Assigned to Danger: Budd Boetticher

Alright, so, I'm starting this review literally less than a minute after I finished watching Budd Boetticher's Assigned to Danger. And I realize that even now I still hardly have any idea what in the hell I just watched. Something about a bank heist gone wrong? An insurance investigator? A wounded gangster holding up in a building with his abused wife? And for some reason the insurance investigator just happens to stumble upon them and manages to defeat them? Am I getting that right? Oh! And what about that part where the untrained (at least I have every reason to believe he was untrained) insurance investigator manages to successfully remove a bullet without the proper medical tools and without killing the patient? What was up with that? Bleagh...these early, nitty-gritty Boetticher movies are beginning to run together...

4/10

One Mysterious Night: Budd Boetticher

So...this is how the mighty Budd Boetticher got his start in feature-length pictures, eh? I have to say that it was a lot better than some of the other debut films I've seen (The Delinquents [1957], anyone?). Clocking in at only an hour, One Mysterious Night was the seventh film in the Columbia Pictures Boston Blackie series. While nothing special, the plot was serviceable and the characters pleasing enough. Mercifully, none of the comedic relief roles were grating or annoying. One Mysterious Night has about as much in common with the rest of Boetticher's filmography as Les affaires publiques (1934) has with that of Robert Bresson. But it's still worth watching for Boetticher aficionados. Plus, it introduced me to a great new character that I'm eager to explore. This Boston Blackie is an ex-con who helps the police and a master of disguise? I'm sold!

6/10

The Tall T: Budd Boetticher

Originally published at Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear in 2010.

The Tall T is a film that many will probably never see. It’s not because it isn’t a great film or a particularly rare one. The reason that many will probably never see it is because everything about it seems like a stereotypical Western. In a genre that has been milked as dry as the Western, some would argue even to the point that it is impossible to say anything new with it, few would probably want to take the time to watch such an unassuming film. It stars one of the great cowboys of the silver screen, Randolph Scott, in the lead role. But he doesn’t have the star power that actors like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Henry Fonda maintain to this day. To many, Scott’s image on the movie poster or DVD case for The Tall T probably wouldn’t seem any different than any other B-movie actor that inundated the Western genre. The story seems too familiar. Scott must save the damsel in distress being held for ransom from a gang of outlaws. How many times have we encountered that story? And finally, the name itself, The Tall T, doesn’t really do anything to grab a potential viewer’s imagination. It doesn’t have any nostalgic romanticism that titles like High Noon or Stagecoach. But perhaps all of these things are what makes The Tall T such a good film. It doesn’t insist upon itself. It knows the rules of the game and is content to play by them. By doing so, The Tall T transforms itself into one of the purest concentrations of Western cinema ever committed to celluloid.

It’s starts of simply enough. Pat Brennan (Randolph), a tough old cowboy, rides into a stagecoach way station to get some water for his journey into town. It’s obvious that he knows the station manager and his young son. The boy can hardly wait to see him and begs him to let him water his horse. Brennan and the station manager pass jokes good naturedly and the boy asks him to bring him some candy from town. The old cowpoke agrees. Despite his tough-as-leather exterior, he has a soft spot in his heart for the boy. He promises to bring him some on his way back.

After he gets into town, he loses his horse in a bet. Forced to return back to the station in foot, we get a comical scene of him walking down a desert road wearing the very saddle that he rode into town on. In fact, the entire film so far has a friendly tone, much like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). It’s clear that he would rather not wear the saddle, but he takes it in stride. Just another day as a cowboy…

Thankfully, he isn’t forced to walk the whole way back to the station. He is picked up by his friend Rintoon, a stagecoach driver, who was transporting newlyweds Willard and Doretta Mims. Willard initially refuses to let him on board, but Doretta convinces him to change his mind. As Brennan joins Rintoon at the front of the stage coach, he jokes that this would be the first time he’d been on a honeymoon.

But the jokes end as soon as they return to the station. They are held up by a band of thieves led by Frank Usher. One of them, a heartless killer named Chink, kills Rintoon. It turns out that they were trying to ambush another coach. Nevertheless, they get ready to kill Brennan and the Mims. It’s obvious that they mean business seeing as how they murdered the station manager and his son and threw their bodies down the same well that the boy had used to water Brennan’s horse.

But perhaps I am telling too much about the plot. The rest of the movie transpires in a predictable fashion. The husband cowardly offers his wife for a ransom, is killed after delivering their demands to her father, Brennan and Doretta fall in love, and they manage to outsmart and kill the three bandits. As I said, the plot is pretty standard Western fare. It’s how the director, Budd Boetticher, commands all the different elements of the story and characters together that makes The Tall T such a powerful film. In the incredible three part documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), Scorsese explains, “Budd Boetticher explored the bare essentials of the genre. His style was as simple as his impassive heroes; deceptively simple. The archetypes of the genre were distilled to the point of abstraction…The choreography of basic human passions was his forte. In the seven Westerns he made with Randolph Scott, Boetticher always gave precedence to character over action.”

