Streaming on Amazon Prime - Barrie Pattison unearths DEAD FOR A DOLLAR (Walter Hill, USA, 2022)

Making a comeback at eighty may not have been one of Walter Hill’s best career moves. His 2022 Dead for a Dollar (no connection to the 1968 John Ireland film) is a presentable enough cowboy movie but it keeps on registering as something that isn’t quite right, despite nice camerawork and some good performances.

We kick off in 1897 at Albuquerque Federal prison, with Bounty Man Christoph Waltz, who turned him in for the reward, warning time served Willem Dafoe to stay clear when they let him loose. The ochre colour scheme that will persist through the film is already dominant. Strong colours are all but absent. Allow for a bit of red blood.

Willem Dafoe

Christoph Waltz

The military (“Rider approaching, sir”) have a new assignment for Waltz. A (black) deserter has kidnapped rich man Hamish Linklater’s wife and is waiting South of the border for the $10,000 ransom. Waltz gets $2000 to bring her back and they give him (black) sharp shooter Warren Burke as sidekick on the job. Burke has details of the payout location. Waltz is already suspicious. “Private Jones just hands out maps after he deserts and abducts a white woman!”

After taking down a few colourful minor characters, Waltz has the job well in hand, getting warned off (“I don’t think we made a new friend”) by local Grandee Benjamin Bratt. Rachel (The Marvelous Miss Maisel) Brosnahan’s “Decorative wife” part is built up to meet 2020s demands and comes with her own purse pistol, which is a plot element. With her alleged captor Brandon Scott in deceptively servile local Captain Fidel Gomez’ jail, in view of a couple of men who have been hanging on the main street gallows a few days, they wait for interested parties to converge

Rachel Brosnahan, Christoph Waltz, Warren Burke

The film is dedicated to Budd Boetticher but it's more The Professionals, with a bit of Joe Kid and Rio Bravo mixed in, and the comparisons don’t benefit Hill’s movie. He never did have John Sturges’ eye for western scenics. Horsemen don’t converse in the saddle. The gunfights are unmemorable. Dialogues interrupt proceedings to get in lines like “Find the Gringo scumbags and kill them.” What about the pair of nuns? The use of fades is tame, though there is a nice wipe on a sideways tracking. 

There are a few reminders, like a figure eight mask view and a bull whip duel to recalis l the ones in Song of Scheherazade or Lewis Milestone’s Kangaroo, along with suitable atmosphere touches like Brosnahan playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on the upright or a plate overrun by roaches. The Latins are gangbusters at violating stereotypes - Gomez (particulaly), Brat, Luis Chávez, Alfredo Quiroz and (nice surprise) Diane Villegas, who joins in the big shoot-out.

This one is good enough to drag out of its obscurity, particularly for admirers of Hill’s The Long Riders, 48 Hours and Last Man Standing.

Streaming and on DVD - Tom Ryan files a postscript to his study of Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott WESTBOUND (USA, 1959)

 

The Ranown Cycle, Postscript  

“I think Randy might have ended up with most of the leading ladies [in the Ranown cycle], if they were available. Because if you don’t have that going for you, you’re a pretty stuffy guy. I thought the Scott character, before the pictures we made with him, was a pretty stuffy guy.” 

                                                                                    (Budd Boetticher, 1969) (1)

 

Westbound was shot in September/October, 1957, between the filming of Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone. It was made for Warner Bros., which, 18 months earlier, had distributed the first film in the Ranown cycle, Seven Men from Now. 

 

Randolph Scott, apparently, wasn’t all that interested in making Westbound.  But, according to Robert Nott (2), his contract with Warners was hanging over his head. He’d extensively expanded his repertoire of Westerns under the company’s logo during the 1950s and now it required one final film from him. Director Budd Boetticher offered his services after the actor came to him for advice. 

 

Aside from Scott and Boetticher, though, neither Ranown nor any of the other key personnel who’d worked on the Ranown cycle were involved. Likewise, the Lone Pine locations that were central to the look of most of the other films were gone, replaced by the Warner Ranch at Calabasas in California. Still, numerous overviews include Westbound as part of the cycle.(3)

 

Indeed, the timing of the film’s production and release might suggest that it belongs with the other Ranown films. It was shot during the same time period that they were in production. Then, having sat on Warners’ shelves until March, 1959, it was released a month after the opening of Ride Lonesome (and almost a year before Comanche Station). 

 

Add to that the incongruity to which I alluded in the first of my essays about the Ranown cycle: if it’s called the Ranown cycle, shouldn’t all the films that are included in it have been made by Ranown Pictures Corp.? Seven Men from Now wasn’t, yet it’s generally seen as part of the cycle. So why not Westbound?

