Comanche Station

The final film of Budd Boetticher's acclaimed Ranown cycle — the seven Westerns he made with actor Randolph Scott — is Comanche Station, a typically solid, straightforward venture that recycles and shuffles around plot elements from the series' previous film, Ride Lonesome. In both films, Scott plays a man who's initially mistaken for a bounty hunter of sorts, riding the territory trying to strike it rich by trading in people, but who is actually on a private mission of his own. In the aftermath of an Indian attack, he falls in with a pretty woman and a group of no-good outlaws who want to relieve him of his bounty and his life. The two films share these basic elements, though the later film casts them in a new light. In Comanche Station, Scott's Jefferson Cody isn't bringing in a murderer to be hanged, but rescuing Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates) from the Comanche tribe who kidnapped her. Mrs. Lowe's husband had announced a $5000 reward for any man who brought her back to him, and naturally this attracts the attention of the rough outlaw Ben (Claude Akins) and his two younger partners, Frank (Richard Rust) and Dobie (Skip Homeier). Cody, of course, wasn't in it for the money; he'd lost his wife to the Indians ten years before, and had been looking for her ever since, going after any women he heard about in the increasingly slender hope of someday finding his own missing wife.

When attacking Indians throw Cody and Mrs. Lowe in with the three outlaws, the trip back to her hometown becomes a tense journey through some of the most astoundingly beautiful vistas to be featured in any of Boetticher's films. With the threat of Indians signaled in the hills by their pillars of black smoke and bird calls in the surrounding woods, Cody finds himself trapped between the Indians and the potential treachery of his riding partners. It hardly helps that he served as Ben's commanding officer in the army, and presided over the other man's dishonorable discharge. There's a lot of bad blood in their past, though Ben seems to foster a grudging respect for the honorable, straight-talking Cody — just not enough respect to dissuade him from taking a shot at that $5000.


Despite the high stakes, the film has a meandering, lazy feel completely at odds with the dramatic tension at its core. Perhaps Boetticher's defining characteristic as a director of Westerns is his recognition that plot is one of the least important aspects of these kinds of films. He often seems indifferent to concerns like pacing or narrative details or dramatic content, as epitomized by the way this film casually riffs on the plot of Ride Lonesome, essentially retelling the story with slightly different motivations driving the characters. His sense of pacing is deliberate and calm, following up a frenzied Indian attack with a long sequence of dialogue-free shots in which the group's train of horses winds across various Western landscapes. All of Boetticher's films have room for such moments, time to stop and appreciate the pictorial beauty of the surroundings, but this film in particular is as much a celebration of the land where it was made as it is an action story. Boetticher bookends the film with shots of the same rocky, barren terrain, like a strangely beautiful alien landscape, boulders piled high on top of one another. And his camera frequently sweeps across the widescreen vistas his characters are riding through; his takes are often extended enough to follow Cody and his group across a very large patch of land, slowly panning along with the trotting horses.

Boetticher also frequently slows the narrative down in order to allow for moments of unexpected humor, puncturing the deadly seriousness of so many other Hollywood Westerns. Frank and Dobie certainly fulfill the role of comic relief, particularly in the scene where Dobie impresses his friend by proving that he can read — not "books or newspapers," but simple signs at least. Later, after a long and heartfelt conversation in which Dobie describes his father's longstanding advice that a man has to "amount to something," Dobie concludes by lamenting, "it's a shame: he never did amount to anything." This dim-witted pair is comical but also kind of sad, in that they're obviously with the ruthless Ben only because they have no other real options, no chance to make anything of themselves unless they're holding a gun. Boetticher's comedy is never mean-spirited, never aimed at completely ridiculing or cutting down its target; there is always complexity and depth even to Boetticher's comic foils.

He even directs his wit at Scott himself, in a scene where Cody, after being wounded in an attack, is treated by Mrs. Lowe. She pours some harsh liquor on his leg, warning him ahead of time that it's going to hurt, but instead of taking it with the expected stoicism and steely reserve, perhaps emitting a quick rush of breath, Cody whoops and throws his hands in the air, exclaiming in pain and then jumping around on his one good leg for a while, shaking the wounded one around to soothe it. It's a startling moment because it cuts so directly against the archetype of the tough, squint-eyed Western hero. Under Boetticher's direction, Scott's hero can be funny, flawed, even silly, can feel pain: he's no stoic superman with a gunbelt, and all of Boetticher's films with the actor feature at least one moment like this. Boetticher loves Western tropes, and films like this revel in the typical lore of the West, but he loves undermining and tweaking these archetypal elements just as much. It's this sensibility, this love of the Western coupled with the desire to open up the genre, to explore its more unusual facets, that makes Comanche Station, like all of Boetticher's Westerns, such a fascinating exemplar of the genre.