To truly understand what Scorsese means, one need only to examine the most important relationship in the film. It is not the one between Brennan and Doretta, but between Usher and Brennan. Scorsese explains, “In the power play, the hero and the villain were complimentary figures. They shared the same loneliness, the same dreams, and the same ethical code. Somehow, the gentleman and the desperado were fascinated by each other.” The scene where they talk over a campfire about their hopes and aspirations brings to mind the famous coffee shop scene with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro from Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). Both men are obviously impressed by each other. They admire each others’ skills and abilities. Usher obviously respects Brennan more than his own trigger happy men. Brennan realizes that not only is Usher not a simple criminal, but he is someone who may have turned out like him if life hadn’t dealt him harder breaks. But they leave with the knowledge that they could not be partners or friends and that they will eventually have to destroy each other.

Under Boetticher’s direction, even simple cliché’s take on deeper meanings. One of the great unspoken rules of the West is that you never shoot a man in the back. As an undiluted Western, the characters comply with the rule. Well, at least Brennan does. While Chink is content to shoot Mr. Mims in the back when he flees back to town, Brennan warns him before shooting him so that he has a chance to turn around and fire back. This code is so important to Brennan and so intrinsic to his character that he even lets Usher go after killing his two men because it would mean shooting him as he fled. It was only after Usher returns for the ransom money that Brennan can kill him and ride into the sun with Doretta. Instead of merely pertaining to cinematic traditions, the act of not shooting Usher in the back proves the integrity of Brennan’s character.

While some Westerns play to the balconies with epic gun battles, over the top villains, and fantastic set pieces, The Tall T is content with remaining a simple film. It is a story of tough men and an even tougher environment. It is a story where the villains are as honorable as the heroes, at least in their own way. It is a story that has been told since the first cowboy drove his first herd of cattle. While it is an old story, The Tall T is one of its best incarnations. Where other Westerns would run ahead and burn out, The Tall T just keeps rolling on from one town to the next, happy to enjoy the scenery and wondering what is behind that sunset after all.

7/10

Wings of the Hawk: Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher's Wings of the Hawk is just further proof that even great directors could direct duds. Film historians might find the film interesting as it contains a kind of proto-Zapata Western plot:a white miner gets caught up in the Mexican Revolution on 1910-11. When his mine is seized by the evil Colonel Paco Ruiz, Irish Gallager (played by the reliably reliable Van Heflin) falls in with a group of guerrilla revolutionaries led by the beautiful Raquel. This being an eighty minute Hollywood film, the two fall in love and Irish is convinced to help free Mexico from tyranny. The plot is serviceable enough. And to the film's credit, it does a fantastic job making the audience hate the villainous Ruiz, played by George Dolenz. But the film is neutered by incompetent cinematography. It's bad enough that much of the film is shot in day-for-night (including a sequence near the end where the rebels use gasoline to make a gold mine's water system light up in flames whose impact is annihilated due to the cinematography), but many shots are framed clumsily. I remember one particular conversation where a large chunk of the dialogue was filmed with Heflin's back towards the audience. In the hands of a director like John Ford or Stanley Kubrick, such a shot could be used to identify that character's state of mind. But here it's merely shoddy craftsmanship. There was only one shot where I saw the genius of Budd Boetticher shine through: Heflin and a group of rebels are forced to watch from a basement while Ruiz's forces round up and execute a number of local townspeople. The executions are witnessed through a barred street-level window that is held in a static shot that obscures most of the outside action. In a way, it almost seems prophetic of Roman Polanski.

4/10

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond: Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher's Jack "Legs" Diamond is one of the most fascinating and despicable cinematic gangsters that I have ever encountered. You wouldn't think it, at first. When we first meet the anti-hero of Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, he is nothing more than a small-time thief in the 1920s. But by the end, he has a paranoid choke-hold on New York City's organized crime  families. The transformation is absolutely astonishing. Here is a man who will literally betray his own brother to advance his goals. He manipulates, cheats, steals, and destroys everyone around him in his quest for power. But what makes Legs Diamond so fascinating isn't just how he gets power, but how he protects it. Apparently taking a page from the real life Legs Diamond, Boetticher's character has an uncanny ability to survive any assassination attempt thrown at him. After surviving multiple attempts, he begins to literally believe that he cannot be killed. So he personally goes around killing and capturing mob bosses. Diamond's sheer audacity is horrifying enough, but Ray Danton's inspired performance transforms him into an unforgettable specter of pride and greed. I've watched many, many gangster films. But The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond is one of the very few that I've seen that has stayed with me long after it ended. This is one for the history books.