A not especially radical proposal to sort out the confusion: perhaps the whole idea of the Ranown cycle should be abandoned and the sequence of films simply re-labelled the Boetticher-Scott cycle, for the director-actor partnership is the single recurring factor for all of the films in the unofficial cycle. Thus redefined, the cycle could then include Westbound, even if it is, as is generally agreed, inferior to the other half dozen films Boetticher made with Scott, especially those written by Burt Kennedy and produced by Harry Joe Brown. 

Budd Boetticher

 

                                                            ***

 

To Westbound. It might not belong in the same class as the films in the category which I’ll now refer to as “the so-called Ranown cycle” (4), but it is of interest: in particular, for the way the discord driving its tale of a divided town is effectively a displacement of the hostilities underpinning the Civil War raging elsewhere. 

 

The scars that the war left on the American landscape – and on its cultural mindset – is a recurring feature of the entire Western genre, including earlier Scott films, such as To the Last Man (1933), The Texans (1938), Virginia City (1940) and Belle Starr (1941). The actor also frequently played characters from the South who’d found themselves displaced after the surrender of General Lee, as in Santa Fe (1951), Hangman’s Knot (1952), The Man Behind the Gun (1952), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953) and Thunder Over the Plains (1952). 

 

Anyone interested in studying the ramifications of that war (1861 – 1865), where Americans took up arms against each other and more than 750,000 died, might find it useful to reflect on the various ways in which the Western grapples with it. Almost everywhere that cowboys roam, there’s evidence either of the national tensions that preceded the conflict on battlefields around the country or of the legacy that it left in its wake. 

 

In the form, for example, of renegade soldiers, who had, in the name of their cause (or simply because they’d been enabled by the lawlessness all around), taken it upon themselves to execute innocent civilians, fellow Americans. Long before such perpetrators were known as “domestic terrorists”. Or of the divisive differences between ordinary folks that not only led to the war but have also persisted through to the present day.

 

Randolph Scott

Westbound is set in 1864. Scott plays John Hayes, a captain in the Union army who used to be the line superintendent for the Overland Stage business. Under instruction from his superiors (in the scene pictured above), he’s returned to his post with the company. His task is to ensure the delivery of gold bullion from California, which is to be used by the Union to buy guns, ammunition and equipment. The opening scroll explains the importance of that mission to both sides: the war has arrived at a stalemate, gold is “the lifeblood of both armies”, and it has become vital for the Confederate forces to prevent its delivery to their enemy.

 

After being assigned to the Overland job, Hayes goes to Julesberg, in Colorado Territory, where he used to live before the war took him away. Once leaning towards the North, the locals’ sympathies have now shifted Southwards, and Hayes’s arrival, alongside Corporal Rod Miller (Michael Dante), a young soldier who’s lost his arm in the war, causes the simmering hostilities to boil over. 

Karen Steele, Michael Dante

Whereas most of the townspeople simply give them the cold shoulder, Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan), an old friend of Hayes who appears to be the owner of the Palace Hotel, the town saloon, is actively plotting to sabotage the efforts to get the stage to run on time. He explains to the cold-blooded Mace (Michael Pate), his hired enforcer, that their methods can include anything “short of bloodshed”. 

 

But Mace operates according to his own agenda which makes Putnam something of a man caught in the middle, torn between his commitment to the Confederate cause and his antipathy to Mace’s methods. The enforcer’s crimes include cold-blooded murder (the shooting of Corporal Miller) and an attack on a stagecoach, which leads to the death of all the passengers on board, including a young girl and several other innocent civilians.

 

Michael Pate (centre)

Written by Berne Giler (Guns of Diablo, Midas Run) and based on a story he wrote with Albert Shelby Le Vino (a veteran from the silent era), Westbound makes the workings of personal conscience its key issue, even if it never develops that as fully as it might have. Almost every scene pivots on a character making a choice and many of them are crucial pointers to personal moralities. 

This is clear in the case of Putnam. In part, his hostility towards Hayes stems from his misplaced jealousy about the former relationship between his wife, Norma (Virginia Mayo), and his old friend. And he’s clearly implicated in Mace’s villainy. But just as he’s made sympathetic by his idealism, so too are several of Mace’s henchmen in their expressed disapproval of their boss’s proposed attack on the doomed stagecoach. “What about the little girl?” one of them asks. They have a choice to make. And, along similar lines, the townspeople’s sympathies for the South lead them to vacillate about which side they should be on while Mace and his men do their dirty work unimpeded. 

 

Only Hayes and Mace remain uncomplicated, Hayes as morally righteous as Mace is evil incarnate. The latter explains to Putnam that he couldn’t care less about the Civil War and is just waiting for an opportunity to wreak havoc and turn the situation to his own advantage (he’s a variation on a carpetbagger). 

Unfortunately, none of the characters’ quandaries or relationships is given anything more than a perfunctory treatment, perhaps because of the production circumstances under which the film was made (in a rush, Warner Bros. attempting to cash in on the Boetticher-Scott partnership). And the film’s running time, a scant 72 minutes, suggests that any hope the studio might have had for the production was abandoned in the editing room. 

 

The result is that potentially interesting dramatic material is nipped in the bud. For example, like The Bounty Hunter, made four years earlier, and Decision at Sundown, Westbound echoes High Noon’s concern with the townspeople’s choices regarding whom they should support. But far too little is made of this and their eventual decision to side with Hayes seems to be simply laying some groundwork for their involvement in the final shoot-out in the streets of Julesberg rather than a result borne of conscientious thought about the principles at stake.

Virginia Mayo, Karen Steele

The two women in the film, Norma and Miller’s wife, Jeannie (Karen Steele), both end up as widows. Hayes remains properly aloof from Norma throughout, and is fatherly towards the Millers as he takes responsibility for their marriage by encouraging the disabled soldier not to seek pity but to make his own way in the world. He even provides him and Jeannie with work they can do together, running a stagecoach station after Mace and his gang’s rampage has led to the departure of Overland employees from the territory.

 

However, after Miller’s death – although not until the film’s closing scene – Jeannie emerges as a potential love interest for Hayes. After he has packed Norma into a stagecoach on her way back east, he turns to a now-interested Jeannie and tells her that, since she’s still in charge of an Overland station, “I’ll drop in on you from time to time, if you don’t mind.” “I don’t mind,” she replies as he rides off into the landscape. One might say, given the discomfort of Scott’s characters when confronted with the possibility of a romantic relationship, the relative safety of the landscape.

 

Boetticher’s film looks handsome, cinematographer John Peverell Marley’s impressive compositions using the outdoor locations to good effect to give a sense of the geography of the action and the characters’ relationships to each other in it. But David Buttolph’s score is, as Nott observes, “overly jaunty” (5) and seems to make a mockery of the melancholy aspects of the material in which decent Americans are pitted against other decent Americans and exploited by the villains amongst them.

 

For his part, Scott was looking his years – he was approaching 60 when the film was shot – and he simply seems to be going through the motions here. It’s not that he’s not up to the task: he’s carrying an iconic history with him. It’s just that he’s done everything that’s required of him here many times before and the strain is starting to show, especially given the pace at which the film was reportedly shot. Fortunately, there were still good times ahead.

 

(1)       Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event, Signet, USA, 1969,            p. 58

(2)       Robert Nott, The Films of Randolph Scott, McFarland & Company, Inc., North Carolina, 2004, p. 210

(3)       Click on, for example, to an enthusiast's blog, this IMDb page & Emmanuel Levy’s entry on his website

(4)       For commentary on the films of “the Ranown cycle”, click on 

Seven Men from Now

&

The Tall T

&

Decision at Sundown

&

          Buchanan Rides Alone

      &

Ride Lonesome

      &

Comanche Station

(5)       Nott, op. cit., p. 210

Streaming and on Blu-ray and DVD - Tom Ryan (almost) concludes his study of Budd Boetticher's westerns with Randolph Scott - COMANCHE STATION (USA, 1959)

 

The Ranown Cycle, Part 6

 

“Whatever happened to Randolph Scott, ridin' the trail alone?
   

Whatever happened to Gene and Tex, and Roy, and Rex, the Durango Kid?
   

Oh, whatever happened to Randolph Scott, his horse plain as could be?
   

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott has happened to the best of me.”

 

(from The Statler Brothers’ “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?”,  

               1974) (1)

 

1959 was the year of The Alamo (John Wayne), Cimarron (Anthony Mann), Flaming Star (Don Siegel), The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges), Sergeant Rutledge (John Ford) and The Unforgiven (John Huston)…. And Comanche Station, the final film in the Ranown cycle (2). 

Written by Burt Kennedy, directed by Budd Boetticher, and shot in 12 days, it once again brings together a Randolph Scott character, three outlaws and a damsel in distress. This time Scott is Jefferson Cody, a former army major who’s been riding Comanche country for ten years on a search mission. As had become the storytelling practice of the films in the cycle, his motivations only gradually become clear. 

