One of seven exemplary, chamber-sized Westerns made by Budd Boetticher from 1956 to 1960, each clean-limbed as their aging star Randolph Scott, most produced by Harry Joe Brown & scripted by Burt Kennedy.* This typically fat-free model (taken from an Elmore Leonard story) sees Scott held hostage at a stagecoach water station, along with loveless middle-aged newlyweds John Hubbard & Maureen O’Sullivan and driver Arthur Hunnicutt, by a trio of particularly ruthless bandits who’ve already murdered the father-son caretakers. And while the film follows a familiar divide-and-conquer pattern in fighting them, they’re so exceptionally well drawn that the old song feels new. (Their leader, Richard Boone, a particularly fascinating philosopher sadist, with a deeply disturbing, ready laugh.) All of it shaped by the film’s rugged landscape, delineating plot & character in a manner that’s something of a Boetticher specialty. And while none of these films run over eight reels, they move without rush and expand in your head after viewing.
DOUBLE-BILL: *All are well worth watching, though probably best to hold off on BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE/’58 as it’s something of a comic variant, and a bit too ambitious for this crowd to pull off on their ultra-tight budgets.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Note that the official Columbia Pictures VOD release looks fine once you get past some dupey-looking opening credits.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: If you think you recognize the cute kid working the station with his dad in an early scene, you probably do. It’s an uncredited Christopher Olsen who had a career’s worth of classics in ‘56 between this, Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and Nick Ray’s BIGGER THAN LIFE.
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