Ride Lonesome

The penultimate film in Budd Boetticher's Ranown cycle of Westerns starring Randolph Scott is the masterful Ride Lonesome, one of the director's finest films. As the title suggests, Scott's Ben Brigade is certainly a loner, a bounty hunter on the track of cowardly killer Billy John (James Best), but throughout most of this film Brigade does not, in fact, ride alone. After catching up with Billy, who's wanted for shooting a man in the back — his jittery insistence that it was "a fair fight" seems pretty hilarious in light of the facts — Brigade soon enough finds himself tangled up in all sorts of problems beyond just getting Billy back to Santa Cruz to stand trial and, most likely, be hanged. Not only is Billy's vicious brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef) hot on Brigade's trail, but the bounty hunter runs into the stirrings of an Indian war that threatens to erupt at any minute. He finds the lovely Carrie Lane (Karen Steele) holed up at a waystation where she's waiting for her husband to return from gathering some lost horses. In her husband's absence, she's unwillingly acquired the company of Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn), two thugs and bandits whose bad reputation Brigade knows well. When it turns out that Carrie's husband has been killed by the Indians, who are now preparing to attack, the whole group throws in together, heading towards Santa Cruz with Frank and the Indians in pursuit.

This plot is basically a compendium of all sorts of Western standards shuffled together: the Indian attacks, the outlaws chasing the good guys towards a final showdown, the frontier woman who needs to be protected (though Carrie is, as usual for Boetticher, pretty tough in her own right). The film also borrows some of the basic scenario from Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur: like James Stewart in that film, Brigade is a somewhat unwilling bounty hunter, not the kind of man you would normally expect to be tracking other men for money. It's always obvious that not everything is as it seems here, that Brigade has some ulterior motive for what he's doing. This film also shares with Mann's film the tension of three men all vying for the same bounty, with their prisoner trying to play them against one another. Boone and Whit want to bring Billy in because there's an offer that anyone who delivers the outlaw will get their own crimes erased by amnesty — this is particularly appealing to Boone, who desperately wants to go straight, to be able to sleep without fear and set up a ranch of his own, that most common of Western goals. To achieve this, he's willing to endure this one last run, and even a possible face-off with Brigade, with whom he shares a good-natured, friendly rivalry.

As usual, Boetticher is remarkably even-handed in dealing with these characters, investing all three of the rival bounty hunters with well-developed personalities, never allowing Boone and Whit to become the villains of the piece despite their designs against Brigade. To some extent, this is because Van Cleef's Frank, who's barely present in the film, is established as such a horrifying villain entirely through exposition. Brigade describes a long-ago act of outrageous nastiness that only seems worse when Frank casually admits that he barely remembers doing it; he's such a thoroughly evil guy that even the worst crimes imaginable don't seem to make much of an impression on him. In comparison, Boone is simply a guy who's made some mistakes and wants his chance at redemption, while Whit is the folksy comic relief — who even gets a wonderful scene where he's genuinely surprised by his partner's generosity and friendship, shocked that he's viewed as more than just the goofy sidekick. This generosity is as much Boetticher's as Boone's: the director seldom views bit players and stock types as extraneous.


The recycled nature of Ride Lonesome's plot ensures that Brigade and his companions progress through a relatively predictable sequence of scenes familiar from countless other Westerns. The Indian attack sequence, in particular, feels like it could fit neatly in virtually any Technicolor Western of the period, with the heroes crouching down behind a low stone wall, the Indians charging around in circles along the perimeter like targets in a shooting gallery, waiting to be picked off. Boetticher dutifully hits notes like this, but he seems far more interested in the overall journey these characters are taking — and the final destination where all expectations are brilliantly upturned — rather than the stops along the way. Boetticher's Westerns are almost always formalist takes on the genre, whether in the taut suspense of The Tall T or the claustrophobic chamber set pieces of Decision at Sundown. Here, Boetticher is working in the wide open spaces of the West, resulting in some of his most stunning images. Much of the film takes place in long shots of flat vistas, where groups of horse riders are just black dots in the white sand, kicking up clouds of dust in their wake. Unlike, say, John Ford, who often used geography loosely and expressively, for its visual qualities rather than to convey a specific location, Boetticher's sense of space is precise. He uses landmarks and recurring scenery to indicate the progress of Frank's pursuing party, who pass through the same ground, framed from the same angles, as Brigade and his group. This gives the latter half of the film a rhythmic quality in its pacing, as scenes are repeated with different characters in the shot.

It all leads inexorably towards a stunning denouement, staged beneath the foreboding "hanging tree," a misshapen and sinister-looking cross that is a focal point for the bad blood between Frank and Brigade. Boetticher expertly builds tension leading up to the final scenes, with striking overhead shots where the characters are framed between the crooked limbs of the hanging tree. But Boetticher then defuses the tension twice over: the showdown with the dreaded Frank, who has been mostly built up while offscreen, is fast and economical, while the expected confrontation between Boone and Brigade never even comes. Instead, the film slows down for a finale centered more on the emotional conclusions of the character arcs (Brigade's thirst for revenge, Boone's desire for redemption, Carrie's quiet grief) rather than on action and violence. This unexpectedly moving ending is the payoff to Boetticher's attentive handling of character and location. Rather than delivering the fast and furious gunplay he seemed to be building towards, Boetticher makes the finale definitively about the characters, about their pain and desires and ambiguous plans for the future. Conflicting, complex emotions waft through the final scenes like the black smoke of the burning hanging tree, signaling the close of a circle of violence and the possibility of new, more hopeful paths branching off.

