David Hast: Scott, have you seen The Tall T?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen The Tall T and I also read the short story that is based on, The Captives’ by Elmore Leonard which was published in Argosy in 1955 and I loved both.
DH: Yeah, people don't usually think of Elmore Leonard as a writer of westerns.
SVW: Well they don't but he started his career writing western short stories for the pulp magazines in the 1950s. In 1953 he wrote, ‘310 to Yuma’ and that was sold to Hollywood.
DH: Oh, it's been made into a movie twice.
SVW: Yes, and then this one was actually initially sold to John Wayne's production company, but then Wayne handed it off so that Randolph Scott could star in it.
DH: We forgot to say in our last episode that we're doing three episodes in a row kind of looking at an important evolution of the Westerns. So last time we did a we did a show on My Darling Clementine which is a great example of a classic Western, widely acknowledged as one of the great Westerns of all time from the 1940s. Now we're going to look at transitional things from the 50s. We’re going to talk about the 50s today and then next week we'll do one on a movie from the 1960s and Westerns changed even more radically in the 60s and 70s. But they certainly changed in the 50s and you mentioned that this movie was given to Randolph Scott, Randolph Scott, a name that isn't like a lot of people, unless you're a movie buff, you maybe haven't heard of Randolph Scott, but Randolph Scott was one of the great Western movie stars. I mean, probably after John Wayne, he's maybe the greatest. People think of Henry Fonda and people like that too, because they were in bigger A pictures. But Scott was a big Western star. He made 60 Westerns.
SVW: Oh my goodness, I did not know that. Yeah, he made 60 Westerns and this came at the end of his career. He actually, after he made his final film, Ride the High Country, which was a sort of farewell to Westerns along with Joel McCray in 1962, he retired in his 60s. He lived another 25 years, but he was just kind of sick of Hollywood or whatever. But before Ride the High Country in the 1950s, he made these movies with director Bud Boetticher. They made seven movies in three years and they are fascinating movies. They have a kind of minimalist style. They've even been called “existentialist westerns.” All seven movies: the shortest one is 72 minutes long and the longest one is 80 minutes long. So they're all this range and they were B pictures. They were shot fast and cheap, but they now are considered highly influential on the genre of the Western.
SVW: And it’s interesting to me to think of this as a B picture because it's so well done. It seems it felt would feel like to me an A picture except for its length.
DH: Yeah, but no, they shot these movies fast and cheap and other than Randolph Scott, there's no real, certainly at that time, big names. Although there are people we now know about, you know, Lee Marvin is in one, playing a villain of course. Richard Boone is in this one, the Tall T. So there people, I guess another actress, the actress in the tall T is Maureen O'Sullivan, who was a big actress. She played Jane in the Tarzan movies.
SVW: Which was probably her most well-known role.
DH: It is, so she was really more well-known when she was a young actress in the pre-code era and in the 30s. She's in The Thin Man. But yeah, by the 50s, she was past the peak of her career. And yeah, Randolph Scott was the big name. He was the box office attraction. But yes, these movies definitely mark a transition, right? You hadn't seen any of the Boetticher films before, but they have a definite different feeling to them than the classic Westerns, right?
SVW: Is this the first collaboration between the two?
DH: The second. The first one they did was called Seven Men From Now, which is also very good. And then...They did seven total, five of them are known as the Ran-Own Westerns. “Ran” for Randolph Scott, “Own” for Harry Joe Brown. They created a production company and Harry Joe Brown produced them all. Randolph Scott starred in them all and Bud Boetticher directed them all. And a writer named Burt Kennedy wrote most of them, certainly wrote the best ones. Let's talk about the Tall T. The Tall T... is this movie with Richard Boone is that we don't even want to really talk about the plot too much because but it involves captivity and escape and a sort of you know standoff between good and evil which is so common in westerns but his bad characters Richard Boone who later became a well-known TV western actor wasn't he the one in Have Gun Will Travel?
SVW: Yes.
DH: Yeah. So he was in a 60s series. But he's this sadistic and evil villain who's holding these people captive and has pretty much made it clear he's gonna murder them. And at the same time, he lives by the same code of honor, this sort of masculine code of honor that Randolph Scott lives by. And he talks about how he'd like to settle down and have his own place and has these longings for stability the same way that Randolph Scott does in the movie, and they sort of bond with each other. They agree that Maureen O'Sullivan's husband is a coward and unworthy of her and is kind of abandoning her when they're in danger. They both agree that there's a certain way people should live, you know, and they seem to be bonding, although I think Scott's kind of manipulating him, don't you think?
