Old Trails in the Western

In the early 1960s, when many of us were trying to establish the legitimacy of film studies, the easiest way to make a case for a genre such as the western was to cite prestige films such as High Noon or Shane. Earnest advocates of introducing film studies into schools and universities would ignore anything resembling a B western, or even features like Anthony Mann’s Winchester 73, while lyrically praising the virtues of the latest Ingmar Bergman movie. Pioneering Australian film scholar John Flaus would have none of this. He didn’t dislike Shane or High Noon, but one of his major works at that time was on a series of Randolph Scott westerns directed by Budd Boetticher that appeared on the bottom half of double bills in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

John was not making things easy for himself. These were B pictures designed to be shown as a support to the main feature, and the titles were difficult to book by the film societies and educational institutions where he was trying to make his case. But many of the key films were being regularly screened theatrically and could sometimes be booked on 35mm by organisations such as the Sydney University Film Group.

Whatever you thought about Randolph Scott, he was a familiar figure—the star of Saturday afternoon matinees and unpretentious second features. But Flaus went further; he took Scott seriously as a performer. As he wrote in his notes in the Sydney University Film Group Bulletin of February 1970:

Scott is more of an aesthetic object, while paradoxically closer to reality … The craggy, weathered contours of the mature Scott visage, the steadfast gaze, and the effortless carriage constitute a fine correlative of endurance and composure.

In his papers and discussions Flaus would discuss the actor’s considerable screen presence, his effortless mastery of period weapons and horse riding, pointing out that Scott’s ramrod-straight back and control of his favourite mounts were instantly recognisable as soon as he rode into view, enabling him to dominate the larger frame of the new formats. (By then even B movies were often shot in cinemascope.) Also, Flaus insisted, Scott had a well-placed voice and impeccable timing. Before establishing himself in westerns, Scott had been a likeable second lead in 1930s screwball comedies and musicals. In the Budd Boetticher films, Flaus argued, the director could play off likeable villains impersonated by strong performers such as Lee Marvin, Claude Akins or Craig Stevens against Scott’s laconic persona to intensify the dramatic conflict—arguments that were quite challenging for audiences that included more than a few intellectual snobs.

Most of us had been aware of the importance of landscape in westerns, but John alerted us to the way western directors made the movement of figures in the landscape an integral part of the narrative—the cinematic equivalent of imagery in poetic drama. Nearly fifty years later, no one who takes film seriously would reject the western as an art form, or disparage a key figure like Randolph Scott, or argue that someone like Budd Boetticher was not a great director. But such disparagement was typical of many film buffs, academics and educational administrators in the 1960s and 1970s, and made founding film studies courses very difficult.

Happily, Boetticher ultimately received ample recognition, at least in America and France, with numerous retrospectives of his work, although until recently his films were difficult to obtain in Australia. However, Seven Men from Now, Boetticher’s first collaboration with Scott, was restored in 2000 and is now available on a special edition DVD, and the other films Boetticher made with Scott between 1956 and 1959 have been released in a handsome boxed set. All of which is good reason to examine these masterpieces again.

The cycle began with the script Burt Kennedy wrote for Seven Men from Now. It was initially picked up by John Wayne’s Batjac productions with the idea that Wayne would play Ben Stride, the former sheriff seeking to avenge the murder of his wife in a hold-up. But Wayne was making The Searchers, so the part was offered to Randolph Scott, who although in his late fifties, was well established as a star of B westerns. The script was then shown to Budd Boetticher, who had written and directed the successful Bullfighter and the Lady for Batjac and had made some modest features at Universal. Boetticher was delighted with Kennedy’s script and the film swiftly went into production. It was with this collaboration with writer and star that the director found his style. There was nothing new in a revenge plot, and the journey is one of the oldest devices in literature, but Kennedy created a taut, finely honed structure with spare dialogue and well-drawn characters that somehow rang true. It was also at times bleakly comic:

Ben Stride: What happened up there?

Bill Masters: Payte Bodeen … I killed him.

Ben Stride: Why?

Bill Masters: Why not?