Buchanan Rides Alone

Buchanan Rides Alone continues Budd Boetticher's famed cycle of Westerns starring Randolph Scott, although this is perhaps the series' lightest, silliest outing. All of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns are notable for giving the normally dour Western hero a sense of humor and a ready grin, but this film in particular is dominated by a loose, slapstick feel. The hero is largely incompetent, stumbling into the middle of trouble, getting out of it just as haphazardly, and then stumbling right back into the thick of things. Scott plays the lone Buchanan, who had just spent some time as a mercenary in Mexico, earning enough money to fulfill that most common of dreams for Western heroes: buying a piece of land all his own. On his way back to his West Texas home, however, he makes the mistake of stopping in the tiny border outpost of Agry Town, which is ruled over by the feuding, competitive Agry brothers: the nasty, greedy sheriff Lew (Barry Kelley), the hypocritical judge Simon (Tol Avery), and the comical, loyalty-switching hotel owner Amos (Peter Whitney). Buchanan only wants to stay a night and get a good meal before moving on, but finds that the townsfolk will do anything they can to relieve him of some money before he moves on: "this sure is a ten-dollar town," he quips with a sly grin. (As he says it, he casts a glance at a nearby saloon woman, as though wondering if perhaps she costs ten dollars, too.) Worse, he soon finds himself entangled in the longstanding rivalry between Lew and Simon when Simon's son, the no-good drunkard Roy (William Leslie), is killed by a rich Mexican's son, Juan de la Vega (Manuel Rojas), seeking vengeance for Roy's rape of Juan's sister.

Buchanan and Juan barely avoid a hanging when it turns out that Simon at least wants to present a façade of justice, and soon enough Buchanan's involved in a complicated plot to trade Juan's life for $50,000 in gold sent to town by Juan's father. Everyone wants to get a hold of that gold — preferably without losing the chance to hang Juan anyway — and Buchanan finds himself trapped in the middle, trying to protect his newfound friend, get back the gun and money that was taken from him by the corrupt sheriff, and get back on his path to home to buy himself some land. The stakes are high, but Boetticher treats the whole thing with a light touch and an eye for broad, comical strokes, playing down the ostensible seriousness of the plot in favor of a rambling, freewheeling atmosphere. For a Western hero, Buchanan isn't actually very formidable: he keeps letting his enemies get the best of him, and makes often frustratingly poor decisions. At one point, after getting the drop on three of Lew's thugs, he ties them up with a few weak strands of rope, admits he has no idea of what to do next, and then rides off, leaving the bad guys loosely tied up with their guns and their horses easily accessible nearby for the inevitable moment when they get free.

Moreover, Buchanan is rarely even an agent in his own victories. Moments like the one where he actually manages to ambush his enemies are rare. More often, his escapes from near-certain death are achieved via various deus ex machina, last-minute contrivances of chance and fortune rather than any inherent skill or fancy gunplay on Buchanan's part. The result is an odd Western in which the hero succeeds not because he's stronger, faster or smarter than his opponents, but because he's just plain lucky. So many of the great Westerns have a subtle Darwinist slant, advancing the idea that the hero is the guy who draws fastest, who's so formidable with a gun that his enemies can only best him by playing dirty, and so tough that his mere slit-eyed glare inspires quavery fear. Scott can certainly play this kind of hero, with his craggy face and tough-guy aura, but he's just as capable of playing a lighter kind of hero, smiling broadly and bumbling his way in above his head.


Buchanan's biggest streak of luck comes from his encounter with the sheriff's henchman Pecos (L.Q. Jones), who just so happens to be a West Texan like Buchanan. The comradely feeling between the two men, the result of their shared homeland, winds up saving Buchanan from one of the many executions he faces in the film, and makes Pecos his ally for the duration. One of the film's funniest scenes is the impromptu funeral that the slow-witted, somewhat cowardly but earnest Pecos is inspired to hold for a slain former buddy. The two men even bungle the funeral, which takes place near a river: unable to dig a hole in the ground without it filling up with water, they're forced to tie the carcass up into a nearby tree so the animals don't get at it. Pecos' eulogy — which includes an acknowledgment that the dead man was a card cheat and a thief, but not so bad in other ways — is a hilarious speech, made even more so by the way that Boetticher works Buchanan into the frame, casting wry sidelong glances at his companion's unbelievable oration. Boetticher further accentuates the morbid comedy of it all by continually cutting away from Pecos' sincere, squint-eyed face to a deadpan shot of the corpse's feet sticking out of the tree above.

