands just offstage twirling his two guns menacingly as Foy attempts to entertain the crowd. While Earp charges in through the audience to rescue Foy, Halliday appears in the wings to keep Pringle covered. In a priceless moment (perhaps) for Chaney fans, Doc decides that the audience expects entertainment and shouldn't be disappointed. He forces Pringle to dance, keeping time with bullets aimed at Chaney's feet as the big lug does a desperate soft-shoe routine. It may be the only time Lon Chaney Jr. ever dances on film. His other highlight is his shootout with Scott, his one scene as leader of the Palace gang. At first, Pringle has no intention of shooting it out with Earp, promising the marshall that Curley Bill will take care of him soon enough. But Earp's casual insult provokes a foolhardy attack, punctuated by Chaney's effective pantomime (in lieu of modern effects) of taking a bullet to the head. Thus pass Chaney and Carradine on their way to their destiny as horror men. They'll next encounter each other in The Mummy's Ghost, when Carradine plays the latest priest to revive the hapless Kharis. By that time, Carradine will already be past his peak of prestige, while Chaney will be in a thankless holding pattern as Universal's "master character creator." Frontier Marshal may be worthless otherwise, but it catches the pair as a team before either man had an inkling of his actual acting destiny. As that, it's a film of historical and maybe even sympathetic interest.

WESTBOUND (1959)

While making the films with Budd Boetticher for Columbia Pictures that have made his latter-day reputation as a western star, Randolph Scott also made pictures for Warner Bros. For his last Warners picture, the studio hired Boetticher to direct. Neither the producer nor the writers had worked with Scott before, and it's unclear whether the actor had anything like the creative control he enjoyed over his Columbia efforts. The end product still seems like a Randolph Scott movie, if somewhat less like a Boetticher film. The Civil War story lacks the spare clarity of the team's Columbia pictures, but remains grounded in certain story situations typical of later Scott films. Scott and Boetticher may also be responsible for a graver mood that prevails here than in other comparable patriotic Fifties westerns.

Scott plays John Hayes, a Union cavalry officer assigned to securing the Overland Stage route through increasingly hostile territory and assuring that Union troops in the West get paid. The deteriorating situation is made clear to him at a station where the manager insults a maimed veteran (Michael Dante) by putting salt in the young man's slice of pie. Hayes is a man who takes crap from no one and will not let anyone give crap to a brave man who gave up an arm for his country. He forces the station master to eat the pie. The situation sounds absurd but it establishes Hayes's understated power of intimidation.

After dropping Rod, the veteran, off on his farm for a reunion with his hardworking, feisty wife Jeanie (Karen Steele), Hayes discovers that the Overland agent in the next town has quit his job and gone over to the Rebs. Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan) was an old friend of Hayes' until he won the woman (Virginia Mayo) both men had courted. As Hayes struggles to reestablish an Overland presence in the town, he finds allies in Rod and Jeanie and a dangerous enemy in Mace (Michael Pate), who becomes Putnam's right hand man in the Confederate effort to stop westbound stage traffic.

Good guys (Karen Steele and Michael Dante, above) and bad guys
(Michael Pate and Andrew Duggan, below) in Westbound.

Mace emerges as the real villain of the piece, while Putnam proves the sort of ambivalent antagonist you'd see in the Columbia pictures. With Hayes having reappeared, Putnam clearly feels insecure in his marriage and succumbs to alcoholism. But strangely, precisely because Hayes is his enemy, Putnam refuses to turn a wartime conflict into a personal matter. While Mace advises that the easiest way to resolve the situation is to assassinate Hayes, Putnam refuses to consider that option. He thinks he can drive Hayes from the field by pressuring stage drivers or stealing the Overland's horses. It's as if Putnam wants to prove to everyone that he doesn't fear Hayes as a returned romantic rival, but his choice of strategy enables Mace to commit a series of escalating atrocities for which Putnam is, for all intents and purposes, to blame.

Randolph Scott often plays a loner whose arrival in a community, no matter how righteous his purpose, tends to disrupt the local order. That makes him different from John Wayne, whose influence wherever his characters go is almost entirely positive and uplifting. Scott and Boetticher could play the star's subversive potential for laughs, as in Buchanan Rides Alone, or to more tragic effect in Decision at Sundown. His disruptive potential extends to the domestic sphere. Scott's films often include a female character whom we recognize as a suitable mate for the hero, but is burdened with an unfit husband or fiancee. The man may be unscrupulous or he may merely be weak, but Scott's superiority provokes a domestic crisis that is often resolved by the other man's demise, whether Scott ends up with the girl or not. The final Scott-Boetticher collaboration, Comanche Station, gives a twist to this gimmick as the Scott character and others spend the film questioning the character of a man who wouldn't venture out to rescue his captive wife, only to learn at the end that the loving husband just happened to be blind. Westbound anticipates this device by tying one of Hayes's potential mates, the stalwart Jeanie, to Rod the amputee who takes to heart the townsfolks' labeling of him as "half a man." But Hayes proves a subtle mentor to the troubled Rod, offhandedly showing how a man can use a rifle with one hand without any condescending motivational speeches. Westbound is also unusual in offering the Scott character two potential mates, including the more age-appropriate Norma Putnam, creating some suspense over which woman, if any, Hayes will end up with. But the filmmakers don't stack the deck in Scott's favor. Jeanie loves Rod despite his handicap, and Norma, as we eventually discover, loves Putnam despite his faults.

