Michael Gough (1916 - 2011)

Sad news today for genre film fans. The actor once known for his scenery-chewing villainy in numerous British horror and sci-films (Konga, Horrors of the Black Museum, etc.), whose image mellowed into that of Batman's wise old butler in four films, has passed away at a great and venerable age. Gough was present close to the creation of Hammer Horror as a supporting player in Terrence Fisher's (Horror of) Dracula and was a fixture in the English genre for more than twenty years thereafter. He remained creatively associated with Tim Burton until just last year, when he contributed a voice to Alice in Wonderland, and he made it before the end into the latest edition of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film. Gough was an instantly memorable figure who'll be just as immediately missed by his many fans around the world.

PANIC BEATS (Latidos de Panico, 1983)

Growing up in Franco's Spain, Jacinto Molina was steeped in American horror culture. His enthusiasm for Universal Pictures is most obvious in the Waldemar Daninsky werewolf films he wrote (and later directed) for his Paul Naschy alter ego. Latidos de Panico shows a broader American (or Anglo-American) influence, since the core story echoes Patrick Hamilton's play Gaslight, which was made first into a British movie, then into the more famous George Cukor film for M-G-M, which earned Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar. Was the American influence broader still? Could Molina have read translated EC Comics? I have my doubts, but after seeing Panic Beats you'd see why I ask.

Influences aside, Molina's film is a sequel to one of Naschy's most popular movies, Carlos Aured's Horror Rises From the Tomb, for which Molina created the character of Alaric de Marnac, one of his variations on the Gilles de Rais theme. Molina's script and Aured's film borrowed from Mario Bava's Black Sunday the idea of an executed villain's curse coming to fruition centuries later. It also enabled Naschy to play two roles: Alaric and a doomed 20th century descendant. Latidos is a sequel to this film the way any Daninsky film is a sequel to its predecessor. That is, Panic Beats is more a reprise than a continuation of the de Marnac character, an opportunity for Naschy to do again something that had proven cool before, with variations.

For those unfamiliar with Gaslight, I can sum up the situation quickly: Paul de Marnac (Naschy)wants to get rid of a sickly wife (Julia Saly) so he can live with another woman and the wife's money. His plan is to scare the wife to death by convincing her that the ancestral home is haunted by the evil spirit of Amalric (Naschy), a wife-murderer who occasionally returns from the grave to lay into unfaithful women with his trusty flail. Molina wisely opens with a stylish sequence establishing Amalric's viciousness. In armor and on horseback, the villain chases a naked woman through a forest before dismounting to beat her to a pulpy death. This is the first of Molina's directorial efforts I've seen, and the opening impressed me. He invests it with more moody artistry than Naschy's previous directors were usually capable of. Those early films have their own raw virtues, reminiscent of the "history of cruelty" films I've been watching lately, but Molina seems to have more control over tone, and that'll serve him especially well at the end.

It's just a matter of time before Paul's plot pays off, and his success moves us away from strict Gaslight territory. In that film the more modest object is to drive the wife insane, and the villain fails. In Panic Beats the modern villain's victory only launches a grim endgame that puts Paul in another league altogether. His comeuppance comes at the hands of his paramour, or more literally from the working electric heater those hands dump into Paul's bathtub. That leaves the femme fatale the winner, if not for the EC ending.

As an actor-director, Molina has to keep the suds and dirty water carefully placed to hide the "full Naschy" from sensitive audiences, if not from actress Pat Ondiviela.

Whether the femme fatale counts as the required unfaithful woman or not, who should show up to pay her a call but Amalric de Marnac in full armor, an embodiment of Paul's revenge from the freshest of graves? Underneath his helmet is a rotting skull, which re-coheres into the familiar fearsome and bearded visage as Amalric's armor steams with rage. He is a silent, remorseless avenger, more like one of EC's gruesome avatars than a self-interested villain. He avenges his descendant with uncompromising finality, and unlike an EC comic, there's no gallows humor to lighten the mood.

Molina shows us Amalric's handiwork in detail, and the shots of the woman's pulped face would seem gratuitous if they didn't somehow seem appropriate instead. Molina controls the tone so that we (maybe I better say I) feel that we need to see this, that we need to see the woman's beauty utterly destroyed by a force beyond the reach of seduction or appeals to mercy. Much of what falls in between the bookending scenes of horror lacks the usual outrages that make me a Naschy fan -- though that bathtub scene is a typical showcase of the actor's sometimes misplaced vanity -- but the beginning and end should be enough to redeem Panic Beats for Euro horror fans.

