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Some Things a Man Can’t Ride Around: Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Westerns
By Tom Gunning
The Outlaw Variations: The Ranown Westerns’ Finely Drawn Antagonists
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In the westerns concocted by director Budd Boetticher and writers Burt Kennedy and Charles Lang for the actor Randolph Scott, the star invariably plays a man who is, as the 1943 Great American Songbook standard “One for My Baby” put it, true to his code. A man who, to trot out an even hoarier phrase, does what a man’s got to do. Scott plays the hero of each movie, and that hero is stalwart, stoic, determined. When he’s getting the job done, he’s imposingly grim. When he’s thwarted, he clenches his jaw. His expression sometimes betrays a self-pity that he’d rather not show. The Boetticher/Scott protagonist can be obsessive, monomaniacal. On the moral ladder, he sometimes stands only one or two rungs above the men he opposes. And the men he opposes, venal though they may be, almost always have their reasons. One of the neat tricks pulled off consistently by these movies is in giving us a western hero who fits within the parameters of genre convention without ever descending into cliché. Another is in putting him up against opponents who are just as intriguing.
In his splendid memoir When in Disgrace, Boetticher boasts that in the seven pictures he made with Scott, he created “six new stars: Lee Marvin, Richard Boone, Craig Stevens, James Coburn, Pernell Roberts, and Claude Akins.” As it happens, all six of those future stars play antagonists of a sort. Marvin goes up against Scott in Seven Men from Now (1956), the first of Boetticher’s pictures with Scott, distributed by Warner Bros. But the rest appear in the five Columbia Pictures releases presented in this set. And while these actors’ performances are all remarkable, theirs are not the only indelible villains in these films.
In The Tall T (1957), adapted by Kennedy from an Elmore Leonard story, Scott’s Pat Brennan is arguably the most relaxed straight arrow of this collection’s bunch. While riding from out of nowhere to a town called Contention, he volunteers to buy some candy for youngster Jeff, son of a stagecoach stationmaster. Because that’s just the kind of fellow Brennan is. The predicament he eventually winds up in involves a kidnapped heiress, her craven husband, and a trio of despicable outlaws. How despicable? They’ve killed the kid who asked for the candy, along with his dad.
The director’s next two films also showcase adversaries who, like Kimbrough, are well versed in corruption. In Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), the almost archetypally handsome Stevens plays Abe Carbo, a cagey temporary foe of Scott’s title character. Carbo, who more or less earns the right to the town he eventually inherits, is what you might call a man of provisional integrity, someone who can roll with the punches of an unscrupulous world. (Stevens’s steely, anti-ironic approach served him in good stead as the title detective on the television show Peter Gunn, which premiered shortly after Buchanan’s release.) On the other hand, much of the tension of Comanche Station (1960) derives from the uneasy détente Scott’s character makes with Akins’s occasionally affable bad guy, Ben Lane, as both compete to see a kidnapped woman to her home, and a big reward. Lane misreads the motivations of Scott’s Jefferson Cody, in part because, unlike Cody, he sees the world only in terms of what he can get out of it. Akins has a grin that’s part aw-shucks and part “I can cheat at cards and get away with it.” But Cody knows the sadism that lies not too far beneath that grin; in their past lives as soldiers, Cody tried to court-martial Lane for killing Native American villagers.
Even more sinister is the main villain of Ride Lonesome (1959), Frank, one of those characters everyone talks about all through the film, so that when he does show up on-screen, he had better be impressive. Given that he’s played by Lee Van Cleef, he is. “I did him a hurt once,” Frank says of Scott’s Ben Brigade—referring to the fact that he murdered Brigade’s wife. This movie also features the most disarming of the Boetticher bad men, played by Coburn and Roberts. Coburn’s Whit and Roberts’s Sam are robbers trying to go straight. They aim to do so by delivering the outlaw Billy John (James Best) to the authorities. But their competition is Brigade, who wants not only the money offered for Billy John but righteous vengeance. The frequently hapless Whit and Sam act as if they’re seasoned tough guys, but they’re young, and hardly as haunted as Brigade. Roberts’s projection of machismo here is refreshingly relaxed, and Coburn is, well, Coburn. Which is to say, irresistibly wry, even in his character’s befuddlement. (Coburn’s role in this, his first feature, was in fact expanded at Scott’s request; the older actor liked the younger man’s style.) The eventual fates of Whit and Sam suggest that the best way a man can live up to his code, in Boetticher’s world and in the real one, is to give another man or two their shot at redemption.
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