Even better, the dramatic conflicts were well grounded in character. Seven Men from Now marked the first appearance of the likeable villain that was to appear in various forms in every film of the cycle. Here the character is called Bill Masters and played with style and wit by Lee Marvin. He respects Scott’s Ben Stride yet wants to test himself against the man. Masters relishes cruelly tormenting Greer (Walter Reed), the “half a man” on the journey with them, when he senses the attraction between Stride and Greer’s wife Annie. Throughout we wait for Masters to cross the line. Deftly interwoven with these themes is Stride’s relationship with the inadequate Greer, on a mysterious journey of his own, and his beautiful wife, luminously played by Gail Russell.

Boetticher shoots in a plain, uncluttered style using long takes that allow the actors to play off each other’s performance. Actors are often brought into a well framed set-up, with the remainder of the scene covered in a two-shot. For me this is infinitely preferable to the mechanical cutting between close-ups that is fashionable in many contemporary films.

Seven Men from Now was filmed almost entirely at Lone Pine, California, in an eighteen-day shoot. The small town is about 215 miles from Hollywood and is surrounded by a variety of landscapes. There are flat meadows, arid desert, a gentle river, several mountain ranges and some distinctive rock formations, and Boetticher uses nearly all of them to give viewers the illusion of a journey. In his Sydney University Film Group notes John Flaus describes how in Boetticher’s films of this period the figures move geometrically across the landscape.

At the time John was not aware of the analysis of Renaissance and Medieval painting in Charles Bouleau’s book The Painter’s Secret Geometry—it has always been a difficult book to obtain. Bouleau found the same geometric compositions in art that Flaus perceived in these westerns. Naturally Bouleau’s treatment of this “secret geometry” is far more extensive, with circles, squares, triangles and rectangles carefully plotted across the book’s reproductions of paintings; and his argument that painters like Leonardo Da Vinci were accomplished geometricians is certainly persuasive. Cinematographers such as Seven Men from Now’s William H. Clothier were, of course, not mapping out their shots with set squares and compasses on busy locations. But Clothier, along with Charles Lawton, Burnett Guffey and Lucien Ballard, who photographed the later films, were all masters of classical composition. Consequently the Boetticher westerns have a formal visual precision that draws viewers into the narrative, encouraging them to make fine distinctions about the characters and their conduct.

One of the great pleasures in studying Boetticher is that we can see his major films in the director’s own cut. We don’t have to wait for sequences removed by the studio either to be restored or reconstructed from stills or the script to enable us evaluate the director’s achievement, as has happened with other independent-minded directors like Orson Welles and Sam Peckinpah. Boetticher’s work remains intact because of the package he arranged with Randolph Scott and veteran producer Harry Joe Brown and took to Columbia after completing Seven Men from Now. The films that followed were B westerns certainly, and might be released anywhere, but the film-makers were an independent unit and thus had a measure of autonomy. The main criticism of the fans who discovered these movies for themselves is that they were “too damned short”.

The next Lone Pine film, also released in 1956, was based on “The Captives”, a short story by Elmore Leonard, and was again scripted by Burt Kennedy. Just before its release the film was retitled The Tall T. Kennedy fleshed out the original, building up Scott’s character of Pat Brennan, the former ranch foreman who is starting a place of his own. He then created a subplot involving a “rich old maid”, Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Sullivan), newly married to Willard Mims (John Hubbard), a fortune-hunting scoundrel. Seemingly effortlessly, all of this is captured in a series of concise exposition scenes, one of which includes a witty send-up of Scott’s stalwart persona. The relaxed tone changes abruptly when the newlyweds and Brennan arrive at the stagecoach station and fall into the hands of a trio of outlaws led by Richard Boone’s Usher. I don’t intend to reveal any more of the plot, as I hope some readers will want to discover the film for themselves, except to say that the interaction between Brennan and Usher takes on the dimensions of an Elizabethan tragedy, thanks to some fine writing and extraordinary performances by Boone and Scott.