BANDITS IN MILAN (The Violent Four, 1968)

A young man walks past a bank. Through the window, he sees what looks like a robbery in progress. The first thing he asks the man standing in front is, "Is it a movie?" "Yeah," the other guy answers, "those guns are empty." We know better; the robbery is real and this guy is a lookout for the robbers. The kid asks him, "Can I stand here and watch?" The lookout shoos him away, and the kid sulks, "Oh, I had someplace to go, anyway."

Like I said, we knew better -- or did we? Our confusion isn't necessarily a credit to the tricky structure of Carlo Lizzani's docudrama, which comes on early more like a mockumentary, or a mock mondo, based on an actual September 1967 bank robbery and police chase that left several Milanese citizens wounded and two dead.

September 26, 1967.

The film opens at the end of a car chase, with a mob threatening to lynch a man pulled from a car and the police, led by Commissario Bassevi (a clean-cut Tomas Milian) intervening to save him. Inside a squad car, Bassevi interrogates his man, demanding to know the names of his accomplices. But from here the film digresses, following a rhetorical question asking how things had gotten so out of control in Milan that the events of September 1967 could have taken place. Bassevi becomes a narrator, and is shown directing or supervising scenes that our original narrator has identified as recreations of actual crimes for the purpose of illustration. We are reminded repeatedly that we are not watching real events, and I think Lizzani meant us to remember that when the kid shows up outside the Banco di Napoli.

The long, disorienting digression takes us into mondo or pop-art territory. The subject is mob infiltration and intimidation of nightclubs, and we're shown a protection racket horning in on a club owner who already pays off another gang. He's warned to play ball with the new people, and when he hesitates, Lizzani cuts to clippings from Batman comics, including their infamous onomatopoeia, before cutting back to show the owner's office wrecked. From there we segue to the story of an aspiring model exploited and eventually set on fire by the mob.

While all this is going on, we learn, Piero Cavallero (Gian Maria Volonte), an ex-leftist who's turned from Communism to crime after his expulsion from the party, is assembling a crack robbery gang. Thinking himself a kind of guerrilla general, Piero's strategy is to stretch police resources thin by hitting a series of banks in a single day in rapid succession. He envisions the Banco di Napoli robbery as his last big score in Milan, but it's one bank too many. Bystanders identify the license plate of the getaway car and the chase is on.

Gian Maria Volonte vs. Tomas Milian on the streets of Milan.

The chase is epic. Lizzani seems to have had the run of the city to film it. Piero turns mad dog, blasting away at cops and civilians alike, hoping to create distractions and obstacles by hitting the latter. Hoping to get out of town, he changes his mind once he realizes that Bassevi won't have his men fire within city limits. He exploits the cops' fear of hurting civilians, having no such scruple himself, and the chase continues. Even in the truncated fullscreen version available for streaming on Netflix, it's pretty stupendous. It isn't a collection of stunts but a sustained race against an insane man as Volonte (best remembered in the U.S. for his villainous roles in Sergio Leone's Dollars films) and his men hurtle down streets blasting away at all and sundry. In the prologue, Lizzani had shown us Piero's victims. During the chase, he reintroduces us to them as they get up in the morning and go about their daily routines, each appearance a milestone of irreversible doom. You're rooting for Bassevi to somehow ride down the bad guys, but you know (and the original Italian audience knew better) that it can't end until all the victims are accounted for. The chase is by far the highlight of an otherwise muddled movie.

History forces Lizzani into anticlimax. While future Italian cop films would have scripted an appropriately violent end to Piero's gang, Bandits sticks to the facts. All of the robbers are taken alive, Piero and his last accomplice readily surrendering when cornered in a small town barn. The film ends with Piero lording it over the media as he's booked, boasting of his generalship and cynically downplaying his killings compared to Vietnam, while the accomplice sullenly denounces Piero to anyone who'll listen. That's it. No moral, no catharsis, no closure. Just the facts -- if you can believe what you see on film.