 

The opening image reintroduces the rocky landscape that has served as the regular setting throughout the cycle: the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine in Northern California, with Mount Whitney in the background. (3) The last of cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr.’s three films for Boetticher (afterThe Tall T and Ride Lonesome), it introduces Cody behind the credits. A man riding lonesome in a landscape where he appears at home, he’s moving from right to left across the CinemaScope screen, visible in the middle distance atop a rise, trailing a mule behind. 

 

His solitude is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a small group of Comanches, their presence signalled an instant earlier by what the untrained ear might identify as a bird call. But Cody knows better. He’s aware of the Comanches’ presence before he sees them. It’s later revealed that he’s done this many times before. Communicating his wish to trade by sheathing his rifle, he negotiates with their spokesman (Foster Hood) – albeit in sign language – before joining them to ride to the village for further discussions with their chief (Joe Molina). 

Randolph Scott

 

As in all the other Ranown films, bargaining is to the fore in Comanche Station and it turns out that the Indians have a prize to trade, a white woman, Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates), inevitably known as “Mrs. Lowe”, or “Ma’am”. Cody’s Winchester seals the deal. She introduces herself. “I might have known,” he mutters. His manner is gruff, but he clearly knew what he was doing. So why has he come to her rescue in the first place and why is he disappointed now? He brushes off her question: “It seemed like a good idea,” he says. “You could have been killed,” she persists. “Yes, Ma’am,” he replies matter-of-factly, and walks away. The conversation is over.

Together they head across the unforgiving terrain towards Lordsburgh, he giving nothing away, she nursing an undeclared but implicit trauma. She wonders aloud to him: “If you had a woman who’d been taken by the Comanche, then you got her back, how would you feel knowing…?” She doesn’t complete the question, but its implications are clear. Three years earlier, in The Searchers, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards had been prepared to kill his teenage niece after she’d been captured by Comanche; it was a time when even the word “miscegenation” was still forbidden by Hollywood’s Production Code. “I loved her, it wouldn’t matter,” Cody responds. She’s disbelieving: “Wouldn’t it?” “No, ma’am, it wouldn’t matter at all.”

 

Nancy Gates, Randolph Scott

At this point in the film, their conversation appears to be about her situation and her fears about how she’ll be received when she returns home. By the end, it’s become achingly clear that it’s also about his situation and his sense of displacement from the life he’d once taken for granted. As with the Scott characters in the other Ranown films, there’s a painful absence in his life, driving him on. The reason he’s been wandering Comanche country for so long has been his search for his wife, abducted years earlier by the Comanche. Whenever news of a white woman being traded has reached him, he’s set out to retrieve her in the hope that it’d be his wife. 

 

Thus his disappointment: Mrs. Lowe isn’t Mrs. Cody. But now, as he instinctively understands, it’s his job to return her to whatever safety civilization has to offer. As they pause in their journey at Comanche Station, a swing-station for the Lordsburgh stage (on which much of Ford’s Stagecoach took place), three riders arrive with Comanche braves in hot pursuit. After the gunfire dies down, Cody realizes that he knows one of them, Ben Lane (Claude Akins). 

 

Randolph Scott, Claude Akins

Their history is not a friendly one. Cody was responsible for court-martialling Lane after he’d disobeyed orders and led his troops in the slaughter and scalping of a tribe of peaceful Indians. When the two briefly discuss what had happened, Lane insists he didn’t understand the orders he’d been given, but Cody isn’t having any of it. “You’re a liar,” he snaps and strides off. The film doesn’t allow any definitive reading of who’s right about what took place, but the exchange does allow one to believe that Lane could be telling the truth and it also points to Cody’s righteousness and his reluctance to see things other than his way.

 

Like Richard Boone’s Frank in The Tall T, Lane is flanked by two offsiders who aren’t especially bright and who don’t appear to know any better than to do his bidding. This Frank (Skip Homeier) seems happy enough to go along with the situation, but Dobie (Richard Rust) is increasingly resistant to the condescending way that Lane treats them. He doesn’t like Dobie’s bossiness and he’s drawn by Cody’s charisma and authoritative demeanour. 

 

“Sure hope I amount to somethin’,” he says wistfully to Frank. Cody is his model: “He was army. Had braid on him.” Frank’s dismissive: “Yeah, but not anymore.” Dobie’s not convinced, remembering how his pa told him that he shouldn’t be discouraged by the changing times. “A man does one thing, one thing in his life he can look back on, go proud. That’s enough,” he explains. 

