Randy rides lonesome
In 1947 Randolph Scott made a decision: he
would henceforth only do Westerns. Christmas
Eve, a comedy/drama of that year with Randy as a dipsomaniac rodeo star,
would be his last non-Western picture. He had tried his hand at other genres:
he had a light touch in comedy and held his own in war films. But he always
seemed an interloper, somehow. He had started in Westerns, in 1932, and by ’47
had already done (depending on your definition of a Western) 24 of them. They
were what he was known for.
Scott was one of the greatest screen cowboys
of them all, rivaling John Wayne
as the greatest star of the saddle and altogether doing (again, depending on
what you call a Western) nearly seventy oaters, ending in 1962 with a truly
magnificent film.
It is not for nothing that in Blazing
Saddles, whenever his name is mentioned, the cowboys doff their hats
and bow their heads.
Today, as a Christmas present to all my
faithful regular readers (both of them) here is an essay on the Western career
of one of the best-loved of all cowboy stars. I was going to post it yesterday
but it took longer than I thought to write. Still, there are twelve days of
Christmas, ain’t there?
It will complement the already-posted Western
career retrospectives of Don
‘Red’ BARRY, Edgar
BUCHANAN, Gary
COOPER, Bruce
DERN, Kirk
DOUGLAS, Jack
ELAM, Frank
FERGUSON, Henry
FONDA, Glenn
FORD, William
S HART, William
HOLDEN, Katy
JURADO, Alan
LADD, Steve
McQUEEN, Robert
MITCHUM, Tom
MIX, John
PAYNE, Gregory
PECK, Slim
PICKENS, James
STEWART and John Wayne, which doubtless
you have already read, digested and agreed with.
Of course there are
other important ones to come, Joel McCrea, Audie Murphy and Clint Eastwood to
start with. “Ah, so little done, so much to do.” (Last words of Cecil Rhodes).
The early days
Randolph Scott started
in Westerns in a way in 1929 when, as a good Virginian (he was born in Orange,
Virginia, on January 23, 1898, though his family lived in South Carolina) he
coached Gary
Cooper with his accent for Paramount’s talkie The
Virginian – still, in my opinion the greatest ever version of that
story. At least, it is said he coached Coop. It’s probably true, though he does
not appear in the credits. He himself said he also appeared as an extra in the
picture, though I’ve looked hard but never seen him.
He had some
non-Western work before that: he had gone West in 1927 after a posh private
education and Army service on the Western Front in World War I. In a later
newspaper interview Scott said that he and a friend had been playing golf and
met Howard Hughes on the course. “As a lark” they took jobs as extras. Over the
next two years Scott worked as an extra on several movies, and, bitten by the
acting bug, spent 1929 and ’30 on the stage in various theaters in LA. In 1931
Paramount put Scott on contract at $400 a week and the following year cast him
as the lead in Heritage
of the Desert (later re-released as When
the West Was Young), a Zane Grey tale to which the studio had bought the
rights.
It’s pretty inept,
much of it, with too much supposed comic relief and a bear attack that was so
poorly staged that the audience laughed.
There were to be ten
of these Zane Grey Westerns between 1932 and ‘35, one-hour program fillers
really and not terribly good but certainly not junk. The best of them were
probably The
Thundering Herd and To
the Last Man, the worst Rocky
Mountain Mystery aka The Fighting
Westerner. In fact most of these movies are quite hard to find now, not
being available on DVD or YouTube. They were talkie remakes of silent Westerns
of a decade before and to save money Paramount used footage from the old ones
in the talkie versions. For this reason Scott had to dress and be made up to
resemble the stars of the previous pictures (often Jack Holt, so Randy had to
sport a thin mustache), in order that the studio could get away with it. Still,
the Zane Grey stories (though much modified) provided a little pedigree and
seven of them were directed by a young Henry
Hathaway. So they are watchable. Scott was still finding his feet as a
movie actor and no one would pretend he was Oscar-ready. In fact he never won
an Oscar – or anything much else really. A posthumous Golden Boot award and a
star on the walk of fame, and that’s about it. I don’t think Scott would have
expected more: he never considered himself an “actor” in the true sense. But
the Zane Greys were a start – and a solid foundation for later Western work.
Randy makes it big
Scott’s first big
break, however, came in 1936 when he starred as Hawkeye in The
Last of the Mohicans, an Edward Small production released by United
Artists (Scott was on a loan-out from Paramount). He was excellent in it and it
was probably the best thing he did in the 1930s. It’s a very pale imitation of
the book and takes many liberties but the novel is so long and turgid that the
changes are an welcome relief. Director George B Seitz did a great job with the
action scenes and Scott appears confident and winning. Scenarist Phillip Dunne
was angry: “Eddie Small, the producer, succeeded in turning our authentic 18th
Century piece into a third-rate Western.” I’m with Eddie, though.
It was a big
box-office hit and it gave Scott his first unqualified A-picture success. The New York Times said, “Randolph
Scott, we must admit, is our Hawkeye to the life.”
