The Tall T

My film watching habits tend to follow stubborn lines of inquiry. For the past year or so, I’ve been on a kick to screen the entirety of Budd Boetticher’s oeuvre. The task isn’t as easy as it might seem and it’s been slow going. Only one of Boetticher’s films is currently available on DVD. That lone representative, Seven Men From Now, was only just released in December. Others like Decision at Sundown and Ride Lonesome aren’t likely to be released in that format anytime soon. Fortunately there’s the saving grace of cable and the handful of Westerns-centric channels that regularly excavate from the more obscure recesses of the genre.

Today’s schedule offered the opportunity to watch The Tall T. Based on a short story by Elmore Leonard it’s widely considered the apex of the collaborative relationship between Boetticher and Western actor/icon Randolph Scott. At a lean 72-minute running time there’s little room for expository gristle or wayward storytelling. Boetticher’s single-minded spartan style with camera, actors and plot fits the material perfectly and he turns in what many consider his finest effort. My vote still goes to Seven Men for that slot, but T is a close second in the small pool I’ve seen so far.

After a panoramic Technicolor titles sequence, the narrative follows ranch owner Patrick Brennan on his daily errands. First, a quick stop to the stage coach station run by a father and son where he amicably accepts an earnestly entreated order for hard stick cherry candy. Onward to the bustling frontier town of Contention where he greets the cantankerous old coot Rintoon and meets a pair of newly weds who will unknowingly factor into his future. Then later over to the cattle ranch of his old boss, the enigmatically named Mr. 10-40, where he concedes to a wager, loses his horse, and for comic relief gets soaked in a water trough fleeing a bucking bull.

These peregrinations give glimpses into Brennan’s character and past, showing him to be the typical Randolph Scott vehicle: a tough and somewhat stoic salt-of-the-earth loner. His physical appearance completes the snapshot with a steel gray mop of hair and square-jawed ruddy features sitting atop a wiry frame that while aged, still looks as if it could best most men in a brawl. Set to upbeat Western orchestral music with plenty of strings and happy harmonica, the scenes do little to portent the darker, grittier turn taken in the film’s second half and their general innocuousness makes the sudden shift all the more striking.

What really sets the film apart though is its script and more specifically dialogue. Much of it reads like Paul Cain-penned hardboiled noir. Take this exchange for example:

How many does that make?
He was the seventh.
When do you figure on eight and nine?
Tomorrow before we leave, you can count on it.
If your boss gives the word?
Don’t worry about that.
I figure I can count on mine... in the back.
You can count on gettin’ yours in the front; I’d kinda like to watch your face. But you can make a run for it now if you’d like to make it interesting. Better than just standin’ there and gettin’ it.
I’ll wait until tomorrow.
Suit yourself.

Boetticher isn’t the least bit satisfied recycling the usual good versus evil archetypes that fuel so many Western morality plays. The excellent Richard Boone plays the head villain Frank Usher. In his capable hands the character exhibits with both intelligence and an incongruous streak of kindness. He looks upon Brennan with a measure of envy and admiration that surprises him. Henry Silva and Skip Homeier handle roles as his more ruthless henchmen. Silva, saddled with ethnic stretch of appearing Chinese, does a solid job portraying the aloof simplicity of a stone-cold killer. There’s an unexpected amount of violence as well, with certain characters kicking the bucket under particularly brutal circumstances and an off-screen scene that predates the taboo-breaking plot point of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 by a good two decades. Maureen O’Sullivan is largely wasted in the only female role of any consequence, accentuating again the masculine thrust of both the Hollywood West and its mythology. But even with that predictable myopia, the film fires on just about every cylinder. The final bon-mot, Scott’s non sequitur admonition to O’Sullivan: “C’mon now, it’s going to be a nice day.”

~ Derek Taylor