Lizzani began his career and has apparently finished it (as of 2008) as a documentarian, so the docudrama approach, the mockumondo elements notwithstanding, may be a matter of personal style. The mondo influence (down to Riz Ortolani's score) shouldn't be underrated, since it probably explains why the film doesn't seem to have a dramatic point, and why such a film would have been made in 1968 Italy. Italian audiences were accustomed to the enhanced actuality approach of mondo movies, so Bandits probably didn't seem as strange to them as it must have seemed to most Americans when Paramount released it in the U.S. as The Violent Four. Lizzani also has roots in neorealism as an assistant to (and later biographer of) Roberto Rossellini, and his apparent commitment to urban verisimilitude serves him well in the crowd and chase scenes. But Bandits ends up an odd, unassimilated hybrid of styles without the real thematic payoff all the establishing stuff about recreating crime with cops in control seems to be pointing at. Despite that, Italian crime-film fans should definitely check out this precursor to the Seventies cop-film cycle for the big chase scene, Volonte's voluble villainy and Milian's understated authority as the commisario. But they should probably try to find it in a format that does Lizzani's vision real justice.

Wendigo Meets LET ME IN (2010)

In what might serve as an omen for the makers of the American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Matt Reeves' Americanization of Sweden's other big cinematic export, Let the Right One In, bombed utterly on its release last fall. It must have struck the producers as a cruel surprise, given how the Swedish film had become a cult hit as a film and DVD in America. My friend Wendigo became one of Let the Right One In's admirers once he caught up with it on DVD. He wasn't surprised when the remake failed, and he remains unsurprised now that he's seen Let Me In and found it a respectful remake and a good film.

The Swedish film was only ever an art-house or cult success, he notes, so any effort to retool it for mainstream multiplex moviegoers was doomed. At this time in genre history, the John Lindqvist story has nothing that mainstream American vampire films want. Above all, it doesn't have sex. When he heard that an American version was being made, Wendigo was afraid that "Oscar" and "Eli" would be turned into teenagers and their relationship romanticized in an effort to lure in the Twilight audience. But if anything, Reeves doomed his project by remaining faithful to the original and keeping the main characters as children, or in the image of children.

Let the Right One In impressed Wendigo as a uniquely creepy film because of the deviant relationship between the childish protagonists, the eternal-child vampire and her dysfunctional servant-to-be. He appreciated the intensity of Oscar's alienation and resentment, how the bullied boy could well have been a serial killer in the making even if he hadn't met Eli. The Swedish film is a portrait of co-dependency that emphasizes the neediness of both characters on many levels. It refuses to romanticize the relationship; it offers no fantasies of power or pleasure, but predicts a terrible future for Oscar in the path of the pathetic father-figure who fetches victims for the vampire. The barren Swedish landscape suits and helps set the movie's bleak mood. Above all, Wendigo liked it because it was different and original. He likes Twilight and will defend it against all comers, but he doesn't need or want every vampire film to be Twilight. As we've shown repeatedly, Wendigo likes the versatility of the vampire as a cinema subject, the variety of things that can be done with it. When he sees something new that's well done, he treasures it.

Ronald Reagan (televised, lower right) should get credit for a cameo role in Let Me In.

Let Me In, of couse, is not something new. It's a remake, sometimes shot-for-shot, of a story familiar enough for us not to synopsize it here, moving the location from Sweden to New Mexico but keeping the period the 1980s. If not for the original, Reeves' movie would have become one of Wendigo's favorites. The ranking isn't automatic -- Wendigo likes The Ring better than Ring, for instance. But in this case the Swedish film feels more spontaneous, and the American version a little too overproduced.

"I'm not a girl," the vampire says, and sometimes Chloe Grace Moretz makes you believe it.

Wendigo admits that the comparison is unfair on at least one level, since his unfamiliarity with the Swedish actors allows him to identify them more completely with their roles, while he couldn't help identifying Chloe Grace Moretz's "Abby" with her Hit Girl from Kick-Ass. But the American actors eventually won him over, and he feels that Moretz and Reeves were more successful than their Swedish counterparts (right) in stressing the femme vampire's disquieting androgyny, and complementing it with a certain androgyny in Kodi Smit-McPhee's "Owen." Moretz looks bigger, more robust than her counterpart, and wears pants and hoodies that sometimes conceal her femininity -- as is appropriate given the original character's backstory, while Smit-McPhee's abject wimpiness gets him called a girl by his bullying tormentors.

