The films of Budd Boetticher have been
criminally unavailable on home video. As of
October, 2008, only four of his 35 features
were available on DVD. That alone makes
The Films of Budd Boetticher, a box
set of five westerns directed by Boetticher
and starring Randolph Scott, an important
release. That they represent some of the
greatest American westerns of the fifties
makes the set essential.
Budd Boetticher first directed Randolph Scott
on
Seven Men From Now, a western made
for John Wayne's production company, Batjac,
written by first-time screenwriter Burt
Kennedy. It was a lean script with sparing
but rich dialogue and Boetticher's direction
matched the writing. Scott was so impressed
with the film and pleased with Boetticher's
direction that he approached Boetticher to
direct for his own Scott-Brown Productions.
For their first production together, Scott
acquired a property that screenwriter Burt
Kennedy had developed for Batjac, an
adaptation of Elmore Leonard's short story
The Captives. " I had found the short
story," Kennedy recalled in an interview.
"Duke's company bought it and I was under
contract and I wrote the script." It was a
perfect match for Scott's persona and the
film, renamed
The Tall T, was the
first of five films Boetticher directed for
Scott and partner Harry Joe Brown.
Scott stars as struggling rancher Pat
Brennan, a likable fellow in the wrong place
at the wrong time, and Richard Boone is his
villain counterpart Frank Usher, the
charismatic and ruthlessly charming leader of
a small gang of homicidal punks who hijack
the stage that has picked up the laconic
cowboy. It's supposed to be a shipment of
silver but instead they find aging newlywed
Doretta Mims (Maureen O'Sullivan), the
"homely" heir to a mining fortune, and her
conniving, cowardly husband John Hubbard, who
sells her out to save his own skin. The heist
turns into a kidnapping, but Usher
unexpectedly lets the unnecessary Brennan
live. He likes Brennan; he's a man in
contract to his gang members, who are merely
boys (and stunted, shallow ones at that), a
realist not afraid to admit he's scared yet
never showing it in his face, and the one
person in Usher's (admittedly limited) social
circle he can confide in.
The rest of the picture is a tight character
drama of shifting relationships as Brennan
uses his wiles and wits to isolate and kill
the individual gang members, who have already
murdered the stage driver (Arthur Hunnicutt
in a small but memorable role) and a
stagecoach station manager and his young son.
Usher is the greatest of the charming
antagonists that Boetticher and Kennedy love
so much and Boone is brilliant in the role:
quiet in his command, both alert and relaxed,
ready to jerk to attention. He expertly,
pitilessly runs the show, and his easy body
language couldn't be more different from the
stiff, self-conscious carriage of Scott, or
from the insolent, lazy lean of the punk
gunman Henry Silva. The language is equally
defining. Scott, true to form, gets all the
arch clichés in tough, terse bites and he
delivers them in his usual flat tenor, but
the two illiterate gunmen played by Silva and
Skip Homeier speak in a kind of frontier
poetry of simple words and offbeat grammar
that communicates immaturity, lack of
education, and petty yet impassioned dreams
with an unexpected sensitivity. Violent as
they are, these boys are full of life and
feeling. But they live a violent lifestyle
that catches up with them. The violence of
The Tall T is not explicit but it is
brutal and a little grotesque. There's
nothing neat or gentle about dying in this
cycle of films.
Shot on location in Lone Pine, a popular
location for western productions a few hours
north of Los Angeles, it was a low budget
production shot on an 18-day schedule.
Boetticher shot it sparingly, so that there
was only one way to put the film together, a
lesson he learned from directing in the
studio assembly-line at Universal. "It was
cut on the set," he described in a 1989
interview. "(The editor) couldn't eliminate
anything because there wasn't anything to
eliminate. He just pieced the thing together.
And that was the movie." One of the film's
most memorable moments was originally an
accident that Boetticher incorporated into
the film. Scott steps out of the shack in the
morning and whacks his head on the
low-hanging roof jutting over the doorway,
prompting Usher to burst out laughing.
"That's the kind of thing that you do,"
explained Boetticher in an interview. "All
the funny stuff, that's not in the script."
It also marks one of the defining moments of
Scott's character, who is stoic but
definitely vulnerable and decidedly human.
Burt Kennedy was still under contract to
Batjac so Charles Lang wrote the next couple
of films in the Boetticher and Scott
collaboration.
Decision at Sundown,
based on a story by Vernon L. Fluharty,
leaves the desert for a town setting, where a
bitter Scott arrives to kill the man who ran
off with his wife. It's an odd and intriguing
little picture and Scott makes one of his
most memorable entrances he holds up a
coach from the inside, then steps off to let
it go its own way but neither Boetticher
nor Scott are in their element in the culture
of the town setting. In
Buchanan Rides
Alone, Scott switches from grim to
affable and easy-going as a momentarily
wealthy cowboy (Scott) who wanders into the
corrupt bordertown of Agryville and runs
afoul of the amoral, backstabbing Agry family
that runs the town. It's a genuine black
comedy with a thoroughly mercenary cast of
characters who keep double-crossing one
another as they scheme to steal Scott's
hard-earned money and the ransom charged for
a Mexican prisoner, the son of a wealthy
rancher across the border. Boetticher was
dissatisfied with Lang's script and called
Kennedy for an uncredited rewrite, keeping
him on the set for the whole shoot as they
ad-libbed the production, which was shot in
Arizona to capture the parched desert
landscape of the Mexican-American border
region.
