On GILDA and getting around the Production Code - An excerpt from HOLLYWOOD'S MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION: Film Noir, the Western and other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s by Geoff Mayer

Editor's Note: This is an extract from the Chapter titled Film Noir, Virtue, the Abyss and Nothingness  which appears in Geoff Mayer's new book HOLLYWOOD'S MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION: Film Noir, the Western and other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s. The book is published by McFarland in the US and is available locally at a number of bookshops including the online service  BOOKTOPIA 

Thanks to Stephanie Nichols of McFarland and to Geoff Mayer for assistance in preparing it for publication here . The preface of the book was also published on this blog and you can find it IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Eight years before Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954) Glenn Ford co-starred in one of Columbia's  most successful films, Gilda. The key creative figure was Columbia writer/producer Virginia Van Upp. In January 1945 Van Upp achieved a rare distinction when she wasappointed executive producer at the studio, a difficult feat in the male dominated studio system at that time. She was second in command to the head of the studio, HarryCohn. Her role was to supervise the preparation and production of twelve to fourteen big-budgeted films each year. One of her first productions in her new position  was Gilda, based on E.A. Ellington's original story. Van Upp not only supervised various drafts of the screenplay, written by Jo Eisinger, Marion Parsonnet and, uncredited, Ben Hecht, she also wrote, uncredited, a substantial portion of the screenplayherself—including the film's upbeat epilogue. The first draft, submitted on 16  November1944,was rejected byJoseph Breen and the PCA on the grounds that it depicted illicit sex and adultery without any semblance of compensating moral values. 

A revised screenplay was submitted on August 24,1945. Again Breen rejected it. Nevertheless, filming began on September 4 and continued until December10, 1945. Revisions were resubmitted on      September 8 and Breen approved the production,with a few quibbles on September 11. After filming was completed,  the PCA, without Breen,reviewed the film and it was granted          a seal of approval on February 25, 1946. Within the history of Hollywood censorship after the tightening of the Production Code system in mid-1934, the PCA’s decision to give Gilda  their seal of approval was a significant moment as the film represented a direct challenge to Breen's dictum  that the appropriate moral values must permeate the entire narrative not just the epilogue.

The film begins with Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), a drifter similar to Cain's opportunistic Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, in trouble in a waterfront gambling game in Buenos Aires. After winning money, he is confronted by a robber in a dark alley. He is rescued by a middle-aged man with his “little friend” a walking cane that abruptly transforms into an erect weapon with a phallic steel tip. Farrell's mysterious savior, middle-aged Ballin Mundson (George Macready), suggests the young man join him and Farrell is soon, in effect, in a kept  relationship with his wealthy benefactor. Director Charles Vidor and cinematographer Rudolph Maté employ low angle camera compositions and subtle editing, along with the not-so-subtle visual metaphor of Ballin's “cane," to convey the real nature  of Farrell's relationship with Ballin. Mundson even compares Farrell with his phallic cane:“Johnny,’ Mundson explains,“is almost as sharp as my other friend, but he will kill for me'’ Johnny replies, “That's what friends are for'’ Many years later Glenn Ford acknowledged that there was a concerted effort by the filmmakers to bypass Breen's opposition to any film he considered contained suggestions of “sexual perversion'’

 

The relationship between Mundson and Farrell is threatened when Mundson, while on a business trip, marries Gilda. The prospect of regularly seeing a woman who had an affair with him some time ago unsettles Johnny. His condition deteriorates when Mundson orders the young man to “look after” Gilda, a situation she exploits to the full as she teases her frustrated ex-lover with her supposed infidelities in Buenos Aires. Johnny's psychological disintegration is exposed in his narration. After watching Gilda with her husband he explains: “I wanted to hit her. I wanted to go back and see them together with me watching'’ Although Gilda enjoys Farrell's torment, she gradually realizes that her husband has his own peculiarities, especially when he tells her that “hate can be a very exciting emotion. Very exciting. Haven't you noticed that there's a heat in it that one can feel. Didn't you feel it tonight.... I did! It warmed me. Hate is the only thing that had ever warmed me.” In  this perverse scene, effectively played by George Macready, Mundson,dressed in a      flamboyant dressing gown over his formal costume, sits on the edge of their bed. Director Charles Vidor places Mundson, in shadow, deep in the foreground of the frame to show his domination of Gilda as his body divides her into two parts.