Who are these masked men?

Owen's uncool weakness only makes his fantasies of violence and revenge more disturbing, and his wearing a clear plastic mask parallels the garbage-bag mask used by Richard Jenkins's father-figure minion, tagging them as two of a kind. Jenkins makes a stronger impression than his Swedish counterpart because he adds a level of bitterness and resentment for both Abby and his own predicament. Moretz comes across as more compassionate and understanding toward Jenkins, though her eternal immaturity makes it impossible for her to fully empathize with him.

Wendigo hasn't seen Smit-McPhee's previous showcase film, The Road, so he probably doesn't see how the young actor probably hurt the film despite his strong performance. Smit-McPhee is the true Wimpy Kid of today's cinema, and I think that fact disturbs a lot of viewers who aren't really comfortable seeing such blatant weakness and neediness on screen. Many Americans would rather that everyone was cool, or at least self-reliant. I think guys especially dig seeing strong, self-reliant female and child characters, not because it's politically correct, but because it takes them off the hook. The thought that someone might become dependent on them might be scarier for a lot of us than many more conventional horrors, and the Lindqvist story, in both forms, is all about weakness and neediness. It's a real modern horror story.

Reeves does some interesting original things, from the odd way he never puts Owen's mother in focus, which emphasizes the mutual alienation of son and mother, to his reimagining of Jenkins's attacks. In America you can't just hang around someplace waiting for someone to walk past, so Jenkins carjacks folks, breaking in and hiding in their vehicles to jump them at railroad crossings. These sequences are nicely done, especially an admittedly Hitchcockian scene when unforeseen complications lead Jenkins from desperation to disaster. As Reeves notes elsewhere on the DVD, his intention is to get you rooting for Jenkins to escape his predicament, no matter how evil his purpose and how foredoomed he is to anyone familiar to the story. With us, he succeeded.

Abby is never so much an American vampire as at moments like this.

If Let Me In falls short of its original, that can be blamed on overproduction. There's a little too much CGI climbing and leaping, and Moretz gets to wear a CG "grr-face" that her Swedish counterpart never needed. Wendigo has nothing against "grr-faces," but he doesn't understand why nearly every American vampire film needs them. Why aren't fangs enough? Maybe they aren't cool or badass enough, and maybe effects teams do it simply because they can. The reductio ad absurdam of that mentality was Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing. Since then, excessive FX often makes it more difficult for Wendigo to take vampires seriously, a problem he never had with more minimalist vampires of the past and present.

The American film doesn't live up to the original's wintry cinematography, despite much imported snow, and Reeves reveals some limitations as a director following the stunt of Cloverfield. He seems to lose track of Owen's creepiness once he starts "going steady" with Abby, and other interesting angles end up underdeveloped. Reeves seems to have a reason for using clips of Ronald Reagan beyond establishing the period, but search us for what it was -- probably something to do with "evil," I suppose. He also lays the pop soundtrack on more thick than the Swedes did, in what struck us as an obvious attempt to sell an album. These complaints don't add up to a negative review. Wendigo stresses again that Let Me In is one of the better American vampire movies he's seen in a while.

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP (2009)

Zhang Yimou didn't hide the fact that this film, also known as A Simple Noodle Story, is a remake of the Coen Brothers' debut movie Blood Simple, which I guess makes the period Chinese setting the most unlikely setting for a film noir since Anthony Mann set The Black Book in Revolutionary Paris. With Zhang at the helm, it may as well have been David Lean's version of Blood Simple. Older fans and history buffs will get my point. Lean made some great films, with some saying his black and white British films from the Forties are even better than Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia. But after a certain point Lean seemed unable to tell a story simply, and his comeuppance came with Ryan's Daughter, a film that seemed appallingly overproduced by the standards of 1970. After the global success of Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang seems to have reached that point. Noodle is a visual overdose that swamps mood with spectacle. When characters chase each other through the desolate hills, the hills are so gorgeously desolate that they dwarf the actors in every way. Zhang may have a narrative point to make about the characters' pettiness, but that point also gets dwarfed by the hyperaesthetic location cinematography.

