What Randolph Scott Knew
It was in a string of westerns late in his career that the actor came to embody an ethic that was the essence of the genre.

By Terry Teachout

If you long to meet odd people, it’s hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who flock to revival houses on sunny spring afternoons to take in the latest week-long tribute to Alexander Dovzhenko, Ida Lupino, or maybe Edgar G. Ulmer—it scarcely matters, since the same folks show up every time, no matter what’s showing.

Rarely are such proceedings invaded by those with lives, but innocent strangers have been known on occasion to wander into an art house just for fun. Not long ago, I was flabbergasted to see a gaggle of so-I’m-like-duh teenagers in attendance at a screening of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, though I soon realized that they were merely film-studies students doing their homework. A few weeks later, I went to the opening of a Budd Boetticher festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and was equally astonished to find myself seated behind an intense-looking man who’d brought along a pair of small children. Wondering how a fellow who bore all the familiar stigmata of film geekery could ever have forgotten himself long enough to father two cute kids, I tuned in on their pre-show chatter. Would they be lisping about aspect ratios or dye-transfer processes? Far from it. No sooner had I started listening than I overheard a snatch of conversation so appropriate to the occasion that I scribbled it down in my notebook:

CHILD #1 (firmly): “Two wrongs don’t make a right!”
CHILD #2 (smugly): “Oh, yes, they do!”

The children didn’t know it, but the conundrum about which they were arguing was the subject of the movie their father had brought them to see. Ride Lonesome, originally released in 1959, is a B Western directed by Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott. Unlike such better-remembered films as Shane, Rio Bravo, and The Searchers, it is known only to a small but stalwart band of critics and buffs who regard it as a minor masterpiece. As a rule, fanatics are not to be trusted on any subject whatsoever, least of all one that falls within the compass of their obsessions—but every once in a while, they’re right.

In certain ways, Hollywood today is just like it was a half-century ago. It’s a company town, a plantation devoted to the manufacture of cultural commodities designed to please the largest possible number of people. Then as now, nearly all of the films produced there fit neatly into the pigeonholes of a limited number of highly stylized genres: gangster movies, costume dramas, romantic comedies, Westerns.

The main difference between then and now is that in the old days, such films were mass-produced on the assembly lines of the major studios. Americans of all ages went to the movies at least once a week, and they expected to see something different every time they went. Hence the studio system, which ground out product fast enough to meet the omnivorous demand. Except for the occasional Gone With the Wind, the modern Spielberg-style “event” movies that now dominate Hollywood filmmaking didn’t exist. You went to the movies not to see Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings, but simply to see a show. If the show in question was a Western or a mystery, that was good; if it starred John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, that was better. But nobody went out of his way to see a Wayne Western directed by Howard Hawks, much less a Mitchum mystery directed by Jacques Tourneur. You took what you got, and if what you got happened to be a Red River or Out of the Past, then you got lucky.

That’s why so many of the best films made in Hollywood in the Forties and Fifties were Westerns and mysteries. Precisely because they were commodities, their makers tended to be ignored by the front office. So long as your last picture turned a profit, however small, you got to make another one. If the movies in which you specialized were low-budget genre pictures for which demand was more or less constant, all that mattered was that you stay more or less within the accepted conventions of the genre, and the conventions of the Western and the mystery happened to be wonderfully well-suited to the artful telling of serious stories that were both entertaining and cheap to produce. The art, of course, was optional, and most such movies were as forgettable as a Law and Order rerun, but some of them were as good—and as serious—as a movie can be.

Randolph Scott didn’t set out to make serious movies. A dignified upper-middle-class gent from North Carolina, he went to Hollywood on a whim in 1928, caught the eye of a talent scout, and within a couple of years was churning out Zane Grey Westerns by the score. As it happens, Scott also had a knack for light comedy—he appeared in two Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, Roberta and Follow the Fleet—and there seems no obvious reason why he became typecast as the white-hatted good guy who rode a horse. Had the breaks fallen differently, he might well have evolved into an all-American version of Cary Grant, with whom he shared a bachelor pad in the Thirties, a living arrangement that caused rumor-mongers to whisper that the two men were lovers. (The rumor circulates to this day, though Scott has denied it and no one has proved him wrong.)

