Ride Lonesome

(Catch my previous Western film review out here: Buchanan Rides Alone)

The fifth installment of director Budd Boetticher and actor Randolph Scott’s Ranown Cycle of Westerns, Ride Lonesome, is a return to form after two relatively low quality dramas immediately preceding it: Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone. Although the film was scripted by Burt Kennedy (who scripted five out of seven of the films in the cycle) and was executive produced by Harry Joe Brown (who served in this role on a total of four out of the seven pictures), Ride Lonesome was the first move toward a producer credit for director Budd Boetticher who took this aforementioned credit presumably because he offered up some money toward the film’s budget or sacrificed some of his director’s fee to create it to his own artistic specifications. On future productions, Boetticher would realize he could retain more creative control in such a position and as such, Harry Joe Brown’s involvement would later be discarded in lieu of Boetticher producing and directing the remaining films in the cycle himself.

The film is also notable for the first reoccurring actor in the series besides the Ranown lead Randolph Scott. This actor was one Karen Steele who had previously played the character of damsel in distress and heroine Lucy Summerton in Decision at Sundown. Steele would later appear in one more film of the cycle, Westbound, before appearing in Budd Boetticher’s 1960 gangster film The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. 

Ride Lonesome begins as a bounty hunter named Ben Brigade (Scott) sulks through a deep rocky gorge looking for his quarry: a man named Billy John who killed someone in cold blood back in Santa Cruz. Billy John and his ilk represent unrepentant evil throughout the film and threaten, at the film’s opening coda, to make the picture into another stale classical Western exercise in form. Brigade tracks the young man down, but is surrounded immediately by Billy John’s brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef) and posse who threaten to kill the ageing bounty hunter if he tries to take the youth in. Brigade is crazed, however, now a man seemingly with nothing left to lose. He tells the posse that if they shoot at him, Billy John will die immediately as well, and aims his rifle toward the boy’s head. They relent and Brigade’s long trip toward Santa Cruz begins.

Along the way, Brigade runs into a woman named Carrie Lane (Steele) whose husband has been missing for some time. As there are roving Mescalero Apache Indians about and out for blood in the territory, Brigade believes her husband has been killed, and his gut reactions are later vindicated when a group of Mescalero approach and try to trade a couple of horses to Brigade for the young woman, one of which belonged to her late husband.

In addition to angry Mescalero Indians and the nihilistic evils of Frank’s posse trying to kill Brigade and get their hands on Billy John, there is the duo of Sam Boone and Whit (James Coburn) who are old friends of Brigade’s, but are found in an abandoned stagecoach stop where they seemed to have set themselves up to rob the next unsuspecting passerby. Instead, they latch onto Brigade’s crew and offer their help in warding off Frank’s gang, with the implicit knowledge between the two parties that Sam and Whit will rebel and take Billy John for themselves when the opportunity comes. Sam and Whit own a large ranch out in the Western territories and wish to work the soil and live upright moral lives, but they both have committed crimes in their pasts and therefore must turn in a criminal of Billy John’s caliber to receive absolution in the name of the law, clear their names, and once again build their reputations as upstanding members of society.

By the film’s denouement, we learn the true reasoning behind Brigade’s quarrel with Billy John. We learn of the untimely, unnatural death of his late wife at the hands of Frank who killed her out of purely psychotic reasoning. But the two have their day in the sun, and the our hero barely scrapes by once again. Brigade’s methods are extra-judicial, and as a bounty hunter he is a figure both outside of civil society and necessary for its continuation in the Old West’s social system. He is a heroic figure who represents the forces of moral law whilst often breaking with the strict rules of legal dictum, and thereby he is an antihero. His foils are the unrepentant totally evil Frank who hung Brigade’s wife only to wound Brigade’s pride and emotional stability, as well as the upstanding and moral Sam Boone who is loyal to his friends and wishes to live a life of good moral virtue but has a dark past that he is always running away from: a dark past he may only be able to escape through one final, fatal confrontation with his friend Brigade. A confrontation against the basic tenets of Sam’s nature. But hell, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Ride Lonesome is a classic Revisionist Western before the term became vogue, and a refined Classical Western at a time when the genre was becoming stultified and stagnant. It is a very basic tale of one man’s justifications up against the justifications of numerous other actors, all with their ‘own reasons’ (to borrow a Jean Renoir-ian comment on the banality of evil and human action). It is a story told a hundred times made all the more potent and powerful through its broaching of postmodern morality, or anti-morality as it were, attendant within the post-World War II world wherein the bountiful fruits of human rationality gave way to the wasteland:

‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.                                                                              And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,                                                          And the dry stone no sound of water.’