But because the Scott character has two potential mates, Westbound makes the fates of the two husbands a matter of further suspense. If Hayes deserves to get a girl, then one of the men must be doomed. Boetticher maintains this suspense during a drastic ratcheting up of violence. After Hayes and Rod recover horses stolen by Mace's men, Mace escalates the conflict. Going against Putnam's order, he sets up an ambush to kill Hayes, but Rod ends up walking through the fateful doorway instead. In an unusual approach, Rod is allowed to linger despite a doctor's declaration that his condition is hopeless. This being a movie, you can believe that his condition isn't hopeless, and the longer he lingers, the more you might believe it. Meanwhile, Mace perpetrates his supreme atrocity, wrecking a coach full of women and children and killing them all. Moments after Hayes is hammered with this news, Jeanie informs him that Rod, offscreen, has finally succumbed to his wounds. Now a reckoning between Hayes and Mace, who had humiliated our hero in town earlier in the picture, is unavoidable, but a desperately repentant Putnam becomes a wild card in the scenario. And after the climax of violence comes Hayes's ultimate choice, if the choice is his to make, between a once-lost love and a love yet to be....

See enough Randolph Scott films and the pattern of a "Randolph Scott film" becomes more recognizable. The man and his associates knew, by the 1950s, the sort of stories and situations that worked best for him. Whether Scott and Boetticher gave it a personal touch, or the Warner people tailor-made a story to suit Scott's strengths, Westbound is plainly a Scott vehicle. While the story in simplest terms is something Gary Cooper or any other Hollywood westerner could have performed, I suspect it would have been inferior with any other actor starring. Whether it would have been inferior with some one else directing is another story. While Scott was clearly comfortable with Boetticher by this point, I imagine that the other top Western directors of the decade -- Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves, etc. -- could have done just as well with the actor and the material. I don't have any problem with Boetticher's work here -- the image seems little compromised by the fullscreen "Starz Play" stream available on Netflix, except for the sequence when Mace's horsemen pursue a stagecoach across a too-sweeping expanse of road -- but the film overall plays less to the director's strengths, which I identify with a certain stoic minimalism, than it does to the star's. Boetticher probably should get credit for keeping the film personal as a Scott movie and getting the usual strong performance from the actor. I haven't seen enough of Scott in other hands yet to determine how much of his definitive screen persona is Boetticher's (or Burt Kennedy's) creation, but for now I'm inclined to give the director the benefit of the doubt. As a team, Boetticher and Scott were seven-for-seven. None of their collaborations fail to impress. Individual works by other directors and other stars may have been better films, but Boetticher and Scott were the most successful team in terms of quantity and quality during the greatest decade of Hollywood westerns.

COMANCHE STATION (1960)

The 1950s were the golden age of the American western. It fell to Europeans to innovate in the genre in the 1960s in response to a drop in U.S. production, which was itself a backlash against a glut of western programming on television. John Ford still had a few westerns in him, and Sam Peckinpah was just getting started, but with the debacle of Cimarron Anthony Mann had made his last western, and Budd Boetticher's 1960 film was his last with Randolph Scott, who himself had a rendezvous with Peckinpah waiting before retirement. Something was changing in American cinema, but on this occasion it was business as usual for Boetticher, Scott, screenwriter Burt Kennedy and producer Harry Joe Brown, which meant closing out what is arguably the best series of "B" westerns ever made.

The "Ranown" films are considered Bs because their budgets were limited and their running times were brief. But the cheapness of Comanche Station only sinks in when you notice how few sets Boetticher uses. On the other hand, he has landscapes that would be the envy of any producer or art director, and if no one told you about the budget you'd say the film looked pretty lavish, since it does. Boetticher complements the landscapes with his most mobile camerawork of the series, racing along to follow hard-riding horsemen and Indians while making judicious use of crane shots to open up our field of vision. This last film is the best looking of the set.

But some corners have been cut. You notice that from the recycling of the theme music from the previous entry, Ride Lonesome. The story itself is a variation on some elements of that film. In Lonesome Scott has to collaborate with some questionable characters to transport an outlaw to where they can collect the bounty on him, and Scott has to worry throughout the picture over whether his colleagues will kill him to claim the bounty for themselves. In Comanche Station Scott, as Cody, makes a dangerous lone venture into Comanche territory to trade for the life of a captured white woman, Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates). It takes his Winchester rifle to seal the deal.