 

Richard Rust, Skip Homeier, Nancy Gates

Later, after Frank is killed by the Comanche, Dobie talks to Cody about the course his life has taken, explaining that Frank “never knew anything but the wild side”. Cody is firm about the choices that can bring one undone: “Man can cross over any time he’s a-mind.” But Dobie holds firm, insisting that the world is a lot more complicated than Cody is allowing. “It ain’t that easy,” he tells his elder. “It ain’t that easy at all.” And Cody is impressed, offering him an alternative future, in partnership with him, their exchange echoing the ones that Frank (Boone) had with Pat (Scott) in The Tall T, that Tom Buchanan had with Pecos (L.Q. Jones) in Buchanan Rides Alone, and that Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) had with Whit (James Coburn) in Ride Lonesome. Whit survives, but The Tall T’s Frank dies at the end of the film. And Pecos is shot in the back, as is Dobie, after he tells Lane that he wants no part of his plans.

 

Like Lee Marvin’s Bill Masters in Decision at Sundown, Lane immediately sees the spark that’s been ignited between Cody and Mrs. Lowe and resents it. In front of her, he accuses Cody of rescuing her for the $5000 bounty her husband has offered. She’s furious that Cody hasn’t told her about it; Cody’s not about to plead his own case, but later reveals that he hadn’t known of it.

 

Nancy Gates, Skip Homeier

And Lane’s later parable about the man who’d rescued a woman from Indians and fallen in love with her is a minor variation on the story that the lascivious Masters tells. “Sure is a good-lookin’ woman,” Lane teases salaciously. “Kinda just made you go along with bein’ around her, hearin’ her say words, seein’ her move.” Then the brutal punch-line: “Come to think of it, she was a lot like you, Mrs. Lowe.” There’s nothing subtle about Lane.

Further echoes of earlier films in the cycle abound, as when, like Boone’s Frank in Ride Lonesome with his offer to Karen Steele’s Mrs. Lane, Comanche Station’s Lane – presumably no relation (4) – makes his feelings for Mrs. Lowe clear with what amounts (in his eyes) to a proposal. However, in the process, he also mocks the husband who hasn’t come looking for her himself. “If you were mine, I’d come lookin’ to find you, even if I died in the doin’,” he tells her. The awkward tenderness that Boone’s Frank brings to his pitch is entirely absent here, Lane’s leering manner devoid of any feeling for Mrs. Lowe. 

 

At the same time, though, Lane’s comments are similar to the Scott character’s in Ride Lonesome when he passes a harsh judgement on the absent swing-station manager for leaving his wife to fend for herself in the middle of nowhere. The only difference between them is that, while Brigade’s motives are protective, Lane’s are predatory. 

His private exchange with Cody about Mrs. Lowe are also reminiscent of the “she-ain’t-ugly” scene in Ride Lonesome in which Brigade and Boone talk about Mrs. Lane. “It’s amazing what an Indian’ll give up for a Winchester rifle and a bowl of red calico,” Lane says. “Sure a handsome woman. See one like that and a man gets to thinking about taking a wife and settling down.” Cody is bemused: “You?” he observes incredulously.

 

He understands that it’s money that makes Lane’s world go around. And he’s shown to be right about this when Lane tells his increasingly unhappy offsiders that he’s prepared to kill her as well as Cody, since the bounty will be paid to whoever brings Mrs. Lowe back, “dead or alive”. Her husband has thought that it would better to know that she’s been killed than be left wondering (like Cody). 

 

That choice has unleashed the monster inside Lane and it’s almost as if he’s surprised to learn what he’s capable of. As he tells Cody, “That amount o’ money has a way o’ makin’ a man go all greedy inside, get to thinkin’ about doin’ things he might not otherwise do.” It’s also as if, all along, he’s known where his moral weakness is leading him. He eventually dies at Cody’s hands because he hasn’t been able to find a way to “cross over”. “Come too far to turn back now,” he explains to Cody, almost apologetically. “Pure shame, ain’t it? How a man’ll push himself for money?” 

 

Without exception, the Ranown films have powerful and astutely-judged endings. But, of all of them, Comanche Station’s is the most satisfying, and moving. The gunfire ended and the journey over, Cody and Mrs. Lowe ride out of the wilderness to a homestead. She dismounts. A little boy (P. Holland) runs into her arms. With Cody, we then look to the husband who’s come out of the homestead to greet her: a blind man with a cane, reaching forward towards her. 