A West with no moral sentiments recognized as anything greater than human invention. An innocence lost, squandered, needlessly slaughtered at the sacrificial table under the knife of a father working the miracles of man, for the sake of man, but in the name of his God. And only to one end: to leave the world ignoble, stripped of all honor, dignity, and fellow feeling. To leave behind a realm wherein there is surely no revelation at hand.

 

Cody Ward

Decision at Sundown

(Catch my previous Western film review here: The Tall T)

The third film in Budd Boetticher’s Western Ranown Cycle is also the second picture the director made in 1957. Like his previous picture, The Tall T, Decision at Sundown was produced by Harry Joe Brown would continue on to produce three of the remaining four pictures in the cycle. This film was Boetticher’s first collaboration with screenwriter Charles Lang who would later contribute the screenplay for one more picture in the series. But most importantly, the heroine of Decision at Sundown, was one Karen Steele who would later appear in two more films from the cycle, Ride Lonesome and Westbound as well as Boetticher’s first film after completion of the Ranown Cycle: 1960’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. 

A man named Bart Allison (Randolph Scott) and his friend Sam open the film as a pair of outlaws who have commandeered a stagecoach and forced its drivers to bring them a few miles out from a town called Sundown. From there, they ride horses into town and immediately begin to use their gifts of gab to track down a man named Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll) who has apparently done some wrong to Bart in the past. After asking around, they find that Tate is indeed in town, and has become something a big shot in these parts with his connections to the town’s lawmen Sheriff Swede Hansen and Deputy Spanish. Furthermore, today of all days is Tate’s wedding day and he is set to marry a young dame named Lucy Summerton (Steele) whose father’s riches are the real object of Tate’s attentions.

As Sam and Bart make their way into a barber shop and make clear their open animosity toward Tate, the aforementioned father of Lucy Summerton, Mr. Charles Summerton, is present. He runs back to tell Tate about the two seedy-looking rogues who came into town with five o’clock shadow and bad intentions. But when Summerton visits Tate, he finds him holed up in his hotel room with a young woman named Ruby James (Valerie French) who has long captured Tate’s amorous attentions, but has escaped his matrimonial intentions by being of low breeding and with no family fortune to function as a dowry. Tate is revealed here to be a player, a greedy man, and an all around jerk, though none of these attributes quite qualify the man as one deserving of death by the guns of an outlaw.

As Sam and Bart cavort around town, they make their way to the local saloon where drinks that day are all on Tate’s dime. Bart, not wishing to accrue any debts of any kind to his mortal enemy, decides to pay the barkeep instead of mooching off of Tate. But the local Sheriff, who is in Tate’s posse and pocket, dislikes this behavior. He takes Bart’s money, throws it in a spittoon, and then hocks a big one right in it. Bart keeps his cool, which throws the Sheriff into an even more hostile attitude. Unfortunately for him, Bart has broken no laws and as such, cannot and should not be subject to any brute force by the sheriff’s hands. Sheriff Swede leaves in disgust, much to the pleasure of the barkeep who openly dislikes Tate and all of his ilk.

After depositing their horses at a local stable, Sam and Bart meet the town Doctor, one Mr. Storrow, who also admits that he dislikes Tate and what he and his friends have done to his town. When time for the wedding comes around, the doctor attends arm in arm with Ruby James as a visual sort of protest. Bart enters the chapel with his gun, and instead of pumping Tate full of lead right there and then, he speaks up when given the chance during the ceremony (‘Speak now or forever hold your peace.’) and promises to kill Tate before sundown that evening. He also warns Lucy not to marry the man as she will surely be a widow the following morning.

The concept sounds good in theory, but in practice going to a wedding and making such big proclamations about planning to kill the groom don’t go over so well. The Sheriff and his Deputy follow Sam and Bart out, pick up their guns at the door, and end up trapping the two men inside the stables where a stand-off occurs for hours on end. Eventually, Deputy Spanish makes his move and tries to enter the room from a window, only to have his gun arm hacked into with a large meat hook. Sam and Bart spare his life, the doctor arrives and heals him up, and as time carries on, the townsfolk begin to realize that this moment might be their only chance to rest back their town from the likes of Sheriff Swede and Tate Kimbrough.