Back at Paramount,
Scott was cast in the big production High,
Wide and Handsome with Irene Dunne and Dorothy Lamour. It’s a
semi-Western at best and a musical, to boot, but in fact Scott is very good in
it and throws himself into the role, so that the film ends up being much better
than you feared. Luckily Randy doesn’t sing. It was a critical (though not a
commercial) success but Paramount had waited too long to give Scott a big
A-picture lead and he was not about to renew his expiring contract. The studio
had wasted him. He could easily have worked on their The
Plainsman (he would have been a far better Buffalo Bill than bland
James Ellison and the Coop/Scott partnership would have been memorable) or Wells
Fargo (he was ideal casting for the Johnny Mack Brown part of Joel
McCrea’s rival who joins the Confederate army
and is shot down trying to ambush McCrea’s gold shipment in Colorado) or even The
Texas Rangers, where he could have been Polka-Dot instead of Lloyd
Nolan or even led instead of Fred MacMurray.
The end of Paramount
The last film Scott did for the studio was The
Texans, filmed in 1937 but released in the summer of ’38, after Scott’s
departure. It’s a big black & white actioner, a remake of Paramount’s
silent North of 36 of 1924, with a
picaresque plot of ex-Rebels trying to resuscitate Confederate fortunes after
Appomattox. The Texans didn’t have a
top director: James P Hogan was a Paramount go-to for B-movies; he had directed
their popular Bulldog Drummond pictures. But he did a reasonable job on The Texans, which, though verging on the
second-rate, does at least rattle along nicely and makes some (very modest)
attempt at character development. At least Scott got to star in an A-Western.
But it was farewell, Paramount. Now Randolph
Scott was a free man.
Three
Westerns for Fox
He started putting together lucrative
freelance deals, and, ever a shrewd money man, he did well at it. Over the next
decade or so he would work with every major studio (except Paramount) and this
independence gave him the chance to take many non-Western parts. He got to know
many good directors, though they tended to be lesser types; he never worked
with the likes of John
Ford or Howard
Hawks. Still, he was gaining wide experience and improving as an actor all
the time.
It is sometimes said of Scott that he only
managed to be cast as the lead in B-pictures and was condemned to support the
stars in A-ones. This isn’t entirely correct but there is a whiff of truth to
it. Jesse
James, for Fox in 1939, is a good example (and we will soon meet
others). The picture was big, noisy and colorful and it brought the adult
Western back to theaters. It had languished for much of the 30s as a juvenile
genre or as a one-hour B-movie. But pictures like Paramount’s The Plainsman in ‘36 and Wells Fargo in ’37 began
to revive the public’s taste for a big-budget A-Western and 1939 would be a
bumper year in which every big studio came out with a star-vehicle oater. There
was Universal’s Destry
Rides Again with James
Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, Paramount’s Union
Pacific with Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck, Warners’ Dodge
City with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and of course the
re-launch of John Wayne’s career with John Ford’s Stagecoach.
These films would bring new life to the Western. But it was Fox that started
the year off in January with Tyrone Power and Henry
Fonda as Jesse and Frank James. And the movie grossed more that year than
any other except Gone with the Wind, The
Hunchback of Notre Dame and The
Wizard of Oz. The Western was back.
Though Scott doesn’t even show up till twenty
minutes in and has very little to do for the last half-hour either, though he
plays an invented character and never draws a gun or rides a horse, he
nevertheless provides a strong and memorable lawman, and he does it with his
classic underplaying, leaving the histrionics to others (especially Henry Hull
chewing the scenery). It was shot on location in Missouri and reporter Jesse
Hodges wrote, “Although Randolph Scott is not the star of the picture, as far
as the Ozark people are concerned he is mighty popular.” Being a Southerner
probably helped…
Two more Fox Westerns followed, or at least
one-and-a-half. Susannah
of the Mounties, a Shirley Temple vehicle released in June ‘39, barely
qualifies, and Randy looks frankly silly in a RCMP cap, resembling a bellboy.
It’s for Temple fans only. But the following month it was a very different
story: Scott would play for the first time on screen Wyatt
Earp. Well, that’s not strictly true; Bert
Lindley played a cameo Wyatt in the 1923 William S
Hart silent Western Wild Bill Hickok. And there had been
several very Earpish figures with thinly disguised names in other Westerns too.
But Scott was the first to lead as Wyatt Earp in a movie, Frontier Marshal, released in July
’39.
A-movie?
B-movie? Somewhere between the two, I’d say. Black & white, directed by
Allan Dwan, less ballyhooed than Jesse
James (or
even Susannah), it still came in at 71
minutes, had a decent budget and, in fact, was enormously popular, especially
in the Midwest. And Scott is superb as Earp. It’s an historically ludicrous
account with wild distortions (despite the presence on the set as consultants
of both Earp biographer Stuart N Lake and Earp widow Josephine) but as a Western
it really does hold its own. Not certainly in the league of My Darling Clementine and Gunfight at the OK Corral, it’s
still a must-see version of the Earp legend. The
New York Times said
of it, “Frontier Marshal is a cracking good Western, and
in the movies there’s nothing much better than that.” Ah, New
York Times, in
your case, Auctoritas et veritas
facit legem.