 

Mundson seemingly dies two-thirds into the film although a brief insert shows  him surviving a plane explosion after parachuting from the damaged craft. Mundson's “death” clears the way for Johnny to court and marry Gilda. However, she soon discovers that Johnny  is even bcrazier than Mundson.His marriage to her was a ruse  to control and punish for her “adulterous affairs'’ On their wedding night she discovers a large photograph of Mundson in their room. Distressed, she tells Johnny that this “isn't decent'’ He throws the word “decent” back into her face as his narration reiterates his deep-seated psychosis:

She didn't know then what was happening to her.She didn't know then what she heard was the door closing on her own cage. She hadn't been faithful to him when he was alive but she was going to be faithful now that he was dead.

 

Obsessed with his debt to Mundson, Johnny systematically tortures Gilda by denying her any sexual contact with him, or other people. To achieve this he assigns Mundson's casino employees to watch her day and night. Distressed by Johnny's neglect,       she tells him: “You wouldn't think that one woman could marry two insane men in  one lifetime, would you?” Gilda tries to get away, fleeing to Montevideo where she  intends filing for divorce. In Montevideo she meets an attorney, Tom Langford (Don Douglas), who is seemingly infatuated with her. He tells Gilda to return to Buenos Aires and file for an annulment as her marriage was never consummated. Accepting    his advice, she returns to Buenos Aires, only to learn that Langford was working forJohnny. Gilda, in an attempt to humiliate Johnny, sings the torch song “Put the BlameonMarne,"while gyrating her hips and undertaking a striptease (she only removes        her gloves) in front of excited patrons in the casino. When she invites two eager men in the audience to assist her, Johnny, who is watching her, erupts with rage. The film's “surface plot” involving former Nazi agents who seek a patent forTungsten is quickly resolved and one of the casino's employees, Uncle Pio (Steven Geray), stabs Mundson in the back with his own walking stick just as he is about to shoot Gilda and Farrell. In the epilogue Johnny and Gilda prepare to leave Buenos Aires for life together in the United States.

"She only removes her gloves", Rita Hayworth, Gilda

 

The film's final moments,withJohnny suddenly assuming some semblance of “normality,’ is poorly motivated. It is an extreme example of a melodramatic deus ex machina. It represents one of Hollywood's more obvious violations of Frances Marion's advice in her 1937 screenplay manual How to Write and Sell Film Stories that the characters “must be extricated in a logical and dramatic way that brings them happiness'’ While the film's brief epilogue endorses the prevailing ethical norms of the1940s, a “normal” heterosexual romance along with a celebration of marriage and domesticity, the episodic narrative for the great bulk of the film is devoid of any consistency with regard to its presentation of virtue - depending on whether Gilda's “transgressions” are to be believed. 

 

Each of the central characters, Gilda, Johnny and Mundson,take turns in extracting pleasure through acts of cruelty.The only semblanceof an explanation for this, and it is barely plausible,is that once the couple are able to extricate themselves from the “depravities” of an “alien” culture (Buenos Aires),they somehow will resume a “normal” life back in the United States.

 

Van Upp's upbeat epilogue was, in effect, a cynical attempt to bolster the film's chances at the box office while also appeasing Breen and his objections concerning the film's depiction of “illicit sex and adultery without compensating moral values”.On the whole, however, the film cleverly bypassed Breen's prohibitions by following his advice to producers in the 1930s that “illicit acts” should always be rendered in an  oblique manner so that audiences could never really point to a moment in the film where “offensive acts” took place. Hence the narrative should deny constantly the possibility of such actions while, at other times, admitting the possibility that they occurred. The filmmakers took this advice and, in the process,made it almost impossible for Breen to object to the ramifications of its oblique presentation, as in the following dialogue exchange:

JOHNNY:Get this straight.I don't care what you do.But I'm going to see to it that it looks all right to him[Mundson]. From now on,you go anywhere you please, with anyone you please. But I'm going to take you there and I'm going to bring you home.Get that?Exactly  the way I'd pick up his laundry.

