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The meditative buckaroo, Budd Boetticher's hombre, the cowboy with a rock in his boot. The desert in the first shot is neither Ford's al fresco cathedral nor Mann's barbed wilderness, but a patch of craggy boulders and low horizons—the circular topography of ambiguity, with Randolph Scott riding through. Former ramrod turned lone goatherd, Scott faces frontier life with good-humored tranquility: He wanders into town, smiles at the bull that will throw him into a watering trough, and limps off with saddle slung over his shoulder. Sharing the stagecoach is the mining heiress "scheduled to be an old maid" (Maureen O'Sullivan) and her fancy-pants bridegroom (John Hubbard), at the nearby station the mood darkens. (A brief panning shot superbly embodies the protagonist's laconic horror as he realizes that the young friend he was bringing gifts to is now one of the several corpses at the bottom of a well.) "A man should have something of his own," declares the bandit (Richard Boone), something of a sagebrush gent despite his sins, with plenty of courtliness and rue to go with his violence. (The only thing he despises more than the snake-eyed brutishness of his cohorts is the craven Hubbard's willingness to ditch his wife to save his own skin.) Boetticher unfolds this hostage scenario on natural prosceniums, a campfire and a cave and a sloping hillside, and with stark delicacy lets the moral codes brush against and shade into each other. A deep and bitter study of hostility and serenity, a waltz between the hero who admits he's scared and the villain who hopes to one day have his own little ranch. The last line ("It's gonna be a nice day") is the perfect echo for Boetticher's West, a void where a man keeps his opponent alive just so he can tell him his dreams. Cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr. With Arthur Hunnicutt, Henry Silva, Skip Homeier, and Robert Burton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |