According
to film historian Jeanine Basinger, director Budd Boetticher often described
the plots to the seven Westerns he made with actor/producer Randolph Scott as, "Here
comes Randy. He's alone. What's his problem?" Between 1956 and 1960, Boetticher
and Scott pared down the Western genre, making sublimely formulaic,
just-under-80-minute movies that told morally nuanced stories. Typically, Scott
played a taciturn loner who inspired a mixture of caution and pity, and
typically, his character held powerful men accountable for the troubles in his
own past, including the women he lost. Sometimes Scott's characters were
good-humored, but there were always dark clouds rolling behind his squinty
eyes. To again quote Boetticher-via-Basinger, in any given Boetticher/Scott
film, "You could've traded the villain's part and Randy's part."
The long-awaited The Films Of Budd Boetticher contains five
Boetticher/Scott collaborations in a compact, reasonably priced package that
should be considered essential for movie buffs. (The duo's first effort, the
marvelous 7 Men From Now, was released on DVD in a nice edition two years ago; their
lesser film Westbound remains on the shelf at Warner Brothers.) When Boetticher
fans try to explain his movies' appeal, they often use words like "simple" and "entertaining,"
but those virtues are hardly negligible. Boetticher didn't go in for a lot of
setup, and didn't care for denouement. In his films, Scott rides into the frame
during the opening credits. He meets some people, reveals his intentions, then
gets mired in a situation partly created by his own stubbornness. The movies
hook their audiences early, move through their plots quickly, and end with some
acceptable version of justice done.
Consider 1957's Decision At Sundown, which has Scott arriving
in town to disrupt the wedding of local fat-cat John Carroll. Scott mistakenly
believes he's defending the honor of his late wife, but even though Carroll
isn't guilty in quite the way Scott thinks he is, he isn't exactly a good guy
either, and as Scott holes up in a makeshift fortress on Main Street, the
townsfolk gradually realize he's fighting a battle they wish they'd had the
courage to fight themselves. No one's intentions are wholly pure, and yet the
end result is, to some extent, "fair." In fact, the moral ambiguity of Decision
At Sundown
is borderline comic, which is why Boetticher and Scott were able to parody it
so well a year later with Buchanan Rides Alone, in which Scott is thrust
into the affairs of a wealthy family and subtly turns one against the other.
Like Decision At Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone is a little too blunt—probably
because both were written by Charles Lang instead of Boetticher/Scott's
favorite screenwriter, Burt Kennedy—but both use their short running
times to flesh out a whole community of patrons, wage-slaves, and wild cards.
Kennedy worked on the remaining three films in
this set, showing his skill at what he called "playing a small story against a
big background." This is especially true in two movies that send Scott out into
barren landscapes on manhunts. In 1959's excellent Ride Lonesome, Scott intends to arrest
affable outlaw James Best, but has to contend with Best's brother and two other
vigilantes (Pernell Roberts and James Coburn) who have intentions of their own.
In 1960's Comanche Station, Scott makes a deal with the Indians to buy back
a woman he believes is his long-missing wife, but when the woman turns out to
be someone else entirely, Scott has to compete with other mercenaries to reap
the reward for her return. Both films are about rivals locked in symbiotic
relationships far from civilization, and both use the Cinemascope frame to
diminish the significance of the hero's quest.
But the best film in The Films Of Budd
Boetticher
is 1957's The Tall T—based on an Elmore Leonard story—which has Scott
embroiled in a kidnapping plot when the stagecoach he's riding on gets hijacked
by dandyish villain Richard Boone. Boone's crew holds Scott and his fellow
passengers hostage, setting off a game of psychological give-and-take in which
even the "good guys" reveal themselves as less than noble. It's telling that
Boone sees in Scott a kindred spirit, and at one point all but asks if they can
quit trying to kill each other and just ride off together. And it's true to the
nature of the Boetticher/Scott films that even when the wicked have a change of
heart, they're still damned by the choices they made long ago.
Key features: The fine feature-length documentary Budd
Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, plus scholar commentaries on The Tall T and Ride Lonesome, and short appreciations
by filmmakers Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Taylor Hackford.