After 1947, though, Scott started making Westerns exclusively, and for several years they ranked among the highest-grossing movies in America. Most filmgoers under the age of sixty are puzzled by the scene in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles in which Black Bart attempts to persuade the craven townspeople of Rock Ridge to stand up to the evil Hedley Lamarr by telling them, “You’d do it for Randolph Scott.” To this they respond in unison, “Randolph Scott!” then doff their hats reverently—an accurate indication of how closely identified Scott was with the Western genre. He always played the same character, a lanky, dryly amusing cowboy with a Virginia accent who spoke only when spoken to and shot only when shot at, and you could take it for granted that he’d do the right thing in any given situation. If he’d been younger and prettier, he would have been too good to be true, but Scott was no dresser’s dummy: he had a thin-lipped mouth and a hawk-like profile, and wasn’t afraid to act his age on screen. Nobody in Hollywood, not even John Wayne, looked more believable in a Stetson.

On two occasions, in Coroner Creek (1948) and Hangman’s Knot (1952), Scott wriggled out of his good-guy straitjacket to deliver cold-eyed, unsettlingly harsh performances that showed what he could do when he gave himself the chance, but otherwise he stuck to predictable B-plus oaters whose profits he shrewdly invested in the oil business. (“My outlook is purely mercenary,” he told an interviewer.) Eventually, Scott’s indifference caught up with him. Though he was at least as popular as John Wayne, Wayne consistently picked better directors and scripts, and by the mid-Fifties, Scott was slipping into bottom-of-the-bill obscurity just as his younger competitor was becoming the most beloved American actor of his time.

Ironically, it was Wayne who turned Scott’s career around. The two men had worked together twice in the Forties, but didn’t quite get along. In 1955, Wayne read a script called “Seven Men from Now” by a novice writer named Burt Kennedy, bought it for his production company, Batjac, and hired Budd Boetticher, an all-but-unknown journeyman director, to put it on the screen. Wayne was already committed to filming The Searchers, so when Boetticher asked him whom he wanted to play the lead, he casually replied, “Let’s use Randolph Scott. He’s through.” Boetticher and Scott went on to make five more films together (plus Westbound, a forgotten potboiler that Boetticher directed simply to keep the collaboration going). The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960), all co-produced by Scott and his partner Harry Joe Brown, run about seventy-five minutes each, the length of a typical B movie, and were shot quickly on location in the barren, rock-strewn hills of Lone Pine, California. The casts were kept small and star-free to hold down costs still further, and Scott and Brown cut other corners whenever they could. Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, for example, contain no interior scenes whatsoever.

The clean, spare look of the Boetticher-Scott films is mirrored in their no-nonsense scripts. Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, both written by Kennedy, are for all intents and purposes the same movie as Seven Men from Now—the basic plot mechanism is recycled from film to film, along with a few choice snippets of dialogue—while Decision at Sundown and The Tall T, the former doctored by Kennedy and the latter adapted by him from a novel by Elmore Leonard, arise from different situations but develop in similar ways. More often than not, Scott plays the part of a solitary, vengeful drifter who is searching for a man has wronged him, usually by murdering his wife. In the course of his travels, he meets an unhappily married woman, to whom he is powerfully and illicitly attracted, and a villain who is charming and courageous—a hero gone bad, in other words. The villain proves to be looking for the same man as Scott, but their interests are in conflict, forcing them into a climactic showdown.

What sounds repetitive on paper proves miraculously varied in practice. Just as Degas never tired of the ballet dancers he painted time and again, so does Boetticher come up with ever-fresh ways to frame his players among the sun-scorched rocks of Lone Pine, finding painfully austere beauty in that least seductive of landscapes. Though he was never obvious about it, Boetticher was among the most visually imaginative of Western directors. I once had the opportunity to ask him if his feel for composition had been shaped by the paintings of such artists as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington, to which he replied that while he liked their work, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec had meant even more to him. (I could see how much he enjoyed telling me that, too.) Similarly, Burt Kennedy makes a virtue out of necessity by letting Scott and his engaging enemies spend most of their time talking instead of fighting. He gives the best lines to the not-entirely-bad-guys—Lee Marvin in Seven Men from Now, Richard Boone in The Tall T, Pernell Roberts in Ride Lonesome, Claude Akins in Comanche Station—and it is Roberts, not Scott, who gets the line that could stand as the motto of all six films, “There are some things a man just can’t ride around.”

Scott was secure enough to let his colleagues do the talking, knowing that his gritty, hard-faced on-screen presence would speak for itself. The dashing young leading man of the Thirties now looked as though he’d been carved from a stump, and every word he spoke reeked of disillusion. Yet he continually found himself forced to make moral choices that were always clear but rarely easy. What Scott should do at any given moment is never in doubt, but we also understand that doing it will never make him “happy” in any conventional sense of the word: he must do the right thing for its own sake, not in the hope of any immediate reward. Significantly, he sees the potential for redemption in the men he kills, slaying them reluctantly and only after giving them a fair chance to change their ways. Sometimes the woman’s weak husband dies in the crossfire, thus freeing her to fall in love with Scott, but in Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, the best and most characteristic films of the series, he discharges his stern duty and rides off into the sunset without looking back, alone again and likely to remain so.