Randy
plays second fiddle
Two big Westerns came next in which Scott
again played second fiddle. It didn’t mean he wasn’t superb in them: he was. Virginia
City (1940) for Warners and Western
Union (1941) back at Fox had him playing to Errol Flynn as lead in the
first and Robert Young in the second. Actually, he stole the show in both. In
the first Scott was supremely well cast as a decent and resourceful Confederate
officer trying to best Union man Flynn’s scheme to bring the wealth of the West
to the Northern cause.
Western
Union was back to Zane Grey (and Scott was Grey’s
personal choice) though for Fox this time and directed by Fritz Lang. Scott
played a classic good-badman, outlaw on the run Vance Shaw, and so far
outclassed the ‘star’, a rather weak Robert Young, as effectively to make Randy
the lead. The picture is one of Scott’s best ever roles. Scott biographer
Robert Nott wrote, “It may not be his best overall film, but along with the role
of Gil Westrum in Ride the High Country,
I think it’s among his finest acting work.” Scott had learned to say little and
express a wide range of emotions with his eyes, in an almost Gary Cooperish
way. The picture was a box-office smash and the critics were glowing about
Scott. “Randolph Scott, who is getting to look and act more and more like
William S Hart, herein shapes one of the truest and most appreciable characters
of his career.” (The New York Times).
A terrifically good book, cheaply available on Kindle - and that way you can search for titles easily
Between these two pictures, in Universal’s When
the Daltons Rode Randy clearly had fun as Tod Jackson, cutting out Bob
Dalton (in the ample shape of Broderick Crawford) by falling for his girl, much
as he had fallen for Jesse James’s wife the year before. It was becoming a
habit. The picture, which very obviously tries to emulate Fox’s Jesse James, is once again an absurdity,
historically speaking, but it is a whole lot of rambunctious fun, it has
first-class direction by George Marshall, and at least Scott got top billing
(Crawford and Brian Donlevy in Dalton parts hadn’t enough star-power to oust
him).
The early
40s: mostly war films
Belle
Starr followed, at the end of ’41. Fox was trying
to reply to MGM’s Gone with the Wind,
though frankly Belle Starr is a pale
imitation, and occasionally tedious. Scott was once again a Confederate
officer. He has a few moments of Southern charm but overall it’s one of his
more lackluster performances. The rather clunky script and direction didn’t
help, mind.
In 1942 Randolph Scott was being diverted into
war films and made only one Western, and barely a Western at that, when he
starred with John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich in that year’s version of The Spoilers.
Scott was cast as the villain, and he made the most of it. In fact it’s
probably the most ruthless character he ever played, though smiles and Southern
charm abound. The famous Wayne/Scott fistfight was done partly with doubles but
the actors themselves performed a great deal of it, grunting and sweating. It
is said that the two were genuine rivals for second billing behind Dietrich and
genuinely swung at each other. Of course Wayne eventually wins the fight (he’s
the hero) but every time I see it I kinda root for Randy. They were to have a
return match later in the year in the non-Western Pittsburgh.
In 1943 Scott did Columbia’s The
Desperadoes, its first Technicolor picture, with Wayne’s famous co-star
Claire Trevor (they were together in Stagecoach,
Allegheny
Uprising and Dark
Command) and as ingénu the up-and-coming Glenn
Ford. Though top-billed, Scott seemed content to play the easy-going
sheriff and let Ford and comic-reliefs Edgar
Buchanan and Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams have most of the limelight.
More war films followed and Westerns were few
and far between. There was only one in 1944, RKO’s Belle
of the Yukon, and none at all in ’45. And the 1944 one was another
semi-Western (no gun is ever fired, for example). It was also dire. Rare are
the bum movies that Randolph Scott appeared in, but Belle was one. It’s a real dud. Co-star Gypsy Rose Lee was very
weak indeed. William Seiter’s direction, ditto. The plot is ridiculously
complex. Scott was clearly just going through the motions. Randolph Scott fans
will probably want to watch it, once, but otherwise it’s best avoided. In fact, in my view it's the only Randolph Scott Western (if Western it be) which comes near to the definition unwatchable.
The late
40s: back in the saddle
In the post-war period of the late 1940s
Randolph Scott went back to the Western in a big way. He made eleven oaters
between 1946 and ’49. He also started taking control, setting up two
partnerships, one with independent producer Nat Holt and the other with Harry
Joe Brown. It was the Brown ones that would really shine but Holt’s pictures
were solid. He often used Edwin L Marin to direct, a safe pair of hands.
Abilene
Town (United Artists) and Badman’s
Territory (RKO) appeared in 1946. The first was an adaptation of the Ernest
Haycox story Trail Town and was a
great little movie. It’s the good old ranchers vs. homesteaders plot as
ruthless cattle barons and their allies in town are bested by decent
homesteaders, the future of the US of A, aided by a bold town marshal (Scott,
of course). The Harold Shumate script and Marin’s direction (it may be Marin’s
best work) are pacey and tight. Edgar Buchanan is again brilliant. Badman’s Territory is weaker than Abilene
Town but still huge fun. It has a totally preposterous plot and rather too
much plot at that. In 1944 and ’45 Universal had had hits by grouping as many
horror characters as you could think of in movies like House of Frankenstein and House
of Dracula, and RKO must have thought they would have a go at that with
outlaws. They would put the James gang, the Daltons, Sam Bass and Belle Starr
all in the same movie. Surprisingly, it was a box-office success. The public
liked it. Mind, Hollywood is still pulling that trick, with cartoon superheroes
jostling cheek by, er, jowl in blockbusters of unending direness.