After an egregious event in which Sam leaves the stable to give up and is shot down in cold blood by the Swede, the Doctor, the barkeep, a local ranch owner Morley Chase and his boys arrest and disarm all of the Sheriff’s men and local militia who have the stable surrounded. The Sheriff is then forced to take on Bart Allison mano e mano, which ends in the former’s death. And then, only Tate is left.

By this point in the film, there have been mentions of Bart’s reasons for wanting to kill Tate. We learn that Tate screwed Bart’s wife Mary years ago while he was away on a trip. Mary killed herself some time thereafter and Bart blamed Tate who he thought had raped his wife and left her with the requisite psychical trauma to go and off herself like she’d done. It is slowly revealed that in fact, Mary was a loose woman and was seeing men like Tate behind Bart’s back all the time. Moreover, she was so difficult to reign in not because of some mere moral defect, but because she suffered from some sort of psycho-sexual disorder that also pushed her toward suicide. As Bart learns of this reality, he ends up leaving Tate alive, though the townsfolk cast him out of Sundown nonetheless, and they champion Bart as a hero.

Unlike the traditional Western with its clear black and white distinctions, here we have only obfuscation. Tate is no devil in disguise. No, he is a man with a sordid past and a charming demeanor who finds it easy to woo women, and just so happened to woo the wrong one. Bart is no true hero vanquishing evil from a town for the benefit of the good townsfolk. He is bent upon revenge based on mistaken assumptions about a past event. And he couldn’t ultimately give a damn about the well-being of the town itself. Neither man is totally evil, and neither is unrepentantly good. They are real people, populating one of the most realistic Western scenarios wherein gunslingers are not gods with inhuman reflexes working in the name of one metaphysical entity or another, but human beings, flawed and weak-natured as any others.

 

Cody Ward

[Up next: Buchanan Rides Alone]

The Tall T

(Catch my previous Western film review here: Seven Men from Now)

The Tall T, released in 1957, is the second Western in actor Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher’s late-fifties Ranown Cycle. The film was the second collaboration in the projected series with screenwriter Burt Kennedy, as well as the first film collaboration in the cycle with producer Harry Joe Brown who would continue on to produce three more of the films. The Tall T is probably also the most well-known of the film’s in the Ranown Cycle today as it was discussed by popular American auteur filmmaker Martin Scorsese in his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, specifically in his Western subsection of Part 1 The director as storyteller. 

In this fifteen minute segment of Scorsese’s sprawling send-up to the films that inspired him as a young man and a budding filmmaker, he discusses how the changing of the times in American society in the mid-twentieth century can be registered and understood merely by watching three different Westerns starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford, each separated by a production window of about a decade each. The winsome, roguish Wayne of Stagecoach evolves into the middle-aged, morally commanding general of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon before finally evolving into the Misfit of 1957’s The Searchers. This figure is nihilistic, hardened by his times and more of a comment on post-WWII sensibilities in the new moral vacuum of our world’s wasteland than anything truly reminiscent of the figures of the Old West.

Scorsese recounts how the same trend toward nihilism, toward moral relativism, and toward absurdity in the Western, and by consequence in the artistic and cultural landscape of American life, became more obvious than ever before in the 1950s. He points to the example of Anthony Mann’s sparse Freudian Westerns like The Furies and works like The Naked Spur in which even the usually-jovial and father-like James Stewart becomes an unrepentant immoralist, as a bounty hunter who has lost all sense of honor and dignity, as a man who would track down an innocent man, a framed man, with a bounty on his head, kill him, and then haul his body into town merely to claim a reward.

Likewise, through the example of The Tall T as a stand-in for the entire Ranown Cycle, Scorsese explains that the nihilistic and amoral culture fomented by the rock and roll revolution of the late 40s and early 50s was reflected almost solely in one cinematic genre, the Western, which would premeditate the American New Wave by more than fifteen years. Auteurs like Budd Boetticher worked at this time within the uniquely American cinematic genre of the Western, and those auteurs amongst the studio ranks brought to bear upon it a feeling of moral vacuity in a world wherein scientific advances had increasingly chiseled away at any sense of human moral, ontological, spiritual, or cosmological superiority. A world wherein religious men and women could commit genocide against their brothers en masse in concentration camps. Wherein Christian nations warred against Christian nations and scientists at the beck and call of their military superiors created tools and weapons to harness the very power of the gods themselves.