This was and is an unusual approach to the Western, whose moral ambiguities generally prove on closer inspection to be superficial. John Wayne, for instance, usually played strong men with tainted pasts who nevertheless knew the right thing to do. (This is what makes Red River and The Searchers Wayne’s most morally interesting movies. In both cases, he knows what to do—kill Montgomery Clift and Natalie Wood, but it’s the wrong thing.) Conversely, the “adult” Westerns that followed in the wake of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, the most influential Western of the postwar era, tend to be nihilistic. The heroes are villains, the villains heroes, and everyone in sight is corrupt beyond hope of redemption. Redemption, on the other hand, is the whole point of the Boetticher-Scott films. It is what Scott is seeking, and what he hopes to offer to the warped half-heroes whom he meets on his endless pilgrimage. And though Boetticher shies away from overt religious symbolism—the cross-like hanging tree in Ride Lonesome is a rare exception—it is hard to fathom Scott’s old-fashioned integrity without supposing that he believes in something beyond his own iron will. Why else would he insist on preserving his honor at the cost of his happiness?

This message rings truer still as we look back on a century that might have been designed for the sole purpose of dramatizing the truth of Dostoyevsky’s terrible warning, “If there is no God, then anything is permitted, even cannibalism.” I doubt that Randolph Scott ever got around to reading The Brothers Karamazov, but he and Boetticher knew by instinct that in a world without laws or lawmen, every man must choose between the integrity of the old-fashioned cowboy and the moral cannibalism of his self-willed enemies.
Though comparatively few critics are more than vaguely familiar with the Boetticher-Scott films, they have always had their fervent admirers, both here and abroad. Andre Bazin called Seven Men from Now “the most intelligent Western I know, while being at the same time the least intellectual, the most subtle and least aestheticising, the simplest and finest example of the form.” But when Boetticher died, only one of them, Comanche Station, was available on videocassette, and so far as I know there are no plans to release any of the others. Nor are they likely ever to become cable-TV fodder, for they are at once too spare and concentrated to pleased the contemporary shoot-’em-up audience and too morally aware for the comfort of postmodernists.

Fortunately, all six films can be seen with reasonable regularity in art houses and on museum film series, where movie lovers continue to stumble onto them in much the same way that the novels of Dawn Powell keep on being rediscovered four decades after their author’s demise. What’s more, some of Randolph Scott’s original fans are still alive and well. I stood behind two of them in the popcorn line at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, a pair of silver-haired dowagers whom you’d never have taken for Western fans. Colin Powell had said something flaccid about Yasser Arafat that morning, and the women were grumbling about how weak-willed he was. “That’s why I’m here today,” the first one proclaimed without a trace of irony. “At least Randolph Scott always knew what to do.” The other one nodded her head in emphatic agreement. No doubt stranger scenes have taken place in Manhattan since September 11, but that one was strange enough for me.

I like what Andre Bazin said about Seven Men from Now, but I like what the first old lady said about Randolph Scott even more: he always knew what to do, and whether he liked it or not, he did it. Midway through The Tall T, Richard Boone tries to explain to Scott why he became an outlaw. “I’m gonna have me a place someday,” he says. “I thought about it, I thought about it a lot. A man should have somethin’ of his own, somethin’ to belong to, to be proud of.”

“And you think you’ll get it this way?” Scott asks.
“Sometimes you don’t have a choice,” Boone answers.
“Don’t you?”

That’s what Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher knew: everybody has a choice. And that is why it is good to watch their movies at a time when America is struggling to deliver itself from the evil in which its citizens have long been taught to disbelieve. Without preaching or hectoring, Boetticher and Scott remind us that there is a difference between hard choices and meaningless ones, between the uneasy honesty of moral ambiguity and the slick-walled abyss of moral relativism. I can’t think of a better reason to go to the movies on a pretty spring day.

Terry Teachout is drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary, but he also writes about the other arts, too—books, ballet, painting and sculpture, film and TV, whatever happens to catch his eye or ear. His work also appears in the New York Times, National Review, and many other magazines and newspapers. Teachout, who lives in Manhattan, blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. His book A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale) includes the article reproduced here.

For a related article that appeared in the same issue of American Cowboy magazine, read Editor Jesse Mullins’ piece on “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?”