I suppose Zhang has earned the right to make films his way, and we definitely should be grateful that he kept martial arts out of this one -- though now that I think of it, some slam-bang wirework might have accentuated the intentional absurdity of the piece. The closest we get to that sort of thing is an utterly gratuitous noodle-making scene in which three employees pass a pie of dough back and forth, each spinning and spreading it out until it's like a tent over their heads. Zhang piles the silliness on early, introducing a flamboyant "Persian" merchant who sells the Frances McDormand counterpart a gun and tries to sell her a cannon. For some reason the Persian and the Chinese woman haggle partly in English, and of course the cannon must be fired. The noise of the explosion introduces the soldier who'll play M. Emmet Walsh's part in the story. The first third of the movie is broadly comic, as if Zhang were remaking Raising Arizona by mistake. Everything is over the top, from the mere presence of a fat bucktoothed oaf of a noodle chef to the usual Asian indulgence of crying and screaming. The plot of Blood Simple is being followed fairly closely, but the tone is totally off. Zhang isn't necessarily obliged to reproduce the original's tone, but his own tone seems off. He can't balance plot, performances and visuals in a way that rings true, at least for American viewers.

An unfaithful wife...

A vengeful husband...

A man who kills for money....

Past the halfway point, however, as Noodle grows more recognizably imitative of Blood Simple, Zhang's commitment to reproducing the original's suspense brings the film under greater control. Things slow down as Zhang ratchets up the tension, putting his soldier over as a convincing menace to set up the final showdown with the wife. Apart from the aesthetic excess of slow-mo shots of arrows flying through the house, the climax works nearly as well as it did the first time around. The Coens wrote a strong scene, and I was tempted to say that it works in spite of Zhang, but I realize how easily it could have been botched. Zhang deserves credit for reclaiming suspense and some entertainment from what looked like a lost cause.

Anyway, it's nice to see the influence running the other way for once. We're so used to seeing Hollywood poaching foreign cinema for story ideas that it's almost reassuring in a backhanded way to see foreigners borrowing from American movies. Of course, Zhang didn't make Noodle to preempt Blood Simple from Chinese screens, so it's not quite the same thing that Hollywood usually does. Since the Coens themselves aren't above remakes, and even did a good one last year, seeing one of their own films remade is kind of like the circle of life in motion, to be sappy about it.

Straight from Sony Pictures Classics, here's the American trailer, for which the film's unoriginality is its main selling point.

WINTER'S BONE (2010)

Maybe I wouldn't have noticed the resemblance if I'd bothered to see Debra Granik's Oscar-nominated movie when it played local theaters last summer, but now that I've watched the DVD I can't help being reminded of True Grit. It strikes me that Granik's adaptation of a Daniel Woodrell novel is more the modern version of Charles Portis's story, in either sense of the word, than the Coen Bros. remake of the Henry Hathway movie. It's definitely the darker telling.

Both stories deal with a girl on a dangerous mission. In Winter's Bone, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) has a week to find her missing father so he can make a court date, or else her family will lose the home he's put up as bond. At first it looks as if Dad might simply have absconded, being the best meth cook in Missouri and all, but the story gradually takes on a stronger resemblance to the basic True Grit situation. Even so, Ree's got to have proof in order to ward off the bondsmen, even if her own acceptance of the country omerta means giving up hope of justice or even revenge. Like the heroine of True Grit, Ree is a premature matriarch due to the absent dad and an incompetent mother. It's up to her to raise a younger brother and a six year old sister, both of whom she has to teach how to use a squirrel gun for survival's sake. Ree isn't perky or quirky like your choice of True Grit actress; the Oscar-nominated Lawrence seems closer to what the Portis-Hathaway-Coen heroine should or probably would have been like. She is hard, grim and bitter, without ideals and only better than her relatives and neighbors because of her sense of responsibility and the fact that she isn't on the meth yet.