The film milks some further comedy out of the character of Amos, who is continually running around the town, clutching his chest as though perpetually on the brink of a heart attack, spreading gossip and generally reacting with bug-eyed disbelief to everything he encounters. It's a broad, frankly comedic performance, practically a slapstick turn in the midst of a film where most of the other actors, including Amos' two brothers, are playing things straight. Buchanan, Amos and Pecos are often comic figures, bringing a light touch to the material, while more straightforward (and humorless) Western archetypes are embodied in the form of the noble Mexican lad Juan and the town's morally ambiguous gunman Carbo (Craig Stevens). Carbo is an interesting character, an adviser to the corrupt judge who seems to have a slightly greater sense of ethics and honor than any of the town's other prominent citizens. He's dead-serious and tough, a typical Western antihero. In another film, he might be the hero, his struggles with his sense of morality and rightness the film's central dilemma; here, he's relegated to the fringes, pushed aside by Buchanan's bumbling adventures.

On the whole, Buchanan Rides Alone is another interesting Western from the Boetticher/Scott team, a study in tonal contrasts in which a serious and often bloody drama is played for laughs, defusing the sense of real danger in this story. Instead, the film is a fun, lightweight take on the Western genre, one whose irreverent tone is best represented by the moment when Scott, languidly lounging back in the midst of a tense saloon standoff, actually winks at one of his adversaries. Try to imagine Gary Cooper ever doing that, and then you'll know exactly how different this film is from the typical genre programmer.

Decision At Sundown

Decision At Sundown is a highly unusual Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher Western in which Scott's ordinarily driven but heroic persona is tainted, twisted, by an irrational, all-consuming hatred. Boetticher keeps the tension high in this mostly static, action-free chamber Western, in which the emotional and philosophical undercurrents of the story are developed slowly and patiently. Scott plays Bart Allison, a man overwhelmed by a desire for revenge. He arrives in the town of Sundown, along with his pal Sam (Noah Beery), after three years of searching for a man named Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll). It's not clear at first why exactly Bart wants revenge, though it's hinted, with increasing pointedness, that it might have something to do with Bart's wife, Mary — which makes it ironic that when Bart and Sam arrive in town, Kimbrough is getting married later that day to local girl Lucy (Karen Steele). Bart quickly stirs up trouble, breaking up the wedding by announcing that he plans to make Lucy a widow by the end of the day. In the ensuing chaos, Bart and Sam hole up in the stables, surrounded on all side by Kimbrough's goons: Bart's target basically controls the town, keeping even the sheriff Swede (Andrew Duggan) in his employ.

This situation sets up the rest of the movie, which quickly settles into a taut stalemate, with the two heroes trapped inside and Kimbrough's men arrayed against them outside. What becomes increasingly apparent, however, is that Bart's quest for revenge is actually a fool's errand: he blames Kimbrough for the death of his wife, several years earlier, but it's soon clear that his wife was not a virtuous woman, that she cheated on him with Kimbrough and many other men, and eventually committed suicide in disgrace. The script has an uncomfortable misogynist streak, a tendency to view women as tramps at worst, fools at best, and at one point Bart even assaults Lucy, spanking her and tearing her dress when she dares to suggest that what happened was his wife's fault as well as Kimbrough's. At the beginning of the film, Bart is a conventional Scott hero, likable and taciturn, with a sly smile that signals his amusement at anyone who dares to mess with him. Things quickly begin to unravel, however, and Bart begins to seem somewhat unhinged. Even his "plan" to confront Kimbrough reeks of lunacy, a lack of foresight that gets him trapped in the stables for the remainder of the film. As the tension builds, it becomes harder and harder to sympathize with the stubborn, angry, vengeance-seeking Bart, who basically makes his own mess and then has to sit in it.


With the film's sympathies tearing away from Bart, who is ostensibly playing the role of the hero, the narrative centers more on the town as a whole. The story is not actually the usual Western tale about a hero seeking revenge against a bad man to right a long-ago wrong, but is a different kind of Western fable, basically High Noon in reverse, with the townsfolk awakening to the rottenness in their midst and coming together around a man who neither wants nor appreciates their help. If the film is not actually about the hero, who ends the film consumed by feelings of hatred, rage and loss, it's about the way the town's people collectively relearn about the value of self-respect. Kimbrough may not have been wholly responsible for the death of Bart's wife, but he is undoubtedly a malevolent influence in Sundown, keeping the people docile with his enforcers posing as lawmen. Led by the righteous local doctor (John Archer), the people of Sundown eventually redeem themselves by speaking up for once, fighting back, not letting the crimes of Kimbrough and his men go unnoticed or unpunished.

Throughout all this, even Kimbrough himself is humanized, as the film's sympathies become more diffuse, harder to trace. It's unclear from the beginning what exactly Kimbrough has done to the people of the town, concretely, other than buy off the sheriff and make some thugs into deputies. He's also a womanizer, keeping company with his longtime girl Ruby (Valerie French) even as he prepares for his wedding; but then, the film's perspective on such things tends to blame the women far more than the men. In the end, Kimbrough is seen as an ordinary man like any other, afraid to face off against Bart but willing to do so anyway to maintain his pride. There are several long scenes leading up this final showdown, with Kimbrough first letting his mistress Ruby know about his inner fears before making more of a show of bravery and steel in the bar downstairs, with the townsfolk all around him. Kimbrough is ultimately more of a fleshed-out, human character than the rigid, unyielding Bart is ever allowed to be, further blurring the boundaries between hero and villain.

