The Films of Budd Boetticher: The Collector's Choice

Although highly regarded today, director Budd Boetticher was just another journeyman filmmaker when he partnered with producer Harry Joe Brown and star Randolph Scott to make a series of five modestly budgeted Westerns for Columbia during the late 1950s. Known as “the Ranown Westerns” (combining star and producer last names), four of the five resulting films were scripted by Burt Kennedy, who first teamed with Scott and Boetticher on 1956's Seven Men from Now, produced by John Wayne's Batjac company for Warner. Four of the five films were also shot in whole or in part at Lone Pine, a small but picturesque high-desert region nestled at the foot of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. All five films eschewed the quaint but adolescent traditions of Saturday-matinee “B” Westerns, introducing into their narratives complex characters, sexual tension, and realistically depicted violence, with each benefiting enormously from Boetticher's spare directorial technique, which let the scripts, actors, and locations do most of the work in carrying the stories. Every one of the five films digitally restored for presentation in this box set—The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (also 1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960)—is commendable. One of the best is The Tall T, a particularly taut outing that finds traveling rancher Scott and married couple Maureen O'Sullivan and John Hubbard captured by psychotic bandit Richard Boone. Boetticher's directorial style may have been low key, but it's no accident that he turned out so many memorable films, working as far away from Hollywood supervision as he could with his many location-filmed Westerns. DVD extras include introductions (by Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford, and Martin Scorsese), audio commentaries, and the excellent biographical feature-length documentary Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That. Recommended. (E. Hulse)