1947 gave us Trail
Street (RKO) and Gunfighters (Columbia).
Trail Street is a Bat Masterson tale. Bat was of course a
great favorite of Hollywood (Randy’s was in fact only the third screen Bat but
there would be many more, on the big screen and small) and he was usually
portrayed, as here, as a steely lawman with a slightly laid-back approach, and
a bit of a dandy. It wasn’t that far
from the truth. However, Randy as Bat doesn’t appear till a good quarter of an
hour into the movie and you do get the feeling that Trail Street was something of a trail for RKO’s young star Robert
Ryan. Randy was a modest and generous man, though, who was
perfectly willing to stand back a little and give a good dose of the
limelight to other actors. The New York
Times dubbed it “just another pistol drama”. Gunfighters,
the first Scott-Brown collaboration, based on Zane Grey's Twin Sombreros, had Bruce Cabot (Magua in Randy’s Last
of the Mohicans) as the bad guy and Randy played a cynical gunman, Brazos
Kane, who wants to hang up his guns but once his pal is killed in a range war
he straps them on again. I think it's a good, solid 1940s oater with several merits but in the last resort it’s predictable and clichéd. Robert Nott calls it “a passably watchable oater.”
Scott remembered it as the only Scott-Brown film not to make money.
Scott did three Westerns in 1948 – one of the
greatest ever years for the genre. Albuquerque
(Pine Thomas Productions, released by Paramount and the nearest Scott got to
working for that studio since the end of his contract in 1937) was a filming of
Dead Freight
for Piute, a great Luke Short novel.
Like all Short, this 1939 tale is gritty, hard and without a wasted word.
Sadly, however, the filming of it, as Albuquerque,
wasn’t of the same quality. Both writing (Gene Lewis and Clarence Upson Young)
and direction (Ray Enright) leave quite a lot to be desired. The main
weaknesses are the implausibility of it and the phony staging. Having said
that, it’s a whole lot of fun. Gabby Hayes, in a part not in the book, does
his ornery ole timer act. Randy wears a great shirt. He gets to do some comic
shtick, not entirely successfully. Russell Simpson, my hero, is the
splendidly named Abner Huggins. The bad guys are really bad. The main henchman
is Lon Chaney, who doesn’t take the cigarette butt out of his mouth even when
fighting, and whose face is several times shown in ultra-close up, like an
embryonic spaghetti western. There’s a last-reel shoot ‘em up in Main Street,
though it's a bit perfunctory.
That was followed by another
Luke Short story, this time absolutely superb: Coroner
Creek. We have a brave and resourceful hero, a loner: Chris Danning,
school of hard knocks, hard of heart and bent on revenge - Scott in a classic
performance, one of his finest, stern of countenance, ideal for the part. Tall,
rangy, grim-faced, he is the personification of Luke Short’s single-minded,
almost deranged revenger. He is verging on the autistic in his lack of empathy
and inability to relate to other people, but he softens at the end and becomes
more human. Edgar Buchanan and Russell Simpson are there again. Wallace Ford
and Forrest Tucker, too. Beautiful Marguerite Chapman. It’s an outstanding
cast. There were Sedona, AZ locations photographed in Cinecolor – a process
giving pleasant washed-out pastel shades and highlighting the reds and oranges
(ideal for Sedona) - by Fred Jackman Jr. Many of the characters wear brown.
Randy does too, but with a flame-orange kerchief at his neck. Brilliant. Robert
Nott says, "In terms of packing an emotional wallop, [Coroner
Creek] may be just as good as the movies Scott made with Budd Boetticher
and Burt Kennedy a decade later." I must say, I have to agree with that.
Third in ’48 came Return
of the Bad Men (RKO again). This was an attempt (a successful one) at a
re-run of Badman’s Territory.
Actually, Return
of the Badmen is quite unusual as a sequel in that it was better
than the original. Once again they assemble the baddest gang of badmen you could
ever wish for. Bill Doolin (Robert Armstrong) is the boss and in the ranks
there are three Dalton brothers (Walter Reed, Michael Harvey and Lex Barker),
three Younger brothers (Robert Bray, Tom Keene, Steve Brodie), Billy the Kid
(Dean White) and The Sundance Kid (Robert Ryan, splendid), among others. Wow.
And against all those, one lawman, Marshal Vance (Scott). The action whips
along and there are trains and stages and all manner of rootin’, tootin’ and of
course shootin’. Best is the posse's attack on the ghost town with mucho blazing
away in the dark. It’s a whoop-de-woo Western of huge charm.
1948 ended on a high.
