The Films of Budd Boetticher (Tall T / Decision at Sundown / Buchanan Rides Alone / Ride Lonesome / Comanche Station)
by Budd Boetticher
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: James Best, Karen Steele, Pernell Roberts, Randolph Scott, Richard BooneDirector: Budd Boetticher
Brand: Sony
Producer: Budd Boetticher
Producer: Harry Joe Brown
Writer: Burt Kennedy
Writer: Charles Lang
Writer: Elmore Leonard
Writer: Jonas Ward
Writer: Vernon L. Fluharty
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 380 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-11-04
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of The Films of Budd Boetticher (Tall T / Decision at Sundown / Buchanan Rides Alone / Ride Lonesome / Comanche Station)
Movie Review: EXQUISITE CHAMBER WESTERNS
Summary: 5 Stars
COMANCHE STATION:
If The "Tall T" is bleakest, and "Ride Lonesome" a fan favorite, then "Comanche Station" (1960) is the most poetic and artistically accomplished of Boetticher's Ranown cycle of westerns.
This was the valedictory film for Ranown and was intended to be actor Randolph Scott's as well (two years later he was talked out of retirement to make the superbly sublime, but slightly overrated "Ride the High Country" with director Sam Peckinpah and co-star Joel McCrea).
Scott emerges from a cubist landscape, first as a majestic silhouette, then as Orphee's haunted, chiseled ghost, continuing his vain, ten year search for a (most likely dead) wife, abducted by the Indians.
The native Americans here are portrayed as little more than savages, and Nancy Gates, the heroine he winds up rescuing, is a delicate object of prized beauty, rather than fully human. These quibbles aside, once again Boetticher's stark, stripped down sense of composition is replete with complex characters and ambiguous mores.
Randolph Scott embodies a beautiful purity here, more so even than in the other entries. His endless years of wandering through the vast, arid, western desert, searching for his lost wife echoes Orpheus searching for Eurydice in hell, or a seemingly pointless purgatory.
Comanche Station is a brooding post modernist work which stems from allegories found in the most potent, forceful biblical tales and mythology. Claude Akins is the primary, King Saul-like villain, who has committed mass murder, intends to kill both Scott and Gates, does not hesitate killing his own man, and yet admires Scott and even saves him from a terrible fate.
Skip Homeier and Richard Rust are Akins' latent homosexual henchmen (in a poignant scene, Akins complains to Scott of Homeier's "softness"). The scene in which Homeier carefully lifts Rust's dead, arrow-ridden body from the creek permeates a tender fragrance such as one found in the story of David and Jonathan from the biblical Book of Kings. Homeier is touchingly simplistic, not truly wanting a life of crime, but clueless as to any other way of life.
Scott's hero looks like a figure culled from a Cezanne canvas. He is at first misjudged by Gates, but will eventually be her savior, reuniting her with her family, the stains and scars of her past laid to rest. There is no such redemption for Scott. Station ends where it begins, and the tree from the finale of Ride Lonesome reappears here, symbolically haunting, in the middle of a river.
Pessimistic repetition is the Kafka-like curse of Scott's ghost who will never find his wife, nor even a destination. The final scene in Comanche Station, like the Ranown cycle, sears itself into memory. Hopelessly undervalued by the bulk of mainstream audiences and critics, but for the rest of us, as blasphemous as this may sound, a brief period by a group of artists, lead by obsessive, inimitable auteur Budd Boetticher, that rivals the best in American cinema (and, yes, that includes the films of John Ford).
RIDE LONESOME:
"Ride Lonesome" (1959) was the first of Boetticher's "Ranown" cycle to utilize the new CinemaScope process, and it does so impressively. The rich color and expressionist framing of desert canyon rock would only be topped in the series' final entry, Comanche Station. Most fans of the cycle consider Ride Lonesome the best entry. While that remains debatable, it is certainly, in terms of composition and pacing, the most perfectly structured. It is also the most elegiac and, surprisingly, optimistic.
Amongst a memorable cast, Lee Van Cleef etches out an unforgettable, albeit brief, performance as the murderous brother of James Best (later known as the bumbling deputy in the TV series Dukes of Hazard) , who is prisoner to Randolph Scott's bounty hunter. Naturally, things are more complex than they seem. Scott wants Cleef to catch up with them and for a very personal, startling reason: Cleef hanged Scott's wife years before. Along the journey Scott meets up with the beautiful Karen Steele, and a pair of pseudo-outlaws in Pernell Roberts (Trapper John M.D) and a shockingly young James Coburn (his first film). Roberts and Coburn want Best for themselves, since turning him in, dead or alive, will gain them amnesty from their crimes. Naturally, there is sexual tension between Steele and Scott, yet the potential for relationship is doomed by Scott's obsessive thirst for revenge.