Boetticher’s lone gunman, always played by Randolph Scott in the Ranown Cycle, is a moral figure with a code of honor, a code of right action. In this sense, he is a classical Western protagonist, a force of good and a stand-in for the bringer of salvation. However, his antagonists are never as morally simplistic, never totally evil figures in any sense. In Seven Men from Now, Lee Marvin played opposite Scott as a roguish figure out to help the lone gunman in his quest to decommission those who killed his wife in a hold-up at the bank back in his hometown. But Marvin’s only condition is that he must get the money at the end of the mission, which runs counter to Scott’s plan to vindicate himself by returning it to the bank, becoming a hero in his town, and once again being named Sheriff. Marvin’s aim is not immoral as he did not kill anyone to get the many except for murderers, but he nonetheless runs up against Scott for personal reasons, which eventually forces the two men to shoot it out, and honorably so I might add.

In The Tall T, Scott plays Pat Brennan, an ageing ranch owner who is unmarried and thereby without an heir to his vast holdings. After a visit to a neighboring ranch on which he makes a bet for his horse that he can ride a particularly aggressive bull, and loses, he is forced to walk the twenty or so miles back to his ranch. Along the way, his friend Rintoon, a local stagecoach driver picks him up and allows him to ride with the newlyweds therein, Willard and Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Sullivan), as they just happen to be passing by Brennan’s ranch on the way back into town. Unfortunately, at the first stagecoach station along the way, they find that the entire place has been taken over a trio of outlaws who have also killed everyone within and placed their bodies out back in the well. The group is more brutal than most outlaws portrayed by this point in time in Western films, and the gruesome nature of their actions is more closely akin in its depravity to the inscrutable actions of outlaws from the Western fictions of Cormac McCarthy more than two decades later, or to the antagonists, like The Misfit, in Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic works being published contemporaneously in the mid-1950s.

Brennan’s pal Rintoon is gunned down, as would be his three passengers if not for the fact that Mrs. Mims’ father is a big copper mine businessman in the region and may potentially be able to pay a handsome ransom for her safe return. The money-hungry Willard Mims is the one to originally propose such an option to the bandits, which unveils his character as corrupted, and will ultimately lead to the much more honorable leader of the bandits, Frank Usher (Richard Boone), to gun the man down.

Usher takes a liking to Brennan over the course of their days waiting for the ransom money to turn up out in the desert, and he reveals that his two misogynistic, drunken pals are kept around for their skill with pistols and other firearms. Usher has tired of their presence and seems to be intimating that Brennan could live if he helped him to take out the two goons, turned his back on his ranch, and decided to join Usher. But Brennan will have none of this talk, he is a plain spoken man who understands that life is hard, but that crime is no way to build one’s fortune, and that Usher’s past crimes will dog him till the day he dies, preventing him thereby from ever attaining a ranch like Brennan’s, and the sense of home, of security, and belonging it brings.

In one of the greatest scenes in the film, Usher responds merely that he has no choice but to live his life of crime, no choice but to continue falling in with this crowd. Brennan merely responds, ‘Don’t you?’ The tensions are palpable and Usher becomes heated, almost reveals his scorpion nature beneath the jovial exterior, and then decides to suppress it when he hears his companions approach from below the ridge.

Ultimately, the two men must face off in mortal combat with one another, something which could have been avoided if not for the animistic tendencies of Usher’s very being. And we all know who the victor turns out to be, though neither man is diminished in heroic stature by the end of the conflict.

 

Cody Ward

[Next up: Decision at Sundown)

Seven Men from Now

(Check out my previous Western film review here: A Lawless Street)

Seven Men from Now was the first in a series of 7 Westerns created between 1956 and 1960, all directed by Budd Boetticher and staring Randolph Scott. The series is known as the Ranown Cycle and in each film, the exploits of a lone gunman who has undertaken a mission or a journey, on account of a lost past, moves through a world seemingly right on the precipice of nihilism, with no more great Trad Western metaphysical distinctions between good and evil, with likable rogues who coil in friendship, for a time, before unfurling to lash out and make clear the substance of their natures. This cycle is the predecessor of the Revisionist Western par excellence.

Apart from the pairing of director Boetticher and actor Scott, there are a few other technicians who make the cycle a real collection of films. Screenwriter Burt Kennedy contributed the scripts for four of the seven pictures (including Seven Men from Now),
while Charles Lang contributed scripts for two (Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone) of the remaining three. After Seven Men from Now, producer Harry Joe Brown funded the following three picture in the cycle, and Budd Boetticher himself took up the helm to produce two of the three remaining pictures. With such a tight-knit group of recurring characters on the production side of the Ranown Cycle, Boetticher had an opportunity to do something that few directors have ever had: to create a true group of films in which his artistic integrity would be paramount in the creation of each. The result: today the films are all held in high esteem with critical ratings on sites like Rotten Tomatoes of 100% for the majority of the films in the cycle, and Boetticher is something of a legendary director of American cinema for his great contributions to Western filmmaking, specifically through the achievement of the Ranown Cycle. 