This ambiguity is among the film's most interesting components, and Boetticher at every point seeks to problematize traditional Western dynamics, shifting from the usual hero/villain dichotomy to a much more complex situation where everyone in town is equally guilty and complicit. The final gunfight sequences are as suspenseful as expected, with long build-ups for a lightning-fast payoff, though in the last showdown, Boetticher purposefully builds towards an anticlimax to dissipate the accumulating tension. The film is largely static, and sometimes overly talky in its philosophical discourses, and its undercurrents of misogyny are often hard to stomach. It's nevertheless an interesting variation on Western norms from a director who was always thinking about such formal questions.

The Tall T

The Tall T is a crisp, economically made and structured Western, director Budd Boetticher's second collaboration with star Randolph Scott. It's a taut thriller for much of its short length, but Boetticher builds up to it slowly. The rambling, laidback introduction establishes Scott's Pat as a real good old boy with an easy smile and a gentle temperament, a former ranch hand who's only recently struck out on his own, buying a small piece of land and a few goats for himself. The Hollywood Western has such a long tradition of stoic, hard-edged heroes that it's almost shocking to see how cheery and charming Pat is, displaying his folksy good humor as he banters with his friends and engages in a bit of good-natured oneupsmanship with his former boss, a ranch owner who wishes he could get back his best employee. One expects a Walter Brennan type to be engaging in these kinds of games: the wizened old-timer sidekick, always quick to spit out a corny joke or stumble into a rough-and-ready physical gag. It's disarming to see the gangly, square-jawed Scott, with his craggy good looks and tough-guy build, putting himself on even ground with the sidekicks and bit players of the Western genre. This is perhaps one of Boetticher's characteristic touches: a few years earlier, the climax to The Man From the Alamo had gathered together all the usual castoffs of the Hollywood Western — women, cripples, and old-timers — to take center stage as heroes for a change. There's a similar logic at work in making Scott the butt of the joke as well as the traditional über-masculine hero.

Scott's predicament doesn't stay funny for long, though. The introduction is just long enough to give a sense of Pat as a quick-witted, easygoing guy who can't resist a challenge, and who nevertheless has a sense of obligation towards making his ranch work. He is proud to own something that's all his. After losing his horse in a bet — and getting all wet in the process — he hitches a ride on a stagecoach that's carrying the shameless gold-digger Willard Mims (John Hubbard) and his new bride Doretta (Maureen O'Sullivan), who he obviously married because her father owns the biggest copper mine in the area. This sets up a situation that should be familiar to anyone who saw the previous Boetticher/Scott collaboration, Seven Men From Now: the cowardly husband, the wife who deserves better, and Scott, who just happens to be providing a counter-example of proud, self-assured masculinity nearby. The film's igniting incident occurs when the stage is hijacked by a trio of thugs, who Mims quickly alerts to the fact that they have a potential ransom on their hands; he sells out his wife to save his own skin. It's a perfectly schematic Western plot, and one that's well-suited for Boetticher to explore the broad outlines of his typical concerns: the definitions of masculinity, cowardice, and bravery.

If that was all the film had to offer, it'd probably be enough: another well-made, reasonably exciting Western actioner from a director who made a long string of similar movies. But in fact, despite the relative simplicity of his plots and the broad strokes of his morality tales, Boetticher is at his best in the smaller touches, working around the edges of the story, infusing personality and an eccentric eye for nuance into these otherwise relatively standard stories of frontier violence. The humor in the film is surprising enough, and even more surprising is that it's not limited to the folksy introduction. At one point, Boetticher interrupts a taut standoff between Pat and the head outlaw Frank (Richard Boone) with a bit of slapstick that sends the villain into hysterics. The soundtrack, sparsely used throughout, here builds tension as though it's leading towards a dramatic break, then abruptly fizzles out into laughter instead.


The outlaws themselves are an interesting trio, particularly Frank, who is in many ways a sympathetic character. He's sick of the immaturity of his two much younger compatriots, the cold-eyed killer Chink (Henry Silva) and the dim-witted man-boy Billy Jack (Skip Homeier). In many ways, Frank keeps Pat around simply to have someone to talk to; Pat isn't really needed for the whole hostage and ransom plot, and Frank's henchmen would just as soon have killed him straight off. But Frank wants to hear about Pat's ranch — he has dreams of having his own place someday, too — and at one point orders his captive to talk at gunpoint. He's a man desperate for real companionship, a subtext that runs through the whole film and through several different characters, including the frontier stationmaster who Frank's gang kills earlier in the film. Pat himself is a lonely man, unmarried and working land that is not yet well-established enough to even have any other ranch hands. The film's most poignant thrust is the necessity of having someone to talk to in the midst of this forlorn, empty country, a terrain that Boetticher emphasizes with gorgeous wide shots of lone riders isolated in the midst of the rocky, expansive open country.