 

GILDA:Shame on you Johnny. Any psychiatrist would tell you your thought-associations are very revealing. All to protect Ballin—who do you think you are kidding,Johnny?

This shift in Hollywood's more problematic presentation of morality was detected by French critics such as Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier in thesummer of 1946. After viewing a relatively large number of Hollywood films produced between 1940 and 1946, films not screened in France during the first half of the 1940s due to the German occupation,they realized that something had changed.For              Chartier, however, this change was not necessarily for the better as he noted in1946:

“She kisses him so that he'll kill for her'’ Emblazoned on the movie posters, over a blood stain, is a description of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. The same line would work just as well for Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet. It would hold true again for The Postman Always RingsTwice which is currently a big hit in the US. We understood why the Hays Office     had previously forbidden film adaptations of James M.Cain's two novels from which Double  Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice  are drawn. It is harder to understand, given this censor's moral posture,why this interdiction was lifted, as it's hard to imagine story lines with a more pessimistic or disgusted point of view regarding human behavior."

On 4K HDR/DV - David Hare welcomes a restored ANATOMY OF A MURDER (Otto Preminger, USA, 1958) & TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1976)

This is the second big six picture collection boxset from Sony of their “Columbia Classics”, all totally new updated restorations executed in 4K with HDR/DV. Grover Crisp who has personally curated these sets (and much more) through Sony’s still flourishing physical media arm makes a particularly strong case in some of the copious restoration notes on each title in which he really promotes the complete revelation HDR and it’s much wider color gamut, wider dynamic range and more has to seriously sell the superority of the new format over all and any earlier Home Vid platforms.

I won’t take much more space here but to say the movies I’ve sampled so far are breathtaking in these UHD 4K discs, even better than a first 35mm viewing of a revival print of Anatomy of a Murder at Sydney Uni Film Group in 1968. By then (only ten years after it was made) the O-neg had been intefered with after wear and tear leaving ten no less lab shots re-inserted from an inferior later gen neg. Even the very beautiful master Criterion used for its own Blu release a few years ago is still stuck with the dupe shots, although Crisp’s team did an almost total restoration on that occasion. 

For the new release they restarted the elements harvest and in the process found a third gen but extremely high quality neg which yielded clean optical shots which now seamlessly meet the rest of the print’s image quality for grain, grayscale and density.

The new 4K of Taxi Driver is from just a few years ago but Crisp and his team are now able to use HDR to really push saturation and the emphasis on grain and texture in this new disc which is quite frankly, gobsmacking, and once again the image quality once again surpasses the 35mm I first saw in opening week at the old Town Cinema in Pitt Street, Sydney. Another bonus is the discovery of multi track stems of Herrmann’s score for which they’ve added a five channel Dolby track with the score isolated on the rear channels. You’ve got to hear this to believe it. They also preserve the original legacy mono track.

I understand the new 4K of the Preminger was amongst the “rediscoveries” at this year’s Cannes event. This boxset, with marvellous liner notes from Julie Kirgo for the Preminger, and Glenn Kenny for Taxi Driver is worth every cent. The remaining four titles (Oliver, Stripes, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network) are yet to be plundered by me.

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

&

The Tall T

&

Decision at Sundown

&

Buchanan Rides Alone

On Blu-ray, DVD and Streaming - BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE (Budd Boetticher, USA, 1958) - Fourth 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 4

 

“Grace. Fred Astaire in a Western.” 

(Budd Boetticher on Randolph Scott) (1)

 

The opening of the fourth film in the Ranown cycle (2) suggests a conventional Western. The credits scroll over a small township: a dusty main street, adobe buildings, men wearing sombreros going about their business. As we subsequently learn, this is Agry Town, situated on the border between the US and Mexico and named after the family that effectively runs it. More or less cut from the same cloth as Sundown in Decision at Sundown(1957).

 

As the credits end, a man riding tall in the saddle comes into medium close-up: Tom Buchanan (Scott). As he later reveals, he’s a rancher who’d needed money, had found some as a gun-for-hire in the Mexican-American war that erupted in the 1840s and is now simply passing through town on his way home to Tucson. That is, until trouble finds him. 