They then fall in with Lane (Claude Akins) and his minions Frank and Dobie, who happened also to be hunting for Mrs. Lowe. They divulge that Mr. Lowe has offered a $5,000 reward for his wife's return -- a fact that Cody hadn't mentioned to her, having given the impression that he acted entirely on his own benevolent initiative. This lowers her regard for her original rescuer, but Lane and company are no prizes, either. In any event, now they must ride together to Lordsburg, avoiding newly hostile Comanches, with Cody concerned that Lane might kill him to claim the reward for himself. Worse, Lane tells his lackeys that Mr. Lowe will pay up if his wife is delivered dead or alive....

What distinguishes Comanche from Lonesome, and elevates it in my opinion, is the degree to which the conflicts in the plot are caused by misunderstandings. Nancy will learn that she has misunderstood Cody's motives, since the hero has a very personal reason for hunting after every kidnapped white woman. Cody's antagonism toward Lane is exacerbated by misunderstandings. He assumes that Lane provoked the Comanches by going scalphunting among them. He assumes that because he testified that Lane had done so when both were in the Army, resulting in Lane's disgrace. It turns out that Cody was wrong about Lane this time, and Kennedy leaves open the possibility that he might have been wrong about Lane in the past. Lane could have a genuinely righteous grievance against Cody to add to his more mercenary motive for possibly killing him. But he's one of Kennedy and Boetticher's honorable villains (though perhaps also the most villainous of them all), risking his neck to save Cody from a Comanche attack, though that may be because he wants the honor of killing Cody himself. Akins is an ideal actor for this sort of part, and individualizes it with his signature call of "Hello!" whenever anyone addresses him. He's like other Boetticher antagonists in at least giving lip service to the idea of settling down to a normal life, while his partners are even more ambivalent about their work, Dobie (Richard Rust) finally turning on Lane rather than join in bushwhacking Cody.

There's a final misunderstanding that gives Comanche Station a poignant little twist. Cody had said that he was unaware of Mr. Lowe offering a reward for his wife's return. Lane confirms that he did, but he uses that fact, and especially the "dead or alive" bit to question both Lowe's manhood (why doesn't he go after his wife himself?) and his love for Mrs. Lowe. You can see that the lonely Cody sees an opening here, but when we finally learn why Mr. Lowe did not go out to the rescue, there's nothing left but for Randolph Scott to resume his lonely ride through the wilderness. His disappearance into the rocks from which he emerged at the start of the picture is a fitting thematic close to the entire series.

Dramatic, often brutal moments from Comanche Station

Comanche Station closes out the Sony Budd Boetticher collection, which was one of last year's top DVD offerings. It includes some audio commentaries and celebrity intros by Clint Eastwood (for this film) Martin Scorsese (for Ride Lonesome) and Taylor Hackford, as well as a feature-length biography of Boetticher that originally appeared on TCM. For the sake of argument, I'll rank the five films in the set, with the understanding that all of them are superior westerns from the genre's peak period.

1. Decision at Sundown
2. The Tall T
3. Comanche Station
4. Buchanan Rides Alone
5. Ride Lonesome

And here's the trailer, uploaded by CultExtras:

RIDE LONESOME (1959)

Lately I've been setting my clock, so to speak, by the ongoing survey over at Goodfella's Movie Blog in which Dave posts his favorite for another year every other day. It's inspired me to look at some films I've had on my shelf for awhile, thinking them essentials, without really watching them. Dave'll hit 1959 this weekend, and that prospect inspired me to go back to my Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott box set to tackle their fifth collaboration. I finally took a look at their first go together, Seven Men From Now, last weekend, and maybe I'll double back and deal with that one at another time. For now I'm going to review the fourth of five films the team released via Columbia Pictures.

This time around, Scott bears the unlikely name of Ben Brigade, which Columbia thought would be a selling point for the film. They emphasized it in the poster and the trailer, and I suppose it conveys that Scott has the strength of a multitude, though not in the same way that Steve Reeves did when he played Hercules. Brigade is a bounty hunter who heads into a typical Boetticher rocky landscape to apprehend Billy John, a wanted killer who has tried to lure our hero into an ambush, but chickens out of it once convinced that Brigade can take him out before dying. Billy tells his partners to summon his brother Frank, who is sure to crush Brigade before Billy can hang.

