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 - 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