Four oaters followed in 1949. The
Walking Hills (Columbia) was a contemporary Western noir written by Alan LeMay and directed
by John Sturges, with John Ireland, Edgar Buchanan again, Arthur Kennedy, and
Ella Raines as the female lead. That’s a pretty good pedigree. And by now Scott
had developed into a superb (and much underrated) actor, capable of great
subtlety, transmitting a persona of stoicism, compassion and authority. He was
ideally suited to intelligent Westerns like this one. Columbia wanted to tap
into Warners’ Treasure of
the Sierra Madre success of the year before, so it’s a modern
gold-hunting tale with a lady (Raines) in the mix. But Scott is an ex-rodeo
star more concerned with his mare in foal than either girl or gold. He is quiet
and restrained but steely when it's called for. Two moments in particular show
his strength: when the PI (Ireland) shoots a young man, member of the group
(Jerome Courtland), Randy says, "If that boy dies, you better hold on to
your gun" in a way that seethes with menace, and when he slaps an
hysterical Kennedy and knocks him to the floor, Ireland asks, "What did
you do that for?" and Randy quietly rolls a cigarette and answers, "I
ran out of words." Although in fact Scott has less screen time than
some of the other actors, he dominates the picture completely.
Canadian
Pacific (Fox) is certainly not one of
Randolph Scott’s better Westerns. In fact it is one of his weakest. Robert Nott
is particularly down on it and goes so far as to call it “abysmal”. Nott says,
“It may not be Scott’s overall worst film, but I rate it as his overall worst
Western.” He adds, “Randolph Scott or no Randolph Scott, it stinks.” Myself, I
think that’s going a bit far. It does have action, color, and Victor Jory as
villain, after all. But I do admit, it’s pretty weak generally.
In Fighting
Man of the Plains (Fox) Scott played Jim
Dancer, a renegade turned sheriff, a classic Western good badman – the sort of
role at which he excelled. The movie featured a young Dale Robertson in a
cameo as Jesse
James. The picture was digitally remastered in 2012 and looks nice now,
shot in Cinecolor by Fred Jackman Jr. And it has quite stirring Paul Sawtell
music. Paul Fix was a co-writer and plays a small part. Randy triumphs, beats
the bad guys and gets the girl. Victor Jory has a derringer. So
all’s well with the world. It’s a goodie, despite the silly title.
Lastly in ’49, The
Doolins of Oklahoma (Columbia), competently directed by Gordon Douglas
and with stunts by Yakima Canutt, had Randy as a noble Bill Doolin, forced
unwillingly to rob. He’s a good man turned bad thanks to crooked politicians. The
support cast is strong, with John Ireland, again, as Bitter Creek and Noah
Beery Jr. as Little Bill. Randy dies on screen, a rare event. It’s a
professional, tight Western with much in its favor.
The
mighty 1950s
Twenty-seven Randolph Scott oaters were
released in the great decade of the 1950s, the high water mark of the Western,
among them some of the finest work Scott ever did and some of the greatest
examples of the genre.
I won’t discuss each one in detail, or this
post will become unconscionably long. I have already reviewed those pictures
individually (all except Sugarfoot, which is bizarrely not available on DVD),
so you can click the links to know more. Here, I will just pick out a few
really great ones and remark on any trends or underlying themes.
I love The
Nevadan, a gripper from Columbia produced with Brown, brilliantly
directed by Gordon Douglas. It had the honor of
being the first Western to come out in 1950, thus ushering in the golden age of
the Western movie. Colt
.45, on the other hand, which followed it, is fast-moving but pretty
silly and the picture is one of Scott’s weaker efforts. It was also rather
stupidly set in a period before the Colt .45 was invented. Doh.
The
Cariboo Trail (Fox, 1951) was another
Canadian effort like Canadian Pacific
and, like Canadian Pacific, not very
good, though it had Marin at the helm and Victor Jory as the bad guy again so
wasn’t quite as bad. Randy as a surveyor with a sixgun builds a railroad. He
was to return in a similar role to build a railroad the following year in Carson
City, a much more enjoyable outing. The rather routine Santa
Fe (Columbia, 1951) was yet another railroad picture. Scott had of
course trained as an engineer; perhaps it was that which attracted him to
railroad-building Westerns.
Carson
City was directed by André De Toth (right), and De Toth and
Scott would work together no fewer than six times: Man
in the Saddle (Columbia, 1951),
Carson City (Warner Bros, 1952), Thunder
Over the Plains (Warner Bros, 1953), The
Stranger Wore a Gun (Columbia, 1953), Riding
Shotgun (Warner Bros, 1954) and The
Bounty Hunter (Warner Bros, 1954). Austro-Hungarian De Toth, dashing in
his uniform film director’s eyepatch (like Raoul Walsh
but unlike John Ford, other patch wearers, he only had one eye), had been an actor,
then writer, editor and director in Europe. He fled to England when war broke
out and worked under Alexander Korda. He emigrated to the US in 1942 and was
fêted as a top-drawer film maker of an intellectual kind but he reveled in
hard-boiled American crime pictures, and he loved Westerns. He gave them all a
hard edge and made them really quite violent for the day. De Toth himself was
rather slighting about Randolph Scott. He said of Harry Joe Brown and Scott
that “Neither of them knew much about stories. They didn’t fight about story
points. They cared about money, all right, but unfortunately they didn’t care
enough about films.” Perhaps this lack of electricity between director,
producer and star led to a certain lackluster quality in some of the films. Carson City, probably the best Warners
Western Scott did (and a bit of a hand-me-down because it had been slated for
Curtiz and Flynn), was the best of them, The
Stranger Wore a Gun probably the least.