 

Randolph Scott

Everything that has been said in all of the films about how men ought to act towards their women – all the leering, all the talk about possession – is suddenly given a new context. She’s been the strong, silent one, the one who knew better, but who kept her thoughts to herself. It’s the men who haven’t been able to see how things might be different from the way they’d been thinking about them who are actually blind. 

“If you knew my man, you’d understand that he’d have to have a reason not to come after me,” she says. “Yes, ma’am. I always figured there was,” Cody replies, setting himself finally as apart from all the other men as the Scott characters have been throughout the cycle. He turns and rides away into the empty West, still hopefully leading the pack-horse along behind him, doomed to “ride lonesome” until he finds his lost soul-mate, or, worse, “to wander forever between the winds” like that other hapless searcher, Ethan Edwards. 

 

The final scene reverses Cody’s movement across the frame in the opening as he rides across the rocky rise before moving out of shot. It’s a glorious ending and would have made a fitting finale to Scott’s career. He retired after shooting Comanche Station, but there was still one more screen adventure to come.

 

Epilogue

 

Randolph Scott’s final film was Sam Peckinpah’s Guns in the Afternoon/Ride the High Country, made in 1962. He died in 1987. 

 

Producer Harry Joe Brown, who’d originally been trained as a lawyer, died in 1972, only producing two more features after Comanche Station. 

 

Budd Boetticher died in 2001. He only made a couple more features, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) and A Time for Dying (1969), continued with TV work (notably The Zane Grey Theatre and an episode of The Rifleman) and, in 1972, made the admired documentary, Arruza (1972), about the famed bullfighter Carlos Arruza.

 

Writer Burt Kennedy, who was in his 30s when the Ranown cycle was made, also died in 2001. He had a long career as a director, making more than 30 features, including films such as The Good Guys and the Bad Guys(1969) and the first version of The Killer Inside Me (1976), as well as doing regular work for TV (including Lawman, Combat! and Simon & Simon).

 

Charles Lawton Jr., whose nickname was “Bud”, died in 1965. After Comanche Station, his features included Two Rode Together (1960), his fourth project with John Ford, and three films with Delmer Daves (for whom he’d shot 3.10 to Yuma in 1956). He died during production of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet, and I’m Feeling So Sad.

 

Ranown Pictures Corp.’s final film was Comanche Station.

 

(1)       Written by Don S. Reid & Harold Wilson Reid Watch the song performed here

(2)       For commentary on the other films of the cycle, see 

Seven Men from Now

&

The Tall T

&

Decision at Sundown

&

           Buchanan Rides Alone

      &

Ride Lonesome

(3)       The setting also featured in earlier Scott films – The Thundering Herd, The Doolins of Oklahoma, Frontier Marshal, Hangman’s Knot, Man in the Saddle,The Nevadan, The Stranger Wore a Gun and The Walking Hills– as well as several hundred other Hollywood movies

(4)       The Ranown cycle constantly recycles names: as well as the two Lanes, there are three Franks, two Bens, a Billy John, a Billy Jack, and a character named Boone (in Ride Lonesome) who shares his surname with an actor (named Richard, star of The Tall T).

 

Next a Postscript: Westbound

On Blu-ray, DVD and Streaming - RIDE LONESOME (Budd Boetticher, USA, 1959) - Fifth instalment of Tom Ryan's series devoted to the legendary cycle of Westerns starring Randolph Scott and (mostly) produced by Harry Joe Brown

 

The Ranown Cycle, Part 5

“The characters in my Westerns were just men with guns trying to lick the West. That’s why, in Ride Lonesome, I started in that gigantic high shot [of Randolph Scott, tracking down James Best], to show how infinitesimal a man on his horse, with his pack, was in that vast expanse of the United States – surrounded by Indians who were out of sight. It was a very local, individual time of survival.”   

 

(Budd Boetticher, 1992) (1)

 

"infinitesimal a man on his horse"

Ride Lonesome is the fifth film in the Ranown cycle. (2) As director Budd Boetticher describes it above, the opening sequence finds bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Scott) hot on the trail of Billy John (James Best). His quarry had shot a man in the back in Santa Cruz and now has a reward on his head. He knows Brigade is after him and has set a trap. As Brigade rides through a rocky ravine – the film is another of those Boetticher shot in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California – Billy John is calmly waiting for him, sipping his coffee and talking to his horse. 

 

Hidden in the hills around him are his four partners-in-crime, armed and ready to shoot when the time is right. A single shot alerts Brigade to their presence. “There’s no way for you to get out of here,” the chuckling villain tells him, very pleased at how clever he’s been. But after Brigade points out that, even if they hit him, he’ll still have time to shoot Billy John before he dies, the outlaw has a choice to make. It’s the first in a series of Mexican stand-offs that drives the film’s plot.