A Rooster Cogburn counterpart even emerges in the form of Ree's Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), a hardcase addict feared by the local law and lawbreakers alike who tries early to warn Ree off of asking too many people where her Dad might be. He finally stands up for Ree when her stubborn nosiness puts her in danger of death at the hands of the local meth patriarch and his clan. By doing so, he puts himself in permanent peril, taking responsibility should Ree ever squeal or otherwise betray the community's secrets, including the fate of Teardrop's brother. He warns her never to tell him if she does find out who might have killed her father, but it's unclear whether he refuses the knowledge because it'd make his own life forfeit or because he'd be compelled to make a suicide-run for revenge. It's probably both, and it makes his departure at the end, after he tells a still-ignorant Ree that he's found out himself, a grimly sad moment of abortive redemption.

Forty years or so ago, this wouldn't be so unusual a film, but it would've been quite different. Hillbilly or country crime movies were a popular subgenre in the Seventies, but they were mostly exploitation films. In those days a slightly older Ree might have been Claudia Jennings in cutoffs and there'd be no question about her taking revenge, however unlikely, on all comers. There would have been car chases and explosions and skinny dipping -- the title might've been Summer's Bone to facilitate the nudity. I would've been reminded less of True Grit in that case, but I don't think it was Granik's plan to plant that thought in my head anyway. She's made a hard film about modern American poverty, an unpopular subject in Hollywood these days.

The poverty was taken for granted in those Seventies films, but it only formed a backdrop for fantasies of rural degeneracy -- fun as they sometimes are -- that dated back to Tobacco Road or God's Little Acre. The world of Winter's Bone is still pretty degenerate, but Granik doesn't make a spectacle of it. Hers is a deliberately ugly film portraying an ugly, littered landscape. There are few signs of stylization. Granik's stark approach and Lawrence and Hawkes's terse, convincing performances tellingly portray potential crushed or in the process of being crushed in a ruined socioeconomic landscape. The stuff of Seventies exploitation is now the stuff of 21st century independent cinema. What that tells us about the movie business and the American audience is hard to say.

WESTBOUND (1959)

While making the films with Budd Boetticher for Columbia Pictures that have made his latter-day reputation as a western star, Randolph Scott also made pictures for Warner Bros. For his last Warners picture, the studio hired Boetticher to direct. Neither the producer nor the writers had worked with Scott before, and it's unclear whether the actor had anything like the creative control he enjoyed over his Columbia efforts. The end product still seems like a Randolph Scott movie, if somewhat less like a Boetticher film. The Civil War story lacks the spare clarity of the team's Columbia pictures, but remains grounded in certain story situations typical of later Scott films. Scott and Boetticher may also be responsible for a graver mood that prevails here than in other comparable patriotic Fifties westerns.

Scott plays John Hayes, a Union cavalry officer assigned to securing the Overland Stage route through increasingly hostile territory and assuring that Union troops in the West get paid. The deteriorating situation is made clear to him at a station where the manager insults a maimed veteran (Michael Dante) by putting salt in the young man's slice of pie. Hayes is a man who takes crap from no one and will not let anyone give crap to a brave man who gave up an arm for his country. He forces the station master to eat the pie. The situation sounds absurd but it establishes Hayes's understated power of intimidation.

After dropping Rod, the veteran, off on his farm for a reunion with his hardworking, feisty wife Jeanie (Karen Steele), Hayes discovers that the Overland agent in the next town has quit his job and gone over to the Rebs. Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan) was an old friend of Hayes' until he won the woman (Virginia Mayo) both men had courted. As Hayes struggles to reestablish an Overland presence in the town, he finds allies in Rod and Jeanie and a dangerous enemy in Mace (Michael Pate), who becomes Putnam's right hand man in the Confederate effort to stop westbound stage traffic.

Good guys (Karen Steele and Michael Dante, above) and bad guys
(Michael Pate and Andrew Duggan, below) in Westbound.

Mace emerges as the real villain of the piece, while Putnam proves the sort of ambivalent antagonist you'd see in the Columbia pictures. With Hayes having reappeared, Putnam clearly feels insecure in his marriage and succumbs to alcoholism. But strangely, precisely because Hayes is his enemy, Putnam refuses to turn a wartime conflict into a personal matter. While Mace advises that the easiest way to resolve the situation is to assassinate Hayes, Putnam refuses to consider that option. He thinks he can drive Hayes from the field by pressuring stage drivers or stealing the Overland's horses. It's as if Putnam wants to prove to everyone that he doesn't fear Hayes as a returned romantic rival, but his choice of strategy enables Mace to commit a series of escalating atrocities for which Putnam is, for all intents and purposes, to blame.