Along the way, Brigade picks up a woman, Carrie Lane (Karen Steele) and two typically personable Boetticher gunman, Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn). Mrs. Lane has most likely lost her husband to the Indians, while Boone sees Billy John as his ticket to a normal life. The reason is that, apart from the bounty on Billy's head, in which Brigade is presumably most interested, the state has promised amnesty to whoever brings in the outlaw. It took a while for Boone to figure out what amnesty meant, but now he wants it, and if the government will forgive all sins upon delivery of Billy, then what would one more death matter -- Brigade's, that is. Boone is one of those up-front sorts who makes his interest clear to Brigade. He has enough of a code of honor to want a fair fight if it has to come to that. For the moment, it's in both men's interest to work together, since there are Indians about and Billy's gang, plus Frank, is on the way.

Karen Steele (above) proves regrettably less formidable than her gun-toting entrance promises, while James Coburn (below) proves more formidable in later films.

Yet Brigade seems to be taking a lot of chances, like riding through open country when there are other routes available. It seems to Boone that Brigade may be inviting a confrontation with the gang, or Frank in particular, which makes his own scheme more dangerous. But he sticks to it, not least because of his growing interest in the newly minted Widow Lane. As for her, the more she understands of Brigade and Boone's conflicting motives, the more she despises both men. Her indignation at their rivalry for bounty seems to steer the film toward Naked Spur territory, but it eventually emerges that bounty is a secondary concern for Brigade, and that Billy is but a means to the end of revenge on Frank at a site of Brigade's choosing, one of dire significance for both men. Partly out of self-interest in Billy's fate, and partly out of respect for Brigade's grievance, Boone commits himself and Whit to stick around for the showdown with Frank's gang, the danger of which can best be illustrated by showing you Frank.

Ride Lonesome is a sort of torch-passing film, though Randolph Scott had a few films left in him, given the presence of future action star Coburn, imminent Bonanza star Roberts, and eventual spaghetti icon Lee Van Cleef. These younger actors aren't all fully formed yet. It seems strange to see Coburn playing the simpleton stooge to Roberts, for instance, while Van Cleef still lacks the essential coolness that he only acquired in Italy from Sergio Leone. He doesn't really have much to do here, given how Frank is built up, and doesn't really come across as the supervillain we might have expected.

Seeing Van Cleef in this picture helps solidify the impression created by the late revenge angle that Ride Lonesome is, arguably, the closest Boetticher and writer Burt Kennedy come to a spaghetti western. Brigade wants to have his showdown with Frank at an old hanging tree where, we learn, Frank had hung Brigade's wife after Brigade, then a sheriff, had put Frank in prison. The difference between a "Ranown" western and a spaghetti western is that, in this movie, we are told what happened to Mrs. Brigade, while a spaghetti western would have shown it. One approach is not automatically preferable to the other, but the difference is significant. That doesn't mean that Ride Lonesome isn't brutal at times. I've noted before that the Boetticher films have moments of violence that sometime exceed what we'd expect from Fifties Hollywood, and here we get the threatened revenge hanging (lynching, really) of Billy John apparently realized.

It looks like Boetticher and Scott never made a really bad western, but in my estimate Ride Lonesome is the weakest of the five I've seen out of the seven they made. At 73 minutes it actually seems a little padded. Boetticher was working in Cinemascope for the first time and may have indulged himself in more landscape shots than were strictly necessary, beautiful though they are. There's also a pointless subplot with Indians who want to trade a horse for Mrs. Lane and get violent when refused. The Indian fight has a perfunctory quality that's unusually disappointing from Boetticher. But the main weakness of this film, as I see it, is Pernell Roberts, who simply lacks the gravitas of such past Scott antagonists as Lee Marvin and Richard Boone. He just doesn't seem like the sort who should be ordering James Coburn around, and his romantic musings over the pneumatic Karen Steele are rather embarrassing. It's a tribute to Kennedy's plotting, if not his dialogue, that you remain interested in the simmering conflict between Roberts and Scott and uncertain of how it'll turn out.

Randolph Scott rides toward the foreground in the rocky opening sequence of Ride Lonesome.

But the general virtues of Scott and Boetticher redeem this film. It is a treat for fans of western landscapes, and Randolph Scott is his good old grim, laconic self. Coburn and Van Cleef are fun to watch while still in relatively raw form, and Steele is easy on the eye. There were better westerns made in 1959, but Ride Lonseome is a decent representative sample of the Hollywood adult western in its peak period.

Here's the trailer, uploaded by CultExtras.

BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE (1958)

The fourth collaboration between star-producer Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher, and the third in Sony's Boetticher box set, is billed as a "change-of-pace, light hearted" film. I suppose that's true, relatively speaking, amid the grim business of the Scott-Brown (or Ranown) series, but "hard-boiled" is the term that came to my mind. Its purported light-heartedness is akin to the tough-minded irreverence toward authority, propriety, and even life and death that we associate with the modern-dress hard-boiled genre. Scott himself is more light-hearted here than the blasted wreck of a man he portrays in Decision at Sundown, the previous film in the series, but most of the comedy here is fairly dark.