After the modest success of The Tall T, Boetticher made two “interior westerns”, Decision at Sundown (1957) and Buchanan Rides Alone (1958). They were scripted by Charles Lang, with some uncredited assistance from Burt Kennedy on Buchanan Rides Alone. Both films are interesting because of their themes and variations on the formula shaped by Burt Kennedy. (He disliked both movies.) In Decision at Sundown the Scott character’s quest for vengeance is wrong yet the town is motivated to redeem itself by his actions—an inversion of High Noon. Scott is very good as a man whose obsession leads him to the verge of madness; and as the object of his hatred John Carroll never quite loses our sympathy with a complex interpretation of a character who, although corrupt, is neither a coward nor a knave.

By way of contrast, the Scott character in Buchanan Rides Alone is enjoyably relaxed and benign. He is simply the catalyst that causes the repulsive family who control the town of Agry to self-destruct through their greed and stupidity. As the viewer comes to like Buchanan and his friends, watching the Agrys (the town is named after them) double-cross each other is subversively enjoyable, even if the plot does creak a little. It is also a pleasure to see Craig Stevens (who later played the eponymous hero in the Peter Gunn series) in his only western as a likeably ambivalent gunfighter who may or may not side with our hero.

Boetticher, Kennedy and Scott returned to Lone Pine for Ride Lonesome (1959) followed by Comanche Station (1960). Both films use much the same situations. Scott’s character is on a quest, he encounters likeable villains played by Pernell Roberts and Claude Akins respectively, and there are some well staged encounters with Indians. There is a beautiful woman on the journey, Karen Steele in the first movie and Nancy Gates in the second. Once again a critic should not reveal too much of the plot, as much of the pleasure derives from the subtle variations Boetticher and Kennedy work on this by-now-familiar structure. Suffice to say the films are beautifully constructed and dramatically satisfying and, indeed, could be a little longer, as we would like to spend more time with the characters. For me, experiencing these films in near-to-ideal circumstances is the visual and dramatic equivalent of listening to Bach’s Goldberg variations. Just when everything seems comfortably familiar there are the aesthetically satisfying jolts we get from a masterpiece.

There were to be no more Ranown westerns, as they had come to be known, after Comanche Station. Scott was in his sixties and Boetticher wanted to make a film about bullfighting.

Seeing these films now, as Clint Eastwood observes in one of the special features on the DVD, they do have some of the limitations of 1950s film-making. The women are too well groomed. There is a terrible song over the credits of Seven Men from Now. When the film was being restored, Kennedy and Boetticher wanted the song cut. But Michael Wayne insisted they should not rewrite film history. The same applies to the films’ treatment of sexuality. Perhaps there should have been a suggestion of nudity in Scott’s scenes with Gail Russell and Maureen O’Sullivan but the uncensored thoughts are present in their performances, and nowadays the restraint is somehow refreshing.

Finally there was a postscript—Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) released here as Guns in the Afternoon. The development of this project by the screenwriter Nathan Stone Jnr overlapped the making of the Ranown films and was intended for John Wayne and Gary Cooper. But Cooper died, and somehow the script found its way to MGM and the young Sam Peckinpah. The two ageing former lawmen were played by Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott.

Again the story is built around a journey, this time to transport gold from a mining camp to a bank. One of the lawmen has become cynical and disillusioned and wants to take the gold; the other is determined to remain true to his code. The latter was the sort of part Scott had played throughout his career in westerns, but both he and McCrea were unhappy with the casting. As Peckinpah told it, they swapped parts over lunch then tossed a coin for who would get top billing, and Scott won. The result could not have been bettered. Scott relished the chance to play the rough equivalent of the roles Lee Marvin and Richard Boone had taken opposite him and delivers Stone and Peckinpah’s dialogue with great aplomb. Scott also gets the chance to do his last on-screen ride to the rescue. Boetticher was unavailable and Ride the High Country became the first of the four westerns with which Peckinpah was to redefine the genre.

Looking back on these old trails is a reminder of how much Australian film scholarship owes to critics like Flaus who approached cinema on its own terms and discovered a new art form. There were others of course: Charles Higham, John Baxter, Joel Greenberg and Sylvia Lawson to name only a few. Their work—soon, in Flaus’s case, to be republished—demonstrates that great artistic achievements are to be found in the most unlikely places, even at Saturday afternoon children’s matinees.