The film dispenses with its discourse on bravery and cowardice relatively quickly, particularly in comparison to Seven Men, where this remains the central dichotomy driving the story. The craven Mims is the film's least developed character, never rising above the level of caricature, and never getting the moment of redemption that Walter Reed's much more fleshed-out variation on the character earned in the earlier film. Boetticher's penchant for recycling basic plot structures can be misleading; in this film, he is far more interested in the relationship between the lead and the outlaws than he is in probing the contrast between the hero and the coward. This interest is reflected in the geometry of Boetticher's shots, the way he weighs Scott against the three bandits in the frame. There's an in-built tension and drama to the way Boetticher uses the widescreen frame, the way he balances figures against one another. They seem to be forming abstracted shapes together, their bodies standing at the corner points of invisible figures traced in space, the lines drawn by the aimed barrels of guns. When Pat learns that the outlaws have killed two of his friends, a stationmaster and his young son, the camera traces the path of Pat's gaze, towards the well where the bodies have been thrown and then back to the outlaws. Nothing is said, and Scott's stony face betrays little overt emotion, but the camerawork in the scene nevertheless conveys the impact this has on the hero.

What this is all leading to is the even more careful geometry of the film's climax, in which Pat faces down the outlaws one by one, culminating in a violent denouement that must have been downright startling at the time it was released, and which still maintains its bracing intensity. The Tall T is a Western masterpiece from Boetticher, a master of the genre who turns his pulpy, low-budget material into an epic morality play with potent, unforgettable imagery.

The Cimarron Kid

The Cimarron Kid is a solid, thoroughly enjoyable Western with a gang of surprisingly sympathetic outlaws at its core. It tweaks the usual good-man-gone-bad trope by having the young Bill Doolin (Audie Murphy), after being driven to a life as an outlaw by bullying railroad cop Sam Swanson (David Wolfe), fully embrace his new outlaw status despite some lingering reservations. Dubbing himself "the Cimarron Kid," Bill falls in with the gang of train and bank robbers who he had previously been falsely accused of riding with. Bill is basically a decent guy, and would love nothing better than to settle into a life as a cattle rancher — particularly once he meets the lovely farmer's daughter and tough ranch gal Carrie (Beverly Tyler) and realizes that he might have something to live for. Nevertheless, he feels he has no choice but an outlaw's life, and he surrounds himself with a gang of men who are equally sympathetic. They're all robbers, and killers when they need to be, but there's something familial about their setup; they're bonded together by real affection and tenderness for one another.

Originally a gang of brothers who are mostly killed during a botched bank job, the leftovers of the gang, now led by Bill, retain a close-knit clannish mentality. They live more like a family than a gang of robbers. There's the lanky, taciturn Bitter Creek (James Best) and his Spanish girlfriend Rose (Yvette Duguay), who loves him and is loyal to him even though she wishes they could have a better life. There's also their black stable hand Stacey (Frank Silvera), a family man who is treated as their equal even though he doesn't actually participate in the heists. The only problem of the bunch is Red Buck (Hugh O'Brian), a hothead who's the only one of them who seems content as an outlaw, whose only ambition really is to be the biggest, baddest outlaw of all. All the rest of them want only to be free, to have enough money to be rid of this life on the run. They exist as a family, taking care of each other, everybody chipping in, even the feisty, playful Rose, who gathers information for the jobs.


Director Budd Boetticher, who always seems to inject a morally engaged perspective into his Westerns, is concerned not only with the action of this story — though there are plenty of beautifully executed gunfights — but with the internal battles of his characters, particularly Bill. He stages the scenes between Bill and Carrie in order to emphasize the way she tugs on his conscience, as though her very presence is a gravitational force pulling him away from his outlaw life. In one of the best of these shots, Carrie stands in the foreground, looking at an oblique angle past the camera, while in the background Bill lies injured and out of focus, listening to her. Tyler forcefully overacts these scenes, and she's more appealing to look at than she is as an actress, but Boetticher's blocking and framing conveys the essential point anyway. She represents earnest decency for Bill, so distinct from his outlaw world that even when they're in the same shot together they seem to be in completely different spaces.

The film is undeniably at its best though in its action showcases, which are always inventively staged. Boetticher likes to shoot at slightly slanted angles down long corridor-like spaces, using objects caught in the foreground to emphasize the sense of distance. When the law, led by Swanson and the noble marshal John Sutton (Leif Erickson), ambushes Bill's gang, Boetticher shoots the gang's ride into town by setting up at the end of the street, the signs and front porch for a local inn partially obscuring the view down the street. The scene as a whole pivots around the use of the long street, with lawmen blocking off both ends and the outlaws trapped in the middle. The battle soon moves into a nearby train yard instead, where the central bar of a train turntable becomes the focal point of the action. Boetticher's camera frequently looks over the shoulders of the gunmen, peering through smoke and over the edges of the train as it spins around. The scene is all angles and obstructions, emphasizing the act of aiming a gun and the trajectories of bullets; there is a precise geometry to Boetticher's action here, depending as it does on the tight arc of the train as it spins on the turntable, and the paths of the outlaws and posse as they attempt to outflank one another.