Boetticher became a producer for his last two
films for Scott (the production banner was
changed from Scott-Brown to Ranown) and
Kennedy, whose contract at Batjac had
expired, wrote magnificent original scripts
that echoed the strengths of
Seven Men
From Now.
Ride Lonesome and
Comanche Station are a pair of films
with almost identical plots but essential,
elegant differences. Scott plays self-imposed
outcasts with a past and a mission, and his
journeys becomes wound up with a woman he
saves/escorts and a collection of mercenary
outlaws who invite themselves along as riding
companions and competitors: both after the
same thing and neither ready to back down.
Yet these men that would see each other dead
will save each other's lives before the final
showdown.
In
Ride Lonesome, the men are Boone
and Wid (Pernell Roberts and James Coburn, in
his film debut), outlaws who want to start
fresh. Bringing in wanted man Billy John
(James Best at his punk kid best) will give
them amnesty, but Scott's driven bounty
hunter Brigade has already captured him and
he's on a mission of vengeance against Billy
John's ruthless criminal brother (Lee Van
Cleef, who brings an oily charm to the role).
In
Comanche Station, Scott's nemesis
is Ben Lane (Claude Akins), a smiling snake
of a outlaw who wants the reward that Scott's
Jefferson Cody is due for rescuing a white
woman (Nancy Gates) from Indian captivity.
Ride Lonesome became Boetticher's
first widescreen production and he settled
into the CinemaScope format by shooting
longer takes, often shooting complete
traveling scenes in one long take using a
dolly car. The films, shot in Boetticher's
defining landscape of Lone Pine, chronicle
long journeys, with pauses and stops along
the way, which begin and end in the
wilderness, and again the terrain is used to
dramatic effect. Scott makes his entrance
into each film walking through a sheer
crevice, hemmed in by walls of rock on either
side, and this barren image is the defining
state of his world: barren deserts, rugged
plains where the rocks jut out of the Earth
instead of trees, and featureless valleys,
all ringed by distant mountains that are as
much fences as borders, trapping them in a
domain far from civilization. Even when the
films leaves the sun-parched desert for the
green coolness of the forest, it's merely an
oasis in the self-inflicted purgatory.
Boetticher carefully paces the rhythm of
landscape his parties travel through, which
served the crew as well as the film; a
stop-off in a shady grove or by a cool river
was good for company morale during the shoot.
"A man needs a reason to ride this country.
You gotta reason?" invariably Scott asks the
men he meets in the nowhereland of the
desert. More than a valid query, it's a
telling one. These characters are driven by
the past and can't stop talking of the
future, but the films are viscerally in the
moment, in the now, as if neither past nor
future exist. When all is said and done,
these final films are American frontier
odysseys with tragic dimensions and Scott is
like a mythic figure doomed to wander the
deserts for eternity in his obsessive quests.
The films were very financially successful
and largely ignored by critics at the time
for the very elements that make them so
great. These low budgets films are modest
productions, unpretentious westerns pared
down to their essentials, lean stories about
men on the frontier living a life in a
dangerous, inhospitable world. Years later
these tight, taut, often savage little
pictures were reassessed and recognized as
classics of the genre. The five films were
branded "the Ranown Cycle," which is
technically incorrect but serves its purpose
just fine, and the name has a certain
frontier color to it.
All five films have been beautifully restored
and remastered for DVD. The images are sharp
and the color vivid. The film grain is
evident in the darker scenes, which is
appropriate and part of the film's texture.
The earlier three films, which have been
shown on TV in full-screen editions (when
shown at all), have been mastered in their
proper theatrical aspect ratio (adjusted to
the 16x9 format of widescreen TVs). The
CinemaScope films are beautifully mastered in
the correct widescreen format and correct
years of bad pan-&-scan TV prints.
Among the film's fans and supporters are
Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, both of
whom are involved in the DVD release. Martin
Scorsese provides a marvelous video
introduction to
The Tall T (and, by
extension, the entire series) and
Ride
Lonesome with a mixture of historical
perspective and cinephile love of the films,
but beware that he does include "spoilers."
His introductions (and everyone else's)
should probably be seen after the films.
Clint Eastwood introduces
Comanche
Station, but an even greater contribution
is the documentary
Budd Boetticher: A Man
Can Do That, a feature-length portrait of
the director and his life and career produced
by Eastwood and directed by Bruce Ricker. Ed
Harris narrates the production, originally
made for and shown on Turner Classic Movies,
it's an excellent overview with rare
interview footage with the director, who had
died before the documentary was made. The
documentary is on the first disc with
The
Tall T, accessed through the "Special
Features" (a minor design flaw on the rather
basic menus). Taylor Hackford provides the
introductions to
Decision at Sundown
and
Buchanan Rides Alone with more
enthusiasm than insight and provides
commentary on
Comanche Station. More
informative commentary tracks are offered by
film historians Jeanine Basinger on
The
Tall T and Jeremy Arnold on
Ride
Lonesome. These film professors have a
relaxed approach to their talks and provide
both historical background and critical
observations. The set is not lavish, but the
supplements and the transfers are excellent.
This is the presentation that these films
deserve: lean, respectful, rich with
information.
For more information about
The Films of
Budd Boetticher, visit
Sony
Pictures.To order
The Films of Budd
Boetticher, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
