Decision at Sundown: Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher's work with Randolph Scott became famous and revered within critical circles and among directors due to its distillation of Western tropes and archetypes into their purest forms. But even Boetticher's work could become tired and repetitive. Decision at Sundown is one such example. It pales in comparison to Boetticher and Scott's other collaborations. The film feels like it is merely going through the motions of what a Boetticher/Scott Western should be. You have Scott as Bart Allison, a tough, weathered man with a dark past. He comes to the town of Sundown with the intention of killing Tate Kimbrough. Allison believes that Kimbrough is responsible for his wife's death three years earlier. After disrupting Kimbrough's marriage ceremony to a local woman, he engages in a massive shoot-out. This scene pales in comparison to another shoot-out in a superior Boetticher/Scott collaboration, Buchanan Rides Alone (1958). Whereas in Buchanan Rides Alone the shoot-out consumed the entire town, in Decision at Sundown Allison is content to hole up in a single building and pick people off. There is a twist near the end that reveals that Allison's wife may not have been as virtuous as he thought. This casts Allison in a peculiar light when compared to Boetticher/Scott's other protagonists. Could he be deluding himself? If he is, why does he want Kimbrough dead so badly? These are interesting questions, but unfortunately they fall to carry the film.

6/10