 

"...simply passing through town on his way home to Tucson"
Randolph Scott, Buchanan Rides Alone

Buchanan Rides Alone was director Budd Boetticher’s 26th feature (with ten of them made under the name of Oscar Boetticher, or Oscar Boetticher Jr., his birth name). He’d begun work in television by then, including an extended stint on the Public Defenderseries several years earlier as well as three episodes of Maverickwhile he was working on the Ranown films with Randolph Scott. 

 

The source for this very different addition to the cycle – different inasmuch as it’s a laconic black comedy – is The Name’s Buchanan, written by Jonas Ward (a nom-de-plume for hard-boiled crime novelist William Ard; he used other names too). (3) Originally published in 1956, when Ard was 34, it was the first in a series of five books he wrote featuring the character of Tom Buchanan. After his death in 1960, three further additions to the series were contributed by other writers. 

 

A hard-boiled but undistinguished Western potboiler, the novel introduces its titular hero as a familiar male stereotype, a man who goes his own way on his own terms. It also offers a 19th-century word for him with which I'd been unfamiliar, labelling him “a ramstam”. For the record, that’s the book’s way of telling us that he’s a “reckless and wilful” hombre. His demeanour lacks the self-contained uprightness that the Scott persona might customarily bring to mind, but he belongs to the same family, more like the hot-headed kid brother.

 

The adaptation for the film generally follows the book’s plot outline. Officially, it was written by Charles Lang, who was also responsible for the Decision at Sundown screenplay, although relatively reliable sources (4)suggest that Lang’s final draft was extensively rethought and rewritten by Boetticher and Burt Kennedy. 

 

In particular, aside from the ways in which the casting of Scott gave Buchanan a more laidback air, it appears that they expanded the character of Abe Carbo, played by Craig Stevens, making him a key figure. In the novel, he’s an important supporting player, but more like a cold-blooded pragmatist than his character in the film where he’s not only spared the bloody death he gets in the book, but even turns out to be kind of likeable. 

 

"...black hat, chaps and vest, with an aqua shirt..."
Craig Stevens,  Buchanan Rides Alone

Imagine Cary Grant in a Western and you’ll catch something of the character’s distinctive cool, dressed in black hat, chaps and vest, with an aqua shirt. He’s also given the film’s deliciously black punch-line – a laugh-out-loud moment – which Boetticher claims he added on the day of shooting. (5)

 

On Buchanan’s arrival in Agry, he’s rudely greeted by the sheriff, Lew Agry (Barry Kelley), and his deputies, suspicious of outsiders wearing guns. Soon afterwards, as he signs in for an overnight stay at the hotel, the eyes of the clerk at the desk, Amos Agry (Peter Whitney), the sheriff’s brother, widen greedily when he sees Buchanan’s money belt. Then the stranger in town heads over to the saloon for a steak, only to be accosted by Roy Agry (William Leslie), who’s ridden up in a hurry with scratches on his face and a melee on his mind.

 

Buchanan handles it all with good humour. Oozing self-assurance, he’s a man of few words and is reluctant to waste too many of them on these cretins. He just wants to gather himself together and be on his way. But then Juan de la Vega (Manuel Rojas) rides into town to avenge his sister, who has – it becomes clear between the lines – been raped by Roy. Some words could still not be spoken in Hollywood in the late ’50s.

 

After he takes his lethal revenge, he’s arrested and, as he’s being beaten up by the sheriff and his men, Buchanan steps in on his behalf. As a result, both the accused and his would-be rescuer are thrown into jail, the Agrys and the townspeople preparing for a double-hanging. What ensues is a series of negotiations in which base motives are camouflaged, generally clumsily, by a civilized veneer. 

Peter Whitney (Amos Agry), Tol Avery (Simon Agry), Craig Stevens
Buchanan Rides Alone

The novel hints at this theme but it’s more systematically expanded in Boetticher’s film. First, the town’s judge, Simon Agry (Tol Avery), steps in to prevent the hanging, not out of any principle but because it wouldn’t look good on his political resume. A trial is required beforehand. He presides, Buchanan pleads and is found innocent, but Juan – whom Buchanan is now calling “Johnny” – is sentenced to hang.

 

At which point the deal-making really begins. An emissary from Juan’s wealthy father (Joe De Santis) offers Judge Simon fifty of his employer’s finest horses in exchange for Juan’s freedom. The judge discusses this with Carbo, his bodyguard/personal assistant (6), and they conjure up an alternative deal that will be less open to scrutiny: $50,000.

 

As in the other Ranown films, a bounty becomes central to the action, a MacGuffin that matters to everybody but turns out to be meaningless in itself. Andrew Sarris has described the Scott/Boetticher films as “partly floating poker games” (7), and that characterisation’s appropriateness was never as pertinent as it is here. Just as Sergio Leone’s man-with-no-name Westerns pivot on the ways in which men and the American way are corrupted by money, so does, in particular, Buchanan Rides Alone. 

 

One doesn’t have to look too hard to see the potent influence that Boetticher’s work has had on Leone. (8)And, like the American West evoked in films such as The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), Boetticher’s bordertown setting provides the stage for a meditation on the parlous state of the human condition (women are notably absent).

 

As the wheeling and dealing accumulates and accelerates, the absurdist black humour driving Buchanan Rides Alone takes charge. Hostages are taken and freed; the cash in the emissary’s saddlebags changes hands; a dizzying number of men with guns negotiate with each other; the $2000 in Buchanan’s money belt becomes a further commodity to be traded; individuals offer each other payment in return for a wide range of services. 

 

L Q Jones, Randolph Scott, Buchanan Rides Alone

It’s a chain of exchange that embroils every character. Including the film’s two essentially honourable men, Buchanan and Juan: Buchanan offers Pecos (L.Q. Jones), one of Sheriff Agry’s deputies, partnership “on that spread o’ mine” after Pecos saves him from being executed; Juan insists at the end that Buchanan accept his horse as payment for saving his life.

"This is my town now"
"You can have it."

 

Eventually and inevitably, the negotiations lead to a shoot-out on the bridge that leads from Mexico to the US, from one state of being to another. When the gunfire stops, bodies are strewn everywhere and Buchanan indicates that the time has come for him to go home. “This is my town now,” Carbo tells him, testing the ground. However, Buchanan isn’t interested in this challenge any more than he’s been interested in any others during the course of the film. “You can have it,” he replies. 

 

As he rides off, Carbo, a very urbane addition to the genre, turns to the grovelling hotel clerk who’s somehow managed to survive the shoot-out: “Don’t just stand there, Amos,” he tells him. “Get a shovel.” Amos, who’s executed by Carbo in the novel, does as he’s told.

 

(1)       from Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (2005), produced and directed by Bruce Ricker, written by Dave Kehr, narrated by Ed Harris

(2)       For commentary on the previous three films of the Ranown cycle, click on the titles  Seven Men from Now & The Tall T & Decision at Sundown 

(3)       Jonas Ward, The Name’s Buchanan, G.K. Hall & Co., Maine, 1995 edition

(4)       The Films of Randolph Scott, McFarland & Company, Inc., North Carolina, 2004, pp. 203 – 206 

(5)       Ibid, p. 206

(6)       In a recent email correspondence, Geoff Gardner provocatively and eloquently described Carbo as “an early apparition of the political minder, the dark force pulling the strings behind the local politician”.

(7)       Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 – 1968, Dutton, USA, 1968, p. 124

(8)       According to Boetticher, he first encountered Leone at a film festival in Italy. The pair met in front of the hotel where Boetticher and his wife were staying. Leone recognized him and introduced himself.  “Buddy, darling, I stole everything from you!” he announced, before offering to produce Boetticher’s next film. “If I produce it and you direct it, everybody in the world will see it,” he promised. “Great, but just one thing,” Boetticher told him. “Stay off the set.”

As recounted in David Schwartz, “A Pinewood Dialogue with Budd Boetticher”, http://www.movingimagesource.us/files/dialogues/2/85893_programs_transcript_html_213.htm