Fort Worth
(Warner Bros) is a 1951 Randolph Scott B-Western which is rather good. It has a
very complex plot but a lot of zip. It was directed by Edwin L Marin, again.
Sadly, Fort Worth was Marin’s last Western and he checked
in his jodhpurs and megaphone permanently the same year. It’s the old one about
the gunfighter hanging up his irons because he believes the pen is mightier
than the Colt. He sets up an independent newspaper in Fort Worth. Of course, as
in all such films, he is finally obliged to buckle on his sixguns again so that
kind of undermines the principle; but that’s Westerns for you.
Hangman’s
Knot (Columbia, 1952) was
one of the very best Randolph Scott Westerns – and that’s saying a lot. Producer
and writer Roy Huggins created the screenplay expressly for Scott and
approached Harry Joe Brown with a view to selling the project to Warners, but
Brown (rightly) thought Columbia would be a better bet. Brown and Scott offered
Huggins less for the script but Huggins got to direct, something he had always
wanted to do. It was in fact his only movie as director. “I directed the film
to prove I could do it,” he wrote. “Directors are a strange group. They like to
make the world feel that directing is a very difficult thing to do, and it
isn’t at all.” It’s a tense, claustrophobic and gripping Western that develops
character interestingly and has unexpected plot twists. And Lee Marvin is excellent.
The
Man Behind the Gun is one of the most
entertaining Randolph Scott Westerns. No one would pretend that it is a great
example of the genre, and of course 1953 was the year of mighty pictures like
Paramount’s Shane,
MGM’s The
Naked Spur and Warners’ own Hondo.
But there is a crackle of humor throughout the movie and Randy seemed to be
enjoying himself hugely. There are even bawdy jokes that must have sneaked somehow
under the censors’ radar. And it’s in bright Technicolor and packed with
action. It’s a whole lot of fun.
The early 50s were a good time
for Randolph Scott. The De Toth ones were OK-to-good, while Fort Worth, The Hangman’s Knot and The Man Behind the Gun were top-class
Westerns.
The
mid-50s
In 1955 Scott made four
indifferent Westerns and there was even the suspicion that he was losing the
magic.
Ten
Wanted Men (Columbia, 1955) was not a
great picture. H Bruce Humberstone directed quite a lot of low-grade
movies such as Charlie Chan tales in the 1930s. He only did three Westerns, all
B ones, and Ten Wanted Men was his
first and probably his best. The movie does benefit from the great Richard
Boone as bad guy and the likes of Lee Van Cleef, Denver Pyle and Leo Gordon are
henchmen. It was filmed at Old Tucson so at least we get some Arizona scenery,
shot by Wilfred Cline in nice color (the currently available print is very
good).
Rage
at Dawn was disappointing and a rather damp-squib end to
Scott’s relationship with RKO. The direction by Tim Whelan is slapdash and the
writing (Horace McCoy, Frank Gruber) iffy. It’s a story of the Reno brothers,
the first outlaws to go into train robbing, but of course the screen Renos have
nothing whatever to do with the real ones.
Tall
Man Riding, for Warners the same year, is alright, but no more than that. It was directed by
Lesley Selander, a B-Western lifer from his first picture in 1936 who moved to
Poverty Row when the market for oaters declined and then to TV. He always
managed to get pace into his Westerns, and his action scenes were good, even if
budget and good writing was sometimes lacking.
1955 finished with A
Lawless Street, for Columbia. It was better than the other three, if
not top-drawer. Gangster-noir B-movie director Joseph H Lewis helmed the
picture and the script was fairly predictable. It’s the one about the town
marshal with a rep that every gun hand wants to beat. He has to draw on them
day after day (though he rather sneakily gets one with a derringer
from under the barber’s sheet; Clint must have seen that before doing High
Plains Drifter) and he knows that sooner or later, someone faster than
he is will ride into town.
So all in all, the mid-50s
looked like a period of decline. Were top-class Randolph Scott Westerns a thing
of the past?
Nope.
Riding
off into the sunset
Randolph Scott was no callow
youth even when he made his first pictures. Paramount had ‘rejuvenated’ him,
claiming he was born in 1903 so that their lead would still (just) be in his
twenties but in fact he was born in 1898 and he was already in his mid-thirties
when he made those Zane Grey programmers. By the time of pictures such as Coroner Creek or Return of the Bad Men he was 50. But it didn’t matter. In fact he
was one of those lucky people who got more handsome with age, and the
cragginess suited Western roles. He always kept himself very fit too. (He said in 1980 that he had the same waistline he had when he started in movies). All this
to say that the finest work Scott did was at the end of his career, in the late
1950s, when he was pushing sixty or even beyond.