This time, Scott is Tom Buchanan, who we meet crossing the border bridge between a Mexican village and Agry Town, California. "He don't look like much" is one townsman's appraisal of the newcomer, who's willing to sell his guns and ammo. He's followed closely into town by some young hothead named Roy, riding hard as if from someone. Roy bumps into a man named Lafe and instantly wants to fight him. "Why don't you grow up?" Lafe protests as Roy storms into a tavern.

Buchanan sets himself up in the Agry Hotel, where Amos Agry is the proprietor. A Simon Agry is running for Senate, while Lew Agry is the sheriff here. After settling in, our hero heads to the tavern for dinner, and finds Roy still running amok. When Roy gets into his personal space, Buchanan slugs him. He then learns that he's hit Roy Agry. "Ain't there anyone in this town who ain't an Agry?" he asks.

Having ordered a bottle, he offers Roy a conciliatory shot, but Roy takes the whole bottle. He needs liquid fuel, apparently, before he settles scores with Buchanan. "Do you know what I'm gonna do?" he asks menacingly. "If you keep pulling on that bottle, I know what you're gonna do," Buchanan answers.

Amos checks out the scene at the tavern, and knows that a liquored-up Roy is bad news. He hustles over to the sheriff's office as fast as his girth and his apparent bad heart will take him to urge Brother Lew to intervene. Lew can't care less, however. Meanwhile, Buchanan enjoys his meal while Roy drains the bottle.

Before any showdown can happen, an angry young Mexican charges across the border, challenges Roy and shoots him. That alerts Sheriff Lew, who runs over with his men to beat the crap out of both the Mexican and Buchanan, who's stuck in the middle of things. Both men are promptly dumped in jail, where custom dictates that the sheriff must wait until they wake up before hanging them.

While Buchanan and the Mexican await their fate, Carbo, a top minion of Judge Simon Agry, goes to his boss's house to let him known that Roy, his son, has been killed. "It was inevitable," the judge says. Carbo advises him to stop Sheriff Lew from hanging the men. Holding a trial instead will bolster Simon's law-&-order credentials. In addition, Carbo has an important bit of intelligence: the Mexican is Juan de la Vega, a son of a rich Don. Doubly inspired, the Judge rides to town to stop the hanging, promising a trial the following morning.

After the jurors turn in their shot glasses ("Judge don't want no more liquored up opinions like we had at the last trial," Waldo the bailiff explains), Buchanan tells the court that he grew up chasing cows ("Which cows?" someone asks) and has since been "a fighter," pretty much a mercenary. Sheriff Lew describes him as "just another hardcase on the dodge" and accuses him of setting Roy up to be shot by Juan. He gets the impression that Buchanan isn't happy with Agry culture.

Lew: So, you don't like this town.
Buchanan: I don't like some of its people.
L: Me included?
B: You especially.
...
L: So, you want to take the law into your own hands?
B: No, just you.

Despite such provocative talk, Buchanan has convinced the judge that he had nothing to do with Roy's death, and is acquitted. Juan cuts his own trial short by declaring, "I killed your son, and I'm glad." He's sentenced to hang, but Buchanan has struck up a friendship with the Mexican, whom he senses to be of good character (he shot Roy, after all). He offers the sheriff a deal: free Juan and Lew can keep all the money he confiscated from Buchanan at the time of his arrest. No deal: Lew is determined to be rid of Buchanan and orders him out of town, escorted by Lafe and Pecos. Meanwhile, Esteban Gomez from Mexico visits the Judge and makes an offer similar to Buchanan's to the Sheriff. Acting on behalf of Don Pedro de la Vega, Gomez offers 30 blooded horses for Juan. The Judge wants $50,000 instead. Amos, who's been arguing with Lew over the division of the Buchanan spoils, overhears the negotiations

Meanwhile, Buchanan fully expects to be killed by his escorts. Luckily, Pecos, the most likable of the Agry minions, "don't cotton to this job." "A man oughtn't do a job he doesn't cotton to," Buchanan suggests.

When the moment comes, Pecos shoots Lafe instead of Buchanan. They give Lafe a sky burial in a tree, carving his name in the trunk as a marker. Pecos explains that he had to save Buchanan as a fellow West Texan. "So long, Lafe, you died real good," he says to his former friend.

Back in Agry Town, Amos lets Lew know he has dirt on the Judge, but wants money before telling. Once he finds out about Simon's scheme, the Sheriff resolves to "spit right in Simon's eye" by getting to the money first. He takes Juan out of jail, intending to deliver him to Don Pedro and collect the ransom. But his men stop at the once-abandoned cabin where Buchanan and Pecos are hiding out. After Pecos stalls them, Buchanan gets the drop on them and frees Juan. Of the Sheriff's goons, Waldo the bailiff had been most rough on Buchanan earlier, so our hero avenges himself by ramming his rifle butt repeatedly onto Waldo's foot to make him talk. Once they know, what's next? "I ain't sure," Buchanan admits.