Randolph Scott often plays a loner whose arrival in a community, no matter how righteous his purpose, tends to disrupt the local order. That makes him different from John Wayne, whose influence wherever his characters go is almost entirely positive and uplifting. Scott and Boetticher could play the star's subversive potential for laughs, as in Buchanan Rides Alone, or to more tragic effect in Decision at Sundown. His disruptive potential extends to the domestic sphere. Scott's films often include a female character whom we recognize as a suitable mate for the hero, but is burdened with an unfit husband or fiancee. The man may be unscrupulous or he may merely be weak, but Scott's superiority provokes a domestic crisis that is often resolved by the other man's demise, whether Scott ends up with the girl or not. The final Scott-Boetticher collaboration, Comanche Station, gives a twist to this gimmick as the Scott character and others spend the film questioning the character of a man who wouldn't venture out to rescue his captive wife, only to learn at the end that the loving husband just happened to be blind. Westbound anticipates this device by tying one of Hayes's potential mates, the stalwart Jeanie, to Rod the amputee who takes to heart the townsfolks' labeling of him as "half a man." But Hayes proves a subtle mentor to the troubled Rod, offhandedly showing how a man can use a rifle with one hand without any condescending motivational speeches. Westbound is also unusual in offering the Scott character two potential mates, including the more age-appropriate Norma Putnam, creating some suspense over which woman, if any, Hayes will end up with. But the filmmakers don't stack the deck in Scott's favor. Jeanie loves Rod despite his handicap, and Norma, as we eventually discover, loves Putnam despite his faults.

But because the Scott character has two potential mates, Westbound makes the fates of the two husbands a matter of further suspense. If Hayes deserves to get a girl, then one of the men must be doomed. Boetticher maintains this suspense during a drastic ratcheting up of violence. After Hayes and Rod recover horses stolen by Mace's men, Mace escalates the conflict. Going against Putnam's order, he sets up an ambush to kill Hayes, but Rod ends up walking through the fateful doorway instead. In an unusual approach, Rod is allowed to linger despite a doctor's declaration that his condition is hopeless. This being a movie, you can believe that his condition isn't hopeless, and the longer he lingers, the more you might believe it. Meanwhile, Mace perpetrates his supreme atrocity, wrecking a coach full of women and children and killing them all. Moments after Hayes is hammered with this news, Jeanie informs him that Rod, offscreen, has finally succumbed to his wounds. Now a reckoning between Hayes and Mace, who had humiliated our hero in town earlier in the picture, is unavoidable, but a desperately repentant Putnam becomes a wild card in the scenario. And after the climax of violence comes Hayes's ultimate choice, if the choice is his to make, between a once-lost love and a love yet to be....

See enough Randolph Scott films and the pattern of a "Randolph Scott film" becomes more recognizable. The man and his associates knew, by the 1950s, the sort of stories and situations that worked best for him. Whether Scott and Boetticher gave it a personal touch, or the Warner people tailor-made a story to suit Scott's strengths, Westbound is plainly a Scott vehicle. While the story in simplest terms is something Gary Cooper or any other Hollywood westerner could have performed, I suspect it would have been inferior with any other actor starring. Whether it would have been inferior with some one else directing is another story. While Scott was clearly comfortable with Boetticher by this point, I imagine that the other top Western directors of the decade -- Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves, etc. -- could have done just as well with the actor and the material. I don't have any problem with Boetticher's work here -- the image seems little compromised by the fullscreen "Starz Play" stream available on Netflix, except for the sequence when Mace's horsemen pursue a stagecoach across a too-sweeping expanse of road -- but the film overall plays less to the director's strengths, which I identify with a certain stoic minimalism, than it does to the star's. Boetticher probably should get credit for keeping the film personal as a Scott movie and getting the usual strong performance from the actor. I haven't seen enough of Scott in other hands yet to determine how much of his definitive screen persona is Boetticher's (or Burt Kennedy's) creation, but for now I'm inclined to give the director the benefit of the doubt. As a team, Boetticher and Scott were seven-for-seven. None of their collaborations fail to impress. Individual works by other directors and other stars may have been better films, but Boetticher and Scott were the most successful team in terms of quantity and quality during the greatest decade of Hollywood westerns.