There were two late-50s Scott
Westerns that aren’t too hot: 7th
Cavalry (Columbia, 1956) and Shoot-Out
at Medicine Bend (Warner Bros, 1957). I myself actually quite like both
(but then they are Randolph Scott Westerns) but there’s no denying they aren’t
the greatest of Western movies. Robert Nott says of 7th Cavalry that it is too talky and repetitive. The aging Scott
was miscast as a junior officer. The story is too improbable. There’s an
anti-climax as the final showdown with the Indians never happens, and too much
superstitious mumbo-jumbo. Shoot-Out
is a disappointing mix of comedy and action, a black & white low-budget
picture released under Warners’ First National brand, clumsily directed by
Richard L Bare, a TV director.
But don’t worry: otherwise, the
late 50s and early 60s were a period of glory.
Because we now come to perhaps the finest
period of Randolph Scott’s career as a Western actor, namely the seven pictures
he made with Budd
Boetticher between 1956 and ‘60: Seven
Men from Now (1956) The
Tall T (1957), Decision
at Sundown (1957), Buchanan
Rides Alone (1958), Ride
Lonesome (1959), Westbound
(1959) and Comanche
Station (1960).
They weren’t all
uniformly superb. The weakest was Westbound: although it starred Scott and was
directed by Boetticher, there was no input from producer Harry Joe Brown or writer
Burt Kennedy and the picture was uninspired. The very best ones, the core of the
oeuvre, were those for Columbia that brought together the team of Boetticher,
Scott, writer Kennedy, cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. and producer Harry
Joe Brown. They were The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. These three are, I suppose, ‘B-Westerns’, but
they are absolutely superb and real landmarks in the history of the genre.
Boetticher, Kennedy, Lawton, Brown
They were a coherent
body of work. They had the same star (though a different bad guy every time,
each one a splendid role), the same director with a deep understanding of the
genre, and in the case of the three at the heart of the oeuvre, the same pithy
writer with a witty sense of irony and the same magnificent photographer (3:10
to Yuma alone would have marked Lawton out as a master), using, and
this is key, the same Lone Pine locations. They had similar plots – hero Randy
on a revenge mission, basically – and they even shared certain lines of
dialogue. They were all terse, laconic and spare.
Ride Lonesome
is such an essential title because cowboys are generally lonesome and Randolph
Scott in particular, and because the horse is key to these oaters, as to all
Westerns. Boetticher loved horses. Watch the way in Comanche Station that Scott enters on horseback right to left, with
Mt. Whitney in the background, and at the end of the movie symmetrically rides
away in the same setting, left to right. Boetticher at his best. In his essay A Time and a Place: Budd Boetticher and the
Western, Mike Dibb makes the point that though the term ‘horse opera’ is
often used pejoratively, it is in fact apt, for it puts the horse at the center
of the genre and emphasizes the pleasantly familiar stylized forms of action,
character, speech, violence and, not least, music, which Westerns share with
opera.
The bad guys are superb.
Randolph Scott was a supremely generous actor who was ready to stand back and
let other actors shine. A sort of opposite of Steve
McQueen, if you like. No camera-hogging or scene stealing: he let his
co-stars have center stage. And the bad guys were written as sort of
anti-Scotts, with some of the hero’s qualities – and faults. They are often
charming and roguish. Randy always seems to have known the characters from
the past. Lee Marvin in Seven Men from
Now, Richard Boone (my favorite) in The
Tall T, Pernell Roberts in Ride
Lonesome, and the others, they were villains, yes, but with saving graces.
Excellent casting, direction and acting.
Boetticher had little
interest in the true history of the West, nor, really, in Western communities.
He wanted lone riders righting wrongs. Everyone is a loner, in fact. Scott’s
character is just the loneliest. Boetticher said, “The
characters are more important to me than the ideas, because it's through the
mind and the sayings and the actions of the characters that the ideas are born.
I'm not concerned with what people stand for, I'm concerned with what they do
about it.”
Going out
on a high
Ride
the High Country, Randolph Scott’s last
Western, is a masterpiece.
There is something elegiac about Sam
Peckinpah’s Westerns. He loved the theme of the ‘end of the West’. The
most obviously example is The
Wild Bunch, about aging gunfighters bewildered in a new, modern
era of automobiles and airplanes, in a time that didn’t want them. Or The Ballad of Cable Hogue
where once again the car symbolizes the end of it all, as it does, indeed, in
the first reel of Ride the High Country.
So to entice two older famous Western stars (Joel McCrea, 57 and Randolph
Scott, 63) out of retirement, or Western inactivity anyway, to make a film
about two men past their prime trying to revive the past and maintain the old
Western code of honor was a master stroke.
McCrea was outstanding as Judd:
upright, tough and steely with integrity. An equally fine Scott is Gil Westrum,
just as tough but roguish, charming and not quite so full of integrity – in
fact larcenous. They play against and complement each other. Both performances
were Oscarable. It is said they were originally cast the other way round but
both felt more comfortable with Scott as Westrum and McCrea as Judd. They were
certainly right.
One of the best aspects of Ride the High Country
is undoubtedly the interplay of McCrea and Scott, the former stoic,
flinty, scriptural, lonely, with all the most stirring speeches, the latter
happy-go-lucky, with wavering moral purpose, essentially pathetic; he has the
quips and good one-liners. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott were never better.