 

Randolph Scott, James Best

Brigade says that this is just a job to him, and it’s not until much later in the film that it becomes clear that he’s not interested in the reward, that he has a hidden agenda. Here Ride Lonesome adheres to the same dramatic strategy – withholding the Scott character’s motivation – as the one deployed previously in Decision at Sundown. 

Years before, Billy John’s brother, Frank (Lee Van Cleef), had murdered Brigade’s wife, by hanging her. Frank had just been released from prison, where he’d been sent after Brigade had brought him to justice, and was seeking to avenge himself on his captor. Now Brigade believes that it’s his turn and he’s the one setting a trap. He knows that Frank will follow him after he takes Billy John prisoner and he’s using the situation to set up his own revenge.

Lee Van Cleef

Their ensuing cross country journey draws in several other characters. At a swing station en route to their Santa Cruz destination, the pair meets up with two more wanted men, Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) and his sidekick, Whit (James Coburn, making his screen debut). Carrie Lane (Boetticher’s girlfriend at the time, Karen Steele), the wife of the station manager, is also there, rifle at the ready, awaiting the return of her husband who’s headed out to track down some missing horses. 

 

As in The Tall T, the landscape all around is rocky, dusty and dangerous, the Cinemascope frame making it appear to be stretching on forever, wide shots frequently dwarfing its human inhabitants. Shot by Boetticher’s trusted cinematographer, Charles Lawton Jr., the film is the first time the director worked in the wide-screen format and he put it to good use.

 

Pernell Roberts, James Coburn

“A man can’t be too careful in this part of the country,” Boone says to Brigade, explaining why he’s aimed a rifle at him and Billy John as they’d approached (and echoing swing-station boss Hank’s suspicion of unexpected arrivals in The Tall T). He only lowers his weapon when he recognizes Brigade.

 

Just as the female leads in previous films in the cycle are referred to by their marital honorific, Carrie is known as “Mrs. Lane” or “Ma’am” throughout by everyone and treated protectively simply because she’s a woman. After a stage-coach arrives, the driver with a lance through his chest and a passenger slaughtered (“Mescaleros!”), she moves towards the group gathered around the coach, only to be told by Billy John to keep her distance. “Don’t come out here. Nothin’ for a woman to see,” he commands. Even villains can be chivalrous in the Ranown cycle. 

 

And Brigade is of like mind, subsequently (and insensitively) telling her that her husband had done the wrong thing, first by bringing her with him into this wilderness, then by leaving her alone when he’d gone off to retrieve the horses. “He never shoulda gone,” Brigade says. “I’m not talking about animals. I’m talking about you… He left you alone,” he continues by way of clarification. She replies, “I can take care of myself.” He presses his point: “If you were mine, you wouldn’t have to… I’d never have brought you here in the first place. Nowhere for a woman!”

 

A complicating factor here is that Brigade is not simply addressing her situation; although we don’t know it yet, he’s also talking about himself and how he believes he’d failed his wife. The past permeates everything he does and says, the world-weariness etched on to his face: Scott was 62 when the film was made, his age showing. And Brigade’s unbending dealings with everyone indicate how far he’s withdrawn into himself, preoccupied with his plans for revenge at the expense of everything else.

 

Mrs. Lane is treated as a precious commodity by all the menfolk, not only because she’s a woman but also because she’s beautiful, Boetticher’s camera angles showing off her fine figure in much the same way as it contemplates the cruel beauty of the rocky surrounds. The Mescaleros’ chief (Boyd Stockman) shares the other men’s view of her, offering to trade a horse in exchange for her becoming his squaw. As in all of the films of the Ranown cycle, the characters are forever bartering with each other. The horse, however, turns out to be her husband’s, a clear indication of the fate that has befallen him.

"She ain't ugly", Karen Steele

 

When the deal turns sour, the chief shamed when she reacts in horror on seeing the horse, the Mescaleros launch an attack. “Sure beats all, don’t it?” Boone says to Brigade, “I can't get over the way them Indians wanted to trade her for a horse. If it'd be me, I'd a’ give a whole herd. I guess she's about the best overall good-lookin' woman I ever seen.” Refusing to join in the leering, Brigade nonetheless reveals that he knows exactly what Boone is talking about. “She ain’t ugly,” he says. Cryptic can be funny.