The good guys leave the Sheriff's men tied up, but none of them ever earned their merit badges. While none of the bad guys can free themselves, they can move close to one another and work on each other's bonds. By the time that Buchanan sends Juan and Pecos across the border, the bad guys are in a position for ambush. They kill Pecos (His last words: "Tell Buchanan...") and recapture Juan.

While this is going on, the townsfolk are impatient for a hanging, but Gomez has delivered the ransom to the Judge, who sends Carbo to free Juan. Juan's not there, of course, but Buchanan soon arrives to get his money back at gunpoint. Before he can make good his escape, Waldo and company return with Juan in tow. They outgun Buchanan, who surrenders and is jailed with Juan again. Amos huffs and hustles to tell Lew that the plan is back in effect, but Lew is looking for Gomez, who is still waiting at the Judge's place, where Amos ends up. Carbo beats the truth out of Amos, and he, the Judge and Gomez rush to the jail to free Juan, despite the public's mounting frustration over the lack of entertainment. Nobody stays in jail for long, however, as we go into a climax of hostage exchanges, fratricide, and a shootout over a bag of money on the border. The story ends with Carbo, who seemed smarter than all the brothers, taking charge of things in Agry Town

Carbo: Like you say, this is my town now.
Buchanan: Mr. Carbo, you can have it.
Carbo: Don't just stand there, Amos. Get a shovel!

Buchanan Rides Alone approaches the farcical with all the switches of poor Juan in and out of prison like the pea in a shell game. The film's "light-heartedness" really consists in its refusal to moralize about the sordid events it portrays. Scott's character is only the least vicious, least money-grubbing (except maybe for Pecos) of the characters. If you've forgiven my pun above, let me say that source novelist Jonas Ward probably meant the "Agry" name to be some kind of mockery of the agricultural virtues of the yeoman farmer types who are more often the heroes of western stories. The actors who play the brothers aren't familiar to me, but they're a convincing family group of stocky, money-grubbing creatures. Craig Stevens, on the verge of becoming Peter Gunn, makes the most of the underwritten role of Carbo, suggesting someone who knows he's smarter than his bosses and maybe meant for better things. As Pecos, the still-young L.Q. Jones makes a charming impression in the most genuinely light-hearted role in the picture.

Randolph Scott is once again effortlessly convincing as an authentic personality rather than an archetype. For all that the advertising emphasized the star's bigness and tallness, he portrays Buchanan as quite an ordinary person rather than a cowboy superman. Buchanan is a different character from the wily survivor of The Tall T and the hysterical avenger of Decision at Sundown, and the more I see of the Boetticher films the more impressed I am by Scott's versatility within the generic confines of the Western. As for Boetticher, I hope my screen captures give some hint of his pictorial skills. While skies sometimes looked grainy on my monitor, this is otherwise a lovely outdoor film to look at. Boetticher and scripter Charles Lang maintain a careful balance of comedy and often brutal drama, becoming all business when they need to but always capable of injecting hard-boiled humor into any situation. Like the other Scott-Browns, this is done in under 80 minutes without making you fell short-changed. I don't know if Scott, Boetticher and Harry Joe Brown felt constrained by their B-picture mandate, but they seemed consistently capable of telling a story effectively without sacrificing deeper effects. They really don't make them this way anymore, and that's a shame. Here's the trailer.

DECISION AT SUNDOWN (1957)

It's Tate Kimbrough's wedding day in the little town of Sundown, and he's treating the town to drinks. People are coming in from all over for the event, but not all are well-wishers. Dr. John Storrow ("Doc") isn't fond of the groom, nor is Morley Chase the rancher. Nor is Ruby the town trollop happy to see Tate marry Lucy Summerton; she considers herself his girl, but he urges her not to sit in the front pew at the wedding. Finally the bride is walked down the aisle, and Rev. Zaron makes the customary call for anyone who might object to the wedding.

Bart Allison objects. He's been lurking around town all day with his sidekick Sam, badmouthing Tate and telling anyone who'll listen that Lucy's "making a big mistake" marrying the man. He's made an enemy out of sheriff Swede Hansen by refusing to drink Tate's health. Now he confronts Tate. "We never laid eyes on each other before today," he says, "and we're not strangers....Remember Sabine Pass?" Tate claims not to, but Bart calls him out, warning Lucy that "If you marry this man you'll be a widow before sundown" and paying Zaron in advance for Tate's funeral. He and Sam exit just ahead of an impromptu posse.

The remainder of Decision at Sundown shifts from Bart and Sam holed up in a stable and Tate's situation deteriorating outside. This is the third collaboration between actor-producer Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher, and the second included in Sony's "Collector's Choice" box set. Scott and Boetticher (and co-producer Harry Joe Brown) made B-level "adult" or "psychological" westerns in the mode of Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart. Many critics now consider Scott and Boetticher the peers of the more prestigious team, and this movie is strong evidence for that argument. Here's how Columbia Pictures tried to sell it to western fans at the time of its original release.





