Ride Lonesome
Well, if you want to know what makes Budd Boetticher a great director, this film is probably the clearest demonstration. It’s also the film in the cycle that best exemplifies the received notion of stark minimalism as his defining characteristic. Scott’s character here is his tersest and sternest – which is saying something – and Boetticher continually reduces his mise-en-scene to an iconographic minimum. In combination with Cinemascope, this strategy is revelatory, and Yojimbo’s comparison with Leone was astute.
Okay, let’s start with the opening scene, which unfolds in a tough, nuggety landscape. The lumps of rock are all around, creating a near-uniform backdrop so that the only significant visual components in the frame are the dark foreground figures: Brigade, Billy, Billy’s horse. What ensues is a rhythmic play of the various abstract possibilities of the set up (including, at the start, a classic Leone-
avant-la-lettre shot of Brigade’s hips in close-up occupying the left hand side of the screen while a full-length long-shot of Billy occupies the right): one figure, two figures, three figures – all spread across the screen. I don’t think there is any cut from one type of composition to the same type. And at the close of the scene, he ties everything up visually by uniting the three figures in the centre of the frame, then superimposing them right in the middle of the screen as they file out away from the camera
Most importantly, and most telling in terms of Boetticher’s visual imagination, is that he includes a fourth kind of composition in the orchestration of the opening sequence: shots with no figures in them. This is the first instance of a very important recurring visual motif of the film. Time and again, Boetticher conceals a threat within the Cinemascope frame. Danger doesn’t come from outside; it’s already there. Some examples: the shots of plain rocks in the opening scene, implying an ambush behind them; the first appearance of Boone, hidden in the darkness of a doorway; the first sign of the Mescalero – a cloud of dust in the far distance behind some hills; the second – a plume of smoke from a ridge; the moment when a tracking shot on a conversation between Brigade and Boone takes in some dark static shapes on a distant dune; the shot of Frank’s gang that begins with them as specks in the desert; their arrival at the final showdown, announced yet again by a small cloud of dust deep in the landscape (and that rhyme of the earlier Mescalero shot anticipates another visual rhyme at the very end of the film). That’s a lot of examples from a film barely over an hour long, and in two of those instances, we’re supposed to notice the danger before the characters do.
And that technique is in turn an expression of Boetticher’s overall strategy of reducing his mise-en-scene to an expressive minimum. The central scene in which the Mescalero band chase the travellers to an abandoned station is a beautiful example. The landscape is all dunes, no topography to speak of, so that the action is entirely defined by the placement of the figures in the frame, and the refuge to which they’re fleeing is little more than a sketch of a fort, a set about as minimal and notional as the one in
Dogville. Though in this instance the sketchiness has more dramatic meaning, since no walls means little cover. And dramatic impact is what Boetticher’s minimalism is all about. He completely understands, as not enough directors do, that the dramatic potential of the Cinemascope frame doesn’t lie in how much you can cram into it, but how much you can leave out.
Boetticher delineates his setpieces with geometric precision, and explores different visual themes with each one. Thus the horizontality of the desert siege (low walls, flat dunes, prone bodies) compares with the verticality of the final confrontation (culminating in the glorious, ominous crane shot that ends the film). In the various stand-offs, Boetticher very carefully triangulates the action for the viewer, even going to the trouble of providing us with Boone’s and Whit’s POV shots of the central action in the climactic scene. This is a very effective and disorienting, but perfectly logical, violation of classical style, which would normally pick the ‘best’ establishing angle on an iconographic scene and stick with it.
Each of the film’s set pieces is beautifully constructed, and the sinew connecting them is elegant and spare, but there’s still room for the surprising characterisation that makes the best of these films so memorable. Boone is one of the most likeable ‘villains’ in the genre (if you define ‘villain’ as somebody who intends to kill the hero), and, like Richard Boone in
The Tall T, he’s an outlaw who’s craving the comforts of civilisation. This longing is very nicely written, as is Boone’s relationship with Whit, and Roberts and Coburn make a good team. Boone’s mildness, and Brigade’s apparent pig-headedness, bring a good deal of moral complexity to the film’s central relationships.
Even in a taut dramatic showdown, Boetticher and Kennedy weave idiosyncratic character bits into the texture of the conflict. I love how Billy’s voice cracks and splays when he realises he’s been outflanked in the opening scene, and the later scene in which he’s similarly psyched out is wonderfully written and staged, with each of the characters’ personalities determining how the stand-off plays out. And the capper of that scene is wonderful. I love how not one, but two scenes in the film rely dramatically on horses responding realistically to gunshots – how often do you see that in a western?
There’s one obvious weak point to the film, however: Karen Steele. She’s not as much of a liability as in her other two films in the series, maybe because she seems to have less dialogue to deal with, but her simultaneously stiff and limp readings certainly don’t communicate ‘tough frontier gal’ very effectively. She completely flubs her biggest scene – so badly that it almost plays as comedy. It’s plausible enough as written, but she simply doesn’t have the chops to sell the series of sharp, quick reversals it requires.
It’s the scene where the Mescaleros want to trade her for a horse. Brigade cautions her, “whatever you do, don’t break down”; “I won’t break down,” she pouts, then immediately does that very thing, before the Indians have even done anything threatening. Brigade responds with sexist disgust, then she reveals the plausible reason for her breakdown, the oblique revelation of her husband’s slaughter. The problem is that she’s not convincing in any of her poses – pride, terror, grief, defiance – so she just comes off as emotionally immature – the very thing Brigade arrogantly presupposes and which the interplay within the scene is supposed to contradict.
As for domino’s specific complaints about the film, I can’t afford the luxury of judging films by the plausibility of their MacGuffins (!), but the motivating wrong committed in the film’s back story, though certainly ghastly, doesn’t strike me as outrageously unbelievable. In fact, the mere fact of its ghastliness – which is just about all we get to know or need to know about Frank, who’s also something of a MacGuffin – makes the action of the film more plausible for me, not less. Something extraordinary had to have made Brigade the way he is, and it’s a telling character bit that Frank himself barely remembers the incident.
I also like how Brigade’s scheme makes a virtue of the biggest problem with chase films: the chaser always has to catch up to the chase, so any delay or distraction along the way runs the risk of smacking of dramatic convenience (a.k.a. “what’s the matter, do they
want to get caught or something?” syndrome). And actually, Brigade’s scheme of taking Billy as hostage rather than bounty has an appealingly brutal directness about it.
I’m guessing he looked up “Psychopaths” in the Frontier Yellow Pages and found that Frank was unlisted, so how else is he going to track him down, assuming Frank is smart enough to keep a low profile?