For her part, Mrs. Lane is resilient and resourceful, determined to look after herself and a straight shooter with a weapon, as she reveals the first time we see her and then demonstrates again later when the Mescaleros attack. She’s also shocked by the killing. When she shoots a charging brave during the Indian attack, she’s dismayed by what she’s done. And then, near the end, when a confrontation looms between Brigade and Boone, she’s direct in her criticism of them: “You’re like two dogs fighting over a bone,” she accuses. 

And she’s right, in touch with what’s required to release both men from their pasts, even if she’s yet to understand exactly what’s motivating them. Like the women in Decision at Sundown, she makes good sense, while the men around her are all bravado, bluster and deep-seated macho angst.

 

For Boone, taking Billy John to Santa Cruz means a chance for amnesty for him and Whit, and he’s prepared to kill Brigade in order to get what he wants. In a scene that echoes the key exchange between Pat and Frank in The Tall T, he tries to bargain with Brigade, offering to give him the money he would earn from taking Billy John in, “double if you say”. “Take me a while, but I’ll get it,” he adds. “How? Stoppin’ coaches? Killin’?” the single-minded Brigade asks contemptuously. For him, money’s not the issue. “Well, that’s all over with,” Boone says, with a convincing sincerity. “Is it?” says the upright, hard-nosed Brigade, disbelieving. “Gotta be,” Boone continues. “Man gets half-way, he oughta have somethin’ of his own, something to belong to, to be proud of.” Now Brigade’s listening: “They say that,” he concedes. “I’ve got me a place,” Boone reveals. “Gonna run beef, work the ground, be able to walk down the street like anybody.” That he means what he says is later confirmed when he tells Whit that he wants him to be his partner in this new venture.

 

Driving the characters in Ride Lonesome, as in most of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns, are aching regrets, a sense of loss and a yearning for something else, something different, something that’s been missing from their lives. Like Pat and Frank in The Tall T, Brigade and Boone understand this about each other, even if only instinctively. It’s why Boone tells Whit, when they think they’re going to have to kill Brigade to get their way, that he’s not the kind of man that you take from the back. Boone recognizes that Brigade deserves respect. He knows the rules of the game they’re playing.

 

It’s not by chance that it’s Boone, rather than Brigade, who delivers Pat’s line from The Tall T when Mrs. Lane wonders to him why he thinks he has to kill Brigade. “There’s some things a man just can’t ride around,” he tells her. Whatever their flaws, both he and Brigade are men of principle. And, finally, this sense of a bond with Boone and a readiness to trust him is also why Brigade finally surrenders Billy John to him.

Both films’ emotional force comes from the various ways in which these interactions are understated, the laconic dialogue simultaneously camouflaging and intimating a turbulent undertow, pointing to feelings these men will never talk about, can never talk about, but desperately need to. The woman generally holds the key, but it’s one they’ll never discover because they fail to see her as anything more than an accessory in a man’s world.

 

The recurrent Mexican stand-offs provide the most dramatic illustrations of the deal-making that is like a way of life for the characters. One has Billy John grabbing Boone’s rifle and thrusting it into Brigade’s stomach, momentarily turning the tables on his captor(s), only to find that Boone has drawn his pistol and has pointed it at him. The fact that Boone saves Brigade’s life here makes Brigade’s subsequent refusal to help the outlaw in his pursuit of amnesty seem simply perverse (at least until we learn that the money isn’t the real issue for him). Another is the showdown between Frank and Brigade where the two men face each other down, the bounty hunter having tied a noose around Billy John’s neck so that, at the first shot, the horse will bolt and leave him hanging.

Finale...Scott, Best

 

Brigade ends up by himself at the end, Boone and Whit riding off with their prisoner and Mrs. Lane (who might or might not have accepted Boone’s earlier proposal), leaving him standing by the now burning cross-like tree where his wife had been hanged. Frank’s body is stretched out on the ground behind him. It’s an uncompromising but ambiguous closure, allowing the possibility that Brigade has finally exorcised his demons but also suggesting that, like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, he is doomed forever to ride lonesome.

 

1.         Michael Wilmington, “Tall in the Director’s Chair: Budd Boetticher”, The Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1992 [Here, Boetticher appears to have mixed up the first sequence and the opening one in Comanche Station. Understandable given the similarities between all the films in the Ranown cycle. His description accurately renders the Scott character’s first appearance in Ride Lonesome, as well as the sequence’s metaphorical implications, but “out of sight” are James Best’s four no-good companions. The Indians, Mescaleros, come later.]

2.         For commentary on the previous four films of the cycle, click on 

Seven Men from Now

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The Tall T

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Decision at Sundown

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Buchanan Rides Alone