9/10

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

The Missing Juror: Budd Boetticher

I've spent the past few weeks immersing myself in Budd Boetticher's Westerns, particularly the ones he made with Randolph Scott. But before he became one of the unsung heroes of the Western genre, he spent years making low budget potboilers like The Missing Juror. The film was what critics of the day referred to as a "murder-a-reel" flick. Basically, in such features the plot would be driven forward by a constant stream of killings, thereby motivating the protagonists to pursue the villain. In this case, the killer is Harry Wharton, a crazed ex-death row inmate who was wrongly convicted for a crime he didn't commit. Before he was executed, though, the authorities discovered the real criminal and released Wharton. But the damage had already been done to Wharton's poor psyche. Claiming to have "died" every time one of his fellow inmates was executed, Wharton considers himself to be deceased. Even worse, his crazed mind believes that the only way he can come back to life is to kill the twelve members of the jury who accidentally convicted him.  Hot on his trail is Joe Keats, an ace reporter who is somehow better than the cops at doing their own job.  Keats is one of those classic, straight-shooting 40s heroes who is always ahead of the game and misogynistic in a way that must have seemed endearing back then ("Why don't you go do those files like a good little girl, huh?"). He only really starts to hunt Wharton when he discovers that one of his targets is the beautiful Alice Hill. Oh, there were other women on the jury, too. But they had frumpy haircuts and glasses. Alice Hill is a pert blonde, and therefore worth saving, know what I mean? Anyway, The Missing Juror is a competent little thriller. George Macready's performance as Wharton is especially enjoyable, particularly when a twist about his identity is revealed near the middle of the film.

7/10

Westbound: Budd Boetticher

The 1959 film Westbound has never been considered to be part of the famous Ranown cycle of Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott.  It is reported that Boetticher only made the film with Scott because of their friendship and a contractual obligation with Warner Bros. Pictures. It doesn't have the bleak purity and existential cynicism of their other collaborations, but it remains a competent and entertaining film in its own right. Scott plays Union army officer Capt. John Hayes who is tasked with managing the Overland stagecoach line which delivers gold from the Union treasury in California to the East. He returns to his hometown of Julesburg, Colorado where the Overland headquarters are located. While there, he meets a one-armed Union soldier named Rod Miller and his wife Jeannie. They help him fight back against Clay Putnam, the ex-commander of Overland who switched sides to the Confederacy. Putnam now controls the Confederate efforts to sabotage the Overland system and steal their precious cargo of gold. He has hired many gunmen to help destroy way-stations. The worst is the delightfully psychotic Mace who acts like a happier version of Klaus Kinski in The Great Silence (1968). The film flirts with many of the story beats that dominated Boetticher's Westerns: the honorable supporting character getting gunned down, the homicidal supporting villain stealing the show from the main antagonist, and the stalwart protagonist who has lived too long and seen too much romancing a committed woman. But Boetticher manages to keep this formula fresh and engaging.

7/10

Comanche Station: Budd Boetticher

Randolph Scott has always been an enigma in the Westerns that he made with Budd Boetticher.  He seems to exist somewhere in between the dashing, white-hatted cowboys of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and the chiseled, amoral loners of Clint Eastwood and Franco Nero.  John Wayne and James Stewart occasionally occupied similar roles. But for John Wayne, roles like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) which pushed the boundaries of typical romanticized Western morality were usually ignored or forgotten in the shadow of his image as the embodiment of American machismo and masculinity.  And despite his phenomenal collaborations with Anthony Mann, James Stewart is more remembered as George Bailey than as Howard Kemp.  But Scott was something else when he worked with Boetticher. In those films he would tip his hat to a lady, graciously help people in need, and follow it all up by brutally killing a group of outlaws.  After a while, Scott's smile seems to betray him as a man who knows and follows the rules but secretly laughs at their absurdity.  In one of his best collaborations with Boetticher, Comanche Station, this tendency becomes loudly pronounced. Scott plays Jefferson Cody, a loner who at the start of the film trades with a group of Comanche Indians in order to free Nancy Lowe, a woman they recently kidnapped. Cody had heard that the local Comanche had kidnapped a white woman who might be his missing wife. Much to his disappointment, it isn't. But regardless, Lowe's husband has announced a massive reward for her safe return, so he decides to lead her to safety.  As they return to Lowe's home, they are joined by a group of three outlaws led by the charismatic yet dangerous Ben Lane who also intend to turn her in for the reward. And so begins a long journey full of intrigue and danger as Cody must lead Lowe to safety through hostile Indian territory and protect her from the smiling men who suddenly decide to "accompany" them.  Comanche Station is classic Boetticher and stands as one of his best films in a distinguished, yet horrifically overlooked, career.  And, of course, there's Randolph Scott...that tired old man with an occasionally kind heart and a gun full of bullets.