Trains of course play a crucial role in the film in general, and at several points Boetticher's setups are reminiscent of the world's most famous (and most fundamental) train film, the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat; again, those slanted angles emphasizing the linearity of the action. Boetticher's geometrical precision also shows through in his use of two virtually identical scenes that take place in a barn, involving gun barrels peeking through the slats of the horse stalls. The first time, Bill and his gang have their guns trained on Marshal Sutton, and the second time it's Bill himself who is in the crosshairs. But there's more than just an ironic reversal to this doubling, and the scene's recurrence at pivotal points in the story serves to make a moral point. This mirroring proves that Bill has been correct in his better instincts, that his refusal to kill without necessity is not only not his undoing, but is in fact the one thing that ultimately saves and redeems him. This is a profoundly moral Western, but also a profoundly entertaining and exciting one, a shoot-em-up with a brain as well as a lot of bullets.

12/27: The Man From the Alamo; California

The Man From the Alamo is a Budd Boetticher Western dating from before the director's more well-known association with actor Randolph Scott. In this film, Glenn Ford plays John Stroud, the unfortunate man chosen by lot to leave the Alamo just before it's overrun, in order to head north and try to save his family, along with the families of several other soldiers, who were being attacked in northern Texas. This gesture gets Stroud branded as a coward by those who don't know his goal, and his stigma is heightened when the Alamo falls to the enemy and everyone left inside is killed. To make matters worse, when Stroud arrives in his home town, he finds that all the families he was sent to protect, including his own, have already been murdered — and not by the Mexican army, he learns, but by unscrupulous Texans posing as Mexicans and hoping to enrich themselves in the melee.

Stroud immediately plans to enact his revenge on these rebels, led by the nasty Jess Wade (Victor Jory), but his reputation as a coward precedes him and makes life difficult, particularly in a town where most of the women's husbands are dead at the Alamo. Boetticher seems especially interested in the line between cowardice and bravery, and the question of which side of the line Stroud's departure from the Alamo should fall on. Stroud is introduced, at the beginning of the film, committing a largely senseless act of bravery by leaping up onto the fort's ramparts in the midst of a firefight, running along the ledge and risking death, simply in order to replace the flag on the fort's ramparts, which had been knocked down by a cannon shot. This is conventional bravery, and certainly the movie version of bravery — risking death unnecessarily, even if the immediate aim of the risk is trivial. This action is implicitly contrasted with Stroud's later decision to leave the fort, which is perceived by all who witness it as a shocking display of cowardice. And yet, in this case Stroud has a definite and useful goal in mind, which is to some extent self-serving (protecting his own family) but also selfless and noble (protecting the families of others). That he risks his own reputation in order to achieve this goal adds an additional element of self-sacrifice to his decision.

This examination of bravery and cowardice plays out within a tautly constructed adventure narrative, which Boetticher tells in just 79 minutes, packing the film with action and just enough character detail to render his hero convincingly. Stroud's reputation as a coward also serves as a metaphor for all manner of prejudices and various signs of "weakness" in the harsh world of the American frontier. If being a coward is just about the worst thing with which a man can be branded, it places him only a few notches down from Mexicans, who earned a status of shame by virtue of being both non-white and members of a nation that was at war with Texas. Thus, Stroud further cements his outsider status by bringing around a young Mexican boy who used to work at his now-destroyed ranch, and who he has more or less adopted as a son. Also low in the pecking order are women, who are considered entirely defenseless and in need of a man, and the crippled, who are unable to engage in traditional "manly" pursuits like fighting in the army.

The film exposes all of these underlying assumptions of the Western in its denouement, in which the coward, the one-armed local doctor John Gage (Chill Wills), and a number of women, must defend a wagon train against Wade's marauding gang. With all the menfolk off fighting the Mexican army, it falls to this motley assortment of supporting players, usually relegated to the sidelines in Hollywood Westerns, to take center stage and fight to protect themselves. Boetticher privileges the sideline characters here, bringing them slowly forward in the narrative. When he first introduces them, they're part of the traditional Western structure, under the protective wing of an army detachment. But as the soldiers and all the other able-bodied men head off from the main plotline, into other stories, Boetticher sticks with the wagon train rather than following the soldiers, and all that's left is the bottom tiers of the Western's de-facto caste system.

This deconstruction of the Western is unexpected in a low-budget oater like this, but Boetticher manages to sneak in a great deal of subtext of this sort within the film's fast-moving framework. It's a solid, economical B-Western with a surprisingly complex moral examination at its core, as well as a subtle querying of the Western's biases and ideological blind spots.

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California is director John Farrow's epic ode to the resiliency of the frontier spirit, and especially to the beauty of the eponymous state, whose statehood is the dilemma at the center of this film. Set in the period of the first gold strikes in California, and the ensuing mass migration to the largely unsettled land, the film charts the progression of the territory from a totally lawless frontier, to a speculative land ripe for exploitation, to the cusp of statehood and entry into the "civilized" boundaries of the Union. This civilizing narrative is often at the heart of the classical Hollywood Westerns, which as a body of work are about the tension between the "wild" West and the gradually spreading society of the then-nascent United States. Here, this tension is localized in California, where the twin aims of gold and power conspire to keep the territory uncivilized and free of laws for as long as possible.

When the film starts, John Trumbo (Ray Milland) is an army deserter who agrees to lead a wagon train of farmers west to California in order to escape his past. Along with the farmers, he reluctantly brings aboard the volatile Lily (Barbara Stanwyck), who is spurned by the locals as a woman of ill repute, though the film never makes it clear whether she's earned this reputation or not. But as soon as the wagons set off, the announcement that gold has been struck in California reaches them, and the farmers all immediately abandon the train in a mad scramble west, leaving behind only Trumbo and the Irish farmer Michael Fabian (Barry Fitzgerald). The two eventually make it west, and find the expected gold rush fever, with the town in the tight grip of the tyrannical former slave trader Pharoah Coffin (George Coulouris). As if his name isn't a good enough clue, Coffin is the film's villain, a cartoonishly exaggerated mustache-stroking kind of villain in the grand old tradition, pure evil kitsch. His evil is also shot through with a solid dose of fear and cowardice, especially from his slave-ship past — at one point, a breeze through the trees reminds him of the sound of "naked feet shuffling on the deck."

Once Trumbo and Fabian arrive in this Coffin-controlled town, the film begins leaping frantically forward, constantly shifting style and never quite settling on just what kind of film this is supposed to be. At one point, it's a rollicking gold rush adventure, then a gambling drama, then a chronicle of political manipulations, then an epic shootout. It even tries to be a folksy musical at intervals, though it falls entirely on its face at that — in the song Stanwyck tries to sing herself, she proves a much worse singer than an actress, and a later more tender song is obviously overdubbed. In another scene, the farmers' abandonment of their wagons to flee west is accompanied by a ludicrous chanted song about the lure of gold. Moments like this, and the stirring landscape montage and patriotic anthem that opens the film, are unavoidably cheesy and completely halt the film's pace.

Not that the pace is so carefully modulated otherwise. Rapid shifts in tone and a massive pile-up of plot elements keep the film rocketing from one thing to the next with only sporadic measured moments along the way. The film is only slightly longer than an hour and a half, and its complex narrative seems to demand much more. It only feels like an epic because so much happens, but the major events are often rushed by. Fabian's stint as a politician and subsequent election to represent the town in a statehood caucus is barely a blip in the narrative, though it represents a major turn of events, and it's a shock when, in the next scene, he talks about five weeks going by. Meanwhile, the local saloon changes ownership so many times in the course of ten minutes of screentime that it's dizzying. Farrow simply attempts to cram too much action and too many twists into a film not big enough to support them all, and as a result the uneven pacing leaves a lot to be desired.

If the film largely falters on the large scale, it's much more successful in short bursts, in individual scenes, and in Farrow's careful camerawork. Especially noteworthy is the way he handles space in two matching scenes set at Coffin's palatial hacienda. In the first, Trumbo comes to visit his adversary, and the two have a confrontational conversation, walking around the room as the camera tracks them. Finally, as they walk towards the door with Trumbo getting ready to leave, the camera pans around to catch them in a two-shot, revealing another room off to the side, with Lily standing behind a piano and watching them. Her appearance, as Coffin's fiancee and the object of a fierce love/hate relationship for Trumbo, unsettles the scene's tension and serves as the hidden anchor for the camera throughout the scene. Tucked off to the side, listening in, she's unseen until the very end and her appearance draws attention to the camera's careful movement, which is revealed to have been conspiring (with Coffin) to keep her hidden all through the preceding scene. This scene is mirrored towards the end of the film, when Trumbo and Coffin again have a confrontation in the same room, although this time it's much more violent. Lily is again off to the side in the adjoining room, unseen throughout the scene, as the camera follows the raving mad Coffin, walking around the room with a pistol and muttering to himself. His showdown with the unarmed Trumbo ends when Lily emerges from the other room and shoots Coffin from offscreen; as he falls, the camera pans over to the side, revealing her standing there, just as it had revealed her in the earlier scene.

California excels in small touches like this, in the moments at which the subtlety and dramatic weight of Farrow's direction overcomes the sweeping gestures and grandiose aesthetics of the film as a whole. The film hangs together very awkwardly, so that its individual parts are much more than the sum. Still, it's an enjoyable film that delves into the conflict between civilization and disorder, and even if its grand ambitions fail, it works quite well as a rough-and-ready B-Western.