Written by NB Stone, a specialist in TV
Westerns, with very large contributions from Peckinpah (McCrea thought as much
as 80%) and some from Bob Williams, who had a vast experience since the early
40s of almost exclusively B-Westerns, the screenplay is tight, professional and
workmanlike, with occasional flashes of brilliance. “The only law up there is
too drunk to hit the ground with his hat.” Or again, “All I want,” says Judd,
quietly, “is to enter my house justified.” It is the credo of the hero and the
theme of the film.
Shot in an uncharacteristic 26 days and only $60,000 over budget (which for
Peckinpah was really under), the movie is tight, taut and tense.
What a way for Scott to go out. It should really have been Joel McCrea’s farewell too; he did a couple more not very good ones and that was probably a mistake. But two great cowboy heroes of the silver screen found a perfectly splendid film to say goodbye with.
MGM's Joe Vogel told Peckinpah he thought it was the worst film he'd ever seen and didn't want to release it. But it was in the can and MGM needed product. They tried to hide it on a double bill with Victor Mature in The Tartars. Good grief. But despite the MGM execs it was a fabulous film. Newsweek said it was "pure gold", Variety thought that Scott and McCrea were "better than they have ever been" and the movie won a number of awards at film festivals.
If the film is about integrity and moral courage, it is also essentially about solitude. It is, as I said, a masterpiece.
Randolph Scott left the set and rode off into the sunset – in a golf buggy.
His house abutted the 3th and 4th tees of the LA Country Club golf course, a
club which he joined, though they always refused actors. He is said to have
told them that he was no actor, and had a hundred films to prove it. He spent
his old age, or even older age, practicing his game and managing the more than
$100 million he had amassed.
Well, there you are. 7000-odd words on Randolph Scott. My hero. He never
made an unwatchable Western (except maybe Belle
of the Yukon). He made some so-so ones but he made some seriously good ones
too, and, like his last picture, the occasional great one. For me, he was a
giant of the genre, to rival John Wayne.
Fabulous piece, Jeff! I agree with everything you wrote, almost (don't consider "MAN BEHIND THE GUN" one of Randy's best personally) and thoroughly enjoyed reading it all through carefully and intently.
ReplyDeleteScott is arguably my absolute favourite, though some others come close(ish) and what a body of work in the western field. I have loved his films nearly all my life and probably love them even more today.
Thanks - a GREAT way to start 2018.
Thanks, Jerry. Very kind.
DeleteI find it very hard to be down on any Scott Western because he was so damn good, even in the moderate ones. I just can't dislike Man Behind the Gun even if it's not in the top ten!
Happy New Year.
Jeff
Happy New Year to you too, Jeff.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this. It made my day. One of the great mysteries of life is why Randolph Scott’s westerns, even the mediocre ones, are so endlessly rewatchable. It certainly helps that there are plenty of them. As with the Nero Wolfe mysteries, once you’ve come to the end, it’s time to start over.
ReplyDeleteYup!
DeleteJeff
This is truly a great Christmas present - I agree that he rivals Wayne at least in my eyes and I always find him & therefore the film watchable even if some of them weren't very good. I was lucky enough to play LA Country Club a few times and his picture was displayed there including fascinating landscapes of what (now is) Century City looked like before the club was built! Anyway the story I was told was that LACC didn't allow actors but did allow Scott because he owned profitable oil wells and therefore was an "oil man" - your version is funnier!
ReplyDeleteBig fan of your work and will get the book on Kindle so thanks for the tip.
Lyson
Thanks very much.
DeleteInteresting about the country club.
Hope you enjoy the book: I think it's first class.
Jeff
Great overview of Randolph Scott's westerns! Back in 1984 or 85 while on a trip to LA, we were driving on Sunset Blvd when we came upon Copley Place. Remembering it as RS's address from a fan letter I had written 20 years earlier (and received an autograph!), I pulled in. Believe it or not, when we reached the cul-de-sac, there was Randolph Scott walking up his driveway with his caregiver. What a thrill!
DeleteGreat piece, Jeff - have you ever actually seen Mature and Orson Welles in “The Tartars”? I did. Once. My God, what kind of movie man must Joe Vogel have been?
ReplyDeleteNo, fortunatey I have never seen that.
DeleteSome of those movie execs needed their heads examined.
Jeff
A monolithic piece Jeff.
ReplyDeleteRandy seems to have at least doubled your regulars roster.
Very interesting comments from DeToth certainly some of those
films needed their scripts given a re-tune.
RIDING SHOTGUN and THE BOUNTY HUNTER are triumphs of style over content.
Actually MAN IN THE SADDLE I feel is De Toth's finest Western-very Noirish
with the obsessive Alexander Knox character...a very underrated film.
Too bad the other five were not made with the same care and attention.
I might add Randy is my all time favorite Western star and the good
far outweighs the bad.
Too bad about THE PLAINSMAN..Coop & Scott would have been wonderful.
Thanks again,Jeff for this wonderful piece.
We must file The Plainsman in the 'what might have been' folder. It would never have been a great Western, not with Cecil B DeMille at the helm, but with Coop and Randy it would have been infinitely better than it turned out.
DeleteJeff
Great piece, thank you. I'm going through scott's work, watching it, and this is really handy -
ReplyDelete