Well, if "a new kind of hero" means hardly a hero at all, Bart Allison definitely qualifies. He's certainly on the "vengeance trail," but Scott, Boetticher, and writer Charles Lang are on a subversive mission of their own to challenge the legitimacy of Allison's agenda. They don't show their hand immediately. We're inclined to take people's word for it that Tate Kimbrough is a villain who has, in Doc's opinion, destroyed Sundown. How he's done it is unclear, but we're probably supposed to presume that he's a gambler or pimp. Our instinct as moviegoers is to root for Bart to take Tate down. But under siege, Sam (Noah Beery Jr.) begins to question Bart's vendetta. Worse, he only now seems to understand that his friend has pursued Kimbrough for three years for no better reason than that Kimbrough seduced Bart's wife, Mary. When Lucy Summerton, trying to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff, suggests that Bart's grievance doesn't justify killing anyone, Bart harshly throws her out of the stable, making Sam more incredulous. When he suggests that Lucy has a point, then tells Bart that "Mary wasn't the girl you thought she was," Allison hauls off and decks him. We assume from what Sam tells Doc later that Mary was a tramp who finally killed herself "on account of the way she was, there was nothing else she could do," -- but Allison can't accept this. He's become fanatical about revenge in a way that goes deeper and darker than Stewart's vendetta against his brother in Mann's Winchester 73. When Swede's men kill Sam, Bart is beside himself with rage. Randolph Scott is one of the typical laconic western stars of his era, but here he works himself up to the closest he could probably get to hysteria. He's less righteous than self-righteous when he kills Swede to avenge Sam. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the ultimate payoff: the showdown between Bart and Tate.

To this point, Tate Kimbrough has been the schemer and manipulator, sending others out to deal with Allison by any means necessary. For the final act, we get the moment that appears to be characteristic of the Scott-Boetticher films, in which the villain is humanized. He has every opportunity to flee Sundown and leave Allison to his fate. Ruby's urging him to flee with her, but Tate decides that survival means more than merely staying alive. Admitting that he's scared, and needing liquid courage to fortify himself, he decides to end the crisis by calling Allison out, even while enemies like Doc and Morley taunt him and tell him he's finished no matter what happens. Fairly or not, he compares favorably with Swede, whom everyone (including Tate) had called a coward for his reluctance to storm the stable or do anything without overwhelming force on his side. Now the viewer is ready to concede that Tate is capable of honor as he goes out alone to face someone who has increasingly appeared like a maniac.

Boetticher's team has set us up for a scene that's a climax and an anticlimax at the same time, in which the denial of expectations can prove perhaps more devastating than anything we expected. In genre terms, good has won, the town is redeemed, but Bart Allison isn't. Here, at least, I think Scott and Boetticher surpass Stewart and Mann. The latter pair usually had their hero back away from the abyss and find hope or redemption with some woman. But in Decision at Sundown Scott's character is denied satisfaction or closure, and while he doesn't do the worst he could, he leaves the town that now celebrates him a ruined man, with Doc concluding, "There's nothing anyone can do for him."

Decision at Sundown looks like it had a lower budget than the previous film, The Tall T. Except for an opening sequence on the road to Sundown, it all goes down on a standard western town set, or inside the stable where Bart and Sam are besieged. While it lacks the dramatic landscapes of The Tall T, this film shows off Boetticher's forceful efficiency as a visual storyteller and Lang's ability to suggest rounded, complex characters with quick strokes. It's all done in 78 minutes and doesn't need to be any longer. The screenplay has a whiff of misogyny to it, or else it leaves you wondering whether it would have been okay for Bart to kill Tate if Mary hadn't been a tramp, but that only slightly mars the overall effect. Randolph Scott gives what for him must have been a very brave performance, and as both actor and producer he reminds me of Clint Eastwood in his willingness to subvert genre expectations and his own heroic image. The supporting cast has few familiar names (though Richard "Mel Cooley" Deacon is unsettling to look at as the alcoholic minister in the middle of a personal meltdown), but all acquit themselves well. The DVD looks good except for the grainy titles, and features an introduction to the film by Taylor Hackford. For me, so far, the box set is two for two with three to go.

THE TALL T (1957)

Randolph Scott is the man whose whereabouts the Statler Bros are always asking about. His is the name that can reduce the population of Rock Ridge to a scene-stopping chorus of awe. So I assumed for a long time that he was just a hokey cowboy hero. Then I saw Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, Scott's final film, and I began reading about Scott's teaming with director Budd Boetticher. They made seven films together, and growing ranks of fans seem to rate them on a level with the '50s westerns of Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart. That's a big claim.