8/10

Seven Men From Now: Budd Boetticher

Randolph Scott was one tough, mean sonovabitch. Of course, if you never watched the Westerns he made with Budd Boetticher, you may not know it. One of the best was Seven Men From Now.  I am not alone in this opinion. Legendary critic André Bazin once wrote that Seven Men From Now was "one of the exemplary successes of the contemporary Western."  Like most of Boetticher films, it has a very simple plot.  Scott plays Ben Stride, the ex-sheriff of Silver Springs.  He is on the search for seven criminals who accidentally killed his wife in the middle of a Wells Fargo freight office robbery where they ran off with $20,000 dollars in gold.  During his hunt, he encounters John and Annie Greer, two inexperienced settlers on their way from Kansas City to California.  At first he merely helps them along when they encounter serious problems such a thick mud.  However, it is revealed that the two may be more related to the Wells Fargo freight office robbery than Stride could have ever imagined.  Clocking in at under 80 minutes, Seven Men From Now is a tight ball of compressed Western drama.  For such a short film, it feels over two hours long. But instead of feeling drawn out, the entire two imaginary hours are absolutely riveting. Boetticher's Westerns have an aura of authenticity and authority. And Seven Men From Now is no exception.

8/10

Buchanan Rides Alone: Budd Boetticher

The Westerns of Budd Boetticher hold a very special place in my heart. As Martin Scorsese once said, his Westerns distill the very essence of the genre into its purest form.  Many of his best Westerns were collaborations with an aged Randolph Scott.  I thoroughly enjoyed such films as Seven Men from Now (1956) and The Tall T (1957).  And yet I find myself feeling less enthusiastic about their 1958 film Buchanan Rides Alone.  The film follows Scott and Tom Buchanan, an ex-gunfigher looking to re-invent himself as a rancher.  When he arrives at the California border town of Agry, he becomes embroiled in a feud concerning the Agry family.  The Agry family dominates the town with members serving as mayor and sheriff.  When Buchanan first came into town, he made the mistake of aiding a young Mexican being brutally assaulted by several men.  What Buchanan didn't know was that the Mexican had just murdered one of the members of the Agry family.  And so Buchanan is pulled into a full-on struggle between the town (and family) of Agry and a Mexican group who are willing to pay a substantial ransom for the killer.  Buchanan Rides Alone contains many of the elements that made Boetticher's Westerns so fantastic: a lone, cynical gunfighter and a bleak landscape dominated by violence.  And yet, it doesn't feel like a Boetticher Western. Buchanan is just a little too happy.  There is just a little too much comic relief.  And most importantly, I never found myself intimidated by the Agry family. The Agry family can't seem to get their priorities in order. Near the start of the film, they stop Buchanan and the Mexican from getting lynched so that one of their number will be elected for mayor...or was it governor? But then the very same Agry who was so scared of upsetting voters hatches a plan to release a despised criminal in exchange for $50,000. Doesn't he realize that ransoming off a convicted murderer will ensure that nobody will vote for him?  Anyhow, the film does contain a few moments of brilliance. My favorite scene was the climactic shootout where the Agry family and Buchanan fight from opposite sides of a bridge with a sack of $50,000 in the middle.  As both sides send out envoys to retrieve the money, the number of bodies in the middle of the street increases. It is a savage, powerful scene. Too bad I can't say the same for the rest of the film.

6/10

Behind Locked Doors: Budd Boetticher

Here's an interesting little film.  Budd Boetticher's Behind Locked Doors was one of his earliest films and comes in at 63 minutes.  It is based off an incident from the 1940s where an investigator infiltrated an insane asylum by posing as one of its patients.  This story was also adapted in Samuel Fuller's magnificent Shock Corridor.  Boetticher's take isn't as good or memorable as Fuller's film, but it still has its own merits.  It features some good performances, including an uncredited appearance by Ed Wood darling Tor Johnson as "The Champ," a psychotically violent inmate who attacks anyone he comes in contact with.  The film is a charming little B-movie: fast-paced, well shot with moody cinematography, and ending on a saccharine happy note.  It's a little too short for its own good, though.  An extra 10-15 minutes would have helped it by adding some more depth.  But as it stands, Behind Locked Doors is a fine way to spend an hour of extra time.

6/10