The Last Movie I Watched

Last night I watched the Randolph Scott western The Tall T, written by Burt Kennedy and directed by Budd Boetticher. This was one of a series of collaborations between Scott, Kennedy, and Boetticher in the 1950s, and each of their films displayed the same core qualities evident in The Tall T: tight, character driven scripts which unfold with a kind of grim determinism even as a degree of moral ambiguity threatens to undermine the straight white hat/black hat dichotomy of the western genre. This latter comes across not by making the antagonist some kind of anti-hero-- after all, Scott is almost as iconic as John Wayne as a paragon of virtue, and it would be almost a decade before the likes of Sam Peckinpaugh and Sergio Leone would rewrite the conventions of the genre-- but by adding a dimension of humanity to the villains. Here, Richard Boone's criminal is highly conscious of, if grudgingly complicit in, the violent excesses of his partners (especially the eerily effective psychopath played by Henry Silva), and reveals a significant amount of empathy towards Scott's unlucky rancher. There's room in the story for the audience to anticipate some kind of redemption, to believe that Boone can be saved, and that creates a level of dramatic tension more compelling than that driven by the kidnapping plotline. It's interesting that, as other directors of westerns were becoming more epic in their work in the fifties (I'm thinking of films like John Ford's The Searchers, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, even Anthony Mann's The Man From Laramie), Boetticher and Kennedy were stripping things down to essential elements. The Tall T clocks in at under 80 minutes, and its tightness is one of its greatest virtues. Check it out if you get the chance.