Hollywood's '50s westerns should get more credit than they do. They may be mistaken for '50s TV westerns in some minds, or the lot are lumped together in unfavorable contrast with the Italian westerns of the '60s and '70s, but I think both genres benefit from the comparison. The spaghettis have their virtues, and the best from '50s Hollywood simply have a different set. The output of Columbia Pictures in particular is pretty formidable, from Mann & Stewart's Man From Laramie and Rudolph Mate's The Violent Men through Delmer Daves' 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboy, through Robert Rossen's quasi-Western They Came to Cordura. Columbia released five of Boetticher's seven Scott films, starting with The Tall T. That fact may clinch the studio's status of Western champ for the decade.

Like 3:10 to Yuma, The Tall T is taken from an Elmore Leonard story, but Martin Scorsese suggests in his intro to the DVD that Burt Kennedy's screenplay isn't very faithful, or at least not pleasing to Leonard. The movie, at least, deals with Pat Brennan (Scott), who's come to the town of Contention (which also figures in 3:10) to buy a bull. We first see him stopping at a switch station where he visits with Hank the stationmaster and promises to bring back some cherry striped candy for Hank's son. In town, he checks in on stage driver Rintoon (Arthur Hunnicutt) and meets his passengers, Willard Mims and his new wife, the daughter of a copper baron. Brennan loses his horse in an attempt to win a bull on a bet and has to walk home. He hitches a ride on Rintoon's stage over Mims' objection and returns to Hank's station to find it seemingly deserted.

The station has been taken over by a three-man gang: Frank (Richard Boone), Billy Jack (played by Skip Homeier, and no relation to the stink-footed '70s hero), and the outrageously named Chink (a baby-faced Henry Silva). They were expecting a mail stage to rob, but Rintoon has come through ahead of schedule as Mims' private driver. This gang won't take disappointment well, but Mims intends to save himself by suggesting that Frank hold his new wife for ransom, which he'll solicit from the old man.

The bulk of the picture deals with Frank, Chink, Brennan, and Mrs. Mims waiting for Mims and Billy Jack to return. This is where the film gets really interesting. We get an instance of what I understand to be a recurring theme of the "Ranown" films, with Brennan and Frank emerging as almost mirror images of one another. Frank wants to settle down on a piece of land like Brennan has, but sees crime as the only way to achieve his goal. He doesn't see or comport himself as a villain, but as someone who does what he has to, as he imagines everyone else does. He adheres to his own code of honor, which emerges in his treatment of Mims and his chastisement of Mrs. Mims for protesting it. When Brennan questions his claim to moral superiority over Mims, Frank protests: "If you don't understand the difference, I can't explain it to you." As it develops, he's too honorable for his own good, while Brennan, our hero, proves as ruthless as survival requires. Both men have eyes on Mrs. Mims, but while Frank seems only to tentatively offer her some food, Brennan later forces himself upon her (within a certain limit) while exhorting her to stand up for herself. Later still, Brennan sows distrust among the gang, but Frank proves more loyal to his men -- to his eventual ruin -- then Brennan would have the boys believe.

The Tall T impressed me with its brevity. It's done in 77 minutes, a running time comparable to the early Universal horror classics, and as with them, you don't feel shorted. Even when, at my first glance, the picture seemed to take its time really getting started through the comedic business in town, it still managed effective character development amid the natural beauty of the location. It does quite well without the gratuitous picturesqueness or iconic posing that bloats many modern films (influenced in part, alas, by spaghetti westerns). It benefits most from dialogue designed for meaningful underplaying from Scott, Boone and even Silva in what could have been more of a showboat role. Theirs are the sort of performances that sometimes get dismissed as non-acting because they lack the emotive histrionics that earn Oscars, but what they achieve at their best is an illusion of authenticity that fits the film perfectly. Only Arthur Hunnicutt really sticks out in the hammy role of an old coot, but we're not burdened with him for long.

Two standout visual moments for me are Brennan's fight with Billy Jack and a tense showdown with Chink. The former comes to a shocking shotgun climax with more blood then you might expect from a '50s film. The latter is wonderfully timed as Brennan gives Mrs. Mims a loaded gun to fire repeatedly at Chink's location while he takes another position. Boetticher intercuts perfectly from Doretta firing to Brennan and Chink successively counting down the shots, ratcheting the tension toward the moment when Chink will break out from cover.

This is the first film in Sony's new box set of the Columbia Ranowns. I watched it on my modest HP monitor and it looked good except for the credits, which seemed to have a layer of irremovable (?) grit on them. The next time I watch, I have the option of hearing historian Jeanine Basinger comment on the film. This first disc also includes a documentary about Boetticher that first appeared on TCM, along with the Scorsese intro. There's also a trailer that looks as run over as the opening credits, and the usual Sony promos. I'll keep you posted as I work through the remaining films in the set, but The Tall T is a good start for anyone discovering Boetticher and Scott.