Ride Lonesome is, easily, Boetticher's most optimistic film (as optimistic as Boetticher can be and still be Boetticher). Scott's eventual handing over of Best to the two repentant outlaws is a pleasant surprise. The villains are hardly two-dimensional. Cleef, having committed a heinous crime, earnestly begs for his brother's life, only to fall on Scott's deaf ears.
The four males desire and vie for the widowed Steele (her husband having been murdered by the Apaches). At first she is mere ornamentation, as the women in the Boetticher films sometimes tend to be. Later, Steele's character somewhat evolves into mother, latent lover, comforter, but short of fully developed person. Full development of female characters and weak scoring are the two biggest flaws in the otherwise outstanding Ranown cycle.
Boetticher still finds time for adroit comic touches amidst the overwhelming ironies and the final, haunting, lyrical image of the burning tree that Scott's wife died on. Steele leaves her protector there, in the desert, alone. He will never be happy, nor find contentment. Indeed, one is left with the ominous feeling that the ravaged Scott himself will die there, never leaving this spot. This final shot sears in the memory.
To summarize: Ride Lonesome is as optimistic as Boetticher can be and still be Boetticher.
THE TALL T:
Shot in a mere twelve days, The Tall T is one of the most remarkable westerns in a decade that unquestionably belonged to the western genre. Burt Kennedy scripted a pure, taut, and crisp script from an Elmore Leonard short story. The Tall T is an actor's film. The first surprise lies in Maureen O'Sullivan's performance as homely, whimpering Doretta Mims; a performance that can almost be seen as a bookend to her far different, equally superb performance as the independent, strong-willed, sensual Jane of Tarzan and his Mate (1934). Here, she is the newly married, timid wife of unsympathetic louse John Hubbard. By film's end she emerges from self-pity's well, dress coming off shoulder, hair loosed down and radiating a fire akin to Prometheus unbound as she is pressed up against the pure, granite-hard, phallic form of Randolph Scott.
Scott's character is one of his most interesting and fully developed in the Boetticher cannon. The film opens with Scott visiting friends at the Way Station. Upon Scott's departure, the young , amiable, grandson of the station manager gives the laconic cowboy a penny for some rock hard candy from the town store. Naturally, the good-natured Scott promises to do so. However, on the way back to the station, Scott, more animated than normal, loses his horse in a bet in a scene evoking archetypal good old boy western humor. The calm before the proverbial storm.
Taking a stagecoach on the way back to the station, Scott has a bit of camaraderie with old buddy and stagecoach driver Arthur Hunnicutt (a character favorite in dozens of westerns, he typified the grizzled sidekick) who is transporting newlyweds O' Sullivan and her louse husband;,John Hubbard (surprisingly, a standard stock coward, nowhere near as developed as Walter Reed's similar character in Seven Men From Now ).
Waiting at the Way are three villains in the form of Richard Boone, Skip Homeier and Henry Silva, plotting mayhem. After the trio kills Hunnicutt, Scott discovers they have butchered the grandfather and grandson,disposing of them in the well. The killings, wisely, are never seen and the interplay of dialogue between Scott and Silva is deftly handled, seething in angst; " And where is the boy?", `In the well!".
Hubbard is disposed of after displaying an all too eager willingness to ransom off his wife. There is honor even among the likes of these. Boone's character, fully capable of committing vicious, cold blooded murder, begins to seep through the mask and facade, revealing a character that Scott empathizes with. Boone is tired of his two young comrades, and, likewise, he identifies with and admires Scott, despite the knowledge that he will have to kill both him and the woman.
The sexual tension between O' Sullivan and Scott inexorably builds as they are forced to sleep together while planning their survival. Scott does not want to kill Boone, but stoically acknowledges what is certainly forthcoming. Even henchmen Homeier and Silva reveal added, fascinating dimensions to their characterizations. Their desperate dreams and goals are revealed, only to be reminded later that they killed an innocent old man, a young boy and they plan to kill again.
The Tall T , like Seven Men From Now, consistently surprises and magnetically draws the viewer into these characters and it's compellingly rich bleakness, so much so that the finale, as inevitable as it is, evokes true, emotionally heightened dread.
The Tall T is sculpted by the hands of a master craftsman.
* My reviews were originally published at 366 Weird Movies
More The Films of Budd Boetticher (Tall T / Decision at Sundown / Buchanan Rides Alone / Ride Lonesome / Comanche Station) reviews:
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Summary of The Films of Budd Boetticher (Tall T / Decision at Sundown / Buchanan Rides Alone / Ride Lonesome / Comanche Station)
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