In the first film of this series, Randolph Scott plays a mysterious drifter named Ben Stride who is out for blood. He is searching for a particular group of men, seven men who recently knocked over a bank in a town called Silver Springs. They left with some $20k in gold and probably nearly crippled the town’s economy thereby, but this is not the major point of contention for Stride. No, they also killed a clerk at the bank during their operation. A clerk who just so happened to be his wife.

And Stride blames himself. You see, Stride used to be the Sheriff in Silver Springs, but he was no good at politics and was slowing becoming an old man who some of the townsfolk didn’t see fit to keep the peace any longer. When elections came up for the new Sheriff position, he was voted out in lieu of a younger man. Although he fought to regain his reputation as a gunslinger and an able-bodied keeper of the peace, he and his wife were on hard times with no stable income. She took the job as a clerk of the town’s bank to make ends meet, and as such, he can see how old Ben Stride felt he was responsible: If he had kept a hold of his job, she would have never been in bank in the first place.

Stride’s mission now is to kill all seven of the men who were responsible for the heist, to reclaim the money and send it back to the bank, and to thereby regain his position as the town’s Sheriff through his overwhelming acts of valor, of glory, and of revenge. But along the way, he runs into a young couple, The Greers, who are travelling in the same direction as himself, toward Flora Vista where a few of the robbers lie in wait for Stride’s arrival. The husband, John Greer, was given a job, unbeknownst to his wife or to Ben Stride to deliver the chest with the money to the men in Flora Vista for $500 (no small sum today, let alone a century and a half ago).

To add another complication to the entire affair, a man named Bill Masters (played by the great Lee Marvin) travelling with a seedy gunman named Clete, knows Stride, knows about the money, and decides to tag along with Stride to help kill the robbers. However, it is made explicit to Stride by Masters that he intends take the money after the mission has been completed, and he knows that Stride will not just hand it over willingly. He knows that there will be a final confrontation between the two men, and he respects Stride nonetheless. There is no feeling throughout any part of the film that this is a tale of good versus evil. Instead, it is a tale of roguish figures with different, but no less honorable moral codes butting heads merely to survive, and if able, to thrive out in this desert wasteland.

The men who killed Stride’s wife did not do so out of enmity for the one-time Sheriff of Silver Springs. No, they didn’t even know that she was his wife until well after Stride took after them and began hunting them like dogs. The men killed Mrs. Stride by accident during the hold-up, and if they knew then what they know now, they would have never entertained such a thought, would have been much more careful to leave her alive and unharmed. Stride is no longer a Sheriff, and by hunting these men down, he is merely acting out a revenge fantasy at best, which is validated legally merely as a bounty run, and at worst is making a supposed heroic play to win back hi sold job and the esteem that came with it. John Greer is low on money and needs to get he and his wife to California where the prospect of making a better lifer for themselves is at least plausible. So he takes the job of hauling away the money, no questions asked. And Masters is out for money, but will ultimately not try to gun down Stride without a fair fight in the open, not without a traditional shootout to see who has the quicker draw.

Moreover, the men who killed Stride’s wife often ambush the ageing one-time lawman, but once outwitted and brought down to Stride’s level, down below the rocks fighting out in the open, they fight, and die like men with honor. John Greer realizes the error of his ways and refuses to hand over the money to the men once he finds out what they had to do to get it. He tries to aid Stride by hailing a Sheriff in Flora Vista, but is gunned down by the men in town who killed Stride’s wife. Masters, proves his honor by fighting like a man, mano e mano with Stride. And Stride proves his honor by not taking advantage of John Greer’s death to woo his beautiful wife Annie Greer (Gail Russell), despite the too being obviously amorous.

Seven Men from Now is taut and gripping, it is dark and amoral, it is ultimately heroic though tragic, and it is a dramatic work with a comedic eye toward the absurdity of life. And as one man falls after another because of the consequences of their unwitting actions or through their motivations, their basic core natures, the bodies leave no real emotional imprint on the viewer beyond the recognition that one day, our lives too will end, and when they do, nothing will change, life will go on, and we, the one-time players in this farcical game called life, have only dealt our final hand, a losing hand, the last of our chips on the table. And not even a crucifix in that death-hand will change the final equation: Death is Oblivion.

 

Cody Ward

[Next up: The Tall T]