SVW: I think that Scott's just trying to stay alive. But he's not holding anything back in terms of pointing out, basically he points out to him, yeah, we’re kind of the same except you make the wrong decisions. You take the wrong action.
DH: Right. Because again, it comes down to right and wrong. And Scott is, although they may have certain similar outlooks in life, they get their different ways. It’s wonderful. Yeah, because at one point, when Boone says, “I want to have my own place. I want to settle down.” And Scott says, “you think you're going to get it this way?” That one thing about Randolph Scott is he has this incredible presence as a star, don't you think?
SVW: Very much so.
DH: Yeah, he's not the sort of idealized hero that you find with a John Wayne, bigger than life. He's plain spoken like them. And there are things that are just like the classic Westerns. In this movie, when he has the opportunity to essentially get the bad guy, Maureen O'Sullivan's saying, well, do you have to? And he says, “some things a man can't ride around,” which sounds exactly like, we've heard it in lots of westerns, but it's in stagecoach, John Wayne tells Claire Trevor when he tells her he has to go seek vengeance for his brother's killing, “there's some things a man can't ride away from.” So in that sense, you know, it’s like the classic westerns, but his voice and then the writing, so often, this is in more than one, this is in many of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns, he'll answer something that he doesn't agree with with a question. Someone will say that in one movie someone says to him, “you got no call to do this” and he says, “don't I?” And there's another one where someone like Richard Boone who's doing something bad says, “well, sometimes you don't have a choice.” And Randolph Scott says, “don't you?” And in those those little moments, it's like this gravitas, there's the way whole moral weight of his character is clear.
SVW: Now, not these particular lines, but I was I was struck when I saw the movie first, and then I went and read the Leonard short story. And there's a lot of the the dialogue is taken directly from the short story.
DH: Oh, yeah?
SVW: A lot of the dialogue and what it kind of came out with the the supporting villainous characters would say something. in terms of, you know, to the Richard Boone character. And they were right out of the story.
DH: Yeah, it makes you wonder, you know, where I don't know anything about the writer Burt Kennedy, who wrote several of these westerns, you know, that he wrote Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, one called Ride Lonesome, which is terrific, and I think was a very big influence. Sergio Leone on his Good, Bad, and the Ugly movies, it even has Lee Van Cleef. So there's a lot of that. But yeah, it makes me wonder where the writing ideas came from because this is one of the first ones and this sort of rhetorical style, the way that Randolph Scott talks is in lots of them.
SVW: Well, the interesting thing in going and looking at online after both reading and seeing the movie, reading the short story, Elmore Leonard was not happy with the adaptation of the story to the film, which kind of, I'd like to ask him, I would like to ask him why if he was still alive because the only thing that's different, the movie follows the story except for in a few slight differences in terms of the main part of the plot exactly. The only thing that's different is there's about a 15-minute prelude that's tacked on. Everything that happens prior to the introduction of the main character and the villains. Once the hero meets the villains, the film basically plays out just like the short story.
DH: Yeah, it's hard to say why a writer likes or doesn't like a movie adaptation. So what is it, you know, maybe we should talk a little bit. What is it about these movies that make them sort of existentialist and taking a different darker view of the West that makes in this sort of transition between the 40s, the classic Westerns of the 30s and 40s and the silent era, to what eventually becomes the revisionist westerns, the anti-westerns of the 60s and 70s. They are stark and desolate. These movies were shot in the eastern Sierras in a place called the Alabama Hills near Mount Whitney. And almost all of them are shot there. And it's almost like, it reminds you a little bit of how John Ford shot all these movies in Monument Valley. But where Monument Valley is sort of epic and awe-inspiring, these movies are just very arid and deserted and feels harsher and more desolate, you know? And that echoes what the plots are like. So almost every movie, one of these movies, there's some definite exceptions, but of these seven movies that Bud Boetticher directed with Randolph Scott, almost everyone starts with Randolph Scott riding his horse alone through one of these deserted landscapes. And they almost always end with Randolph Scott returning on his horse alone into the life of loneliness, which does remind you of like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, which is again a 50s Western. It's part of John Ford's transition to a different darker kind of Western. Or if you know Once Upon a Time in the West, harmonica at the end, rides off. And, you know, the conflict has been resolved. The hero may have triumphed, but he still seems like a man without a place to have roots. He's a wanderer. And certainly, Sergio Leone with his movies with Clint Eastwood and Once Upon a Time in the West and other Westerns pick up on that.
SVW: There's also sort of an abruptness to all of the brutality and violence, even though Westerns were violent before, obviously, but there's something about the way that the villains are treating people in this movie that's pretty stark.
DH: Yeah, so it takes away all the sort of ceremony and, you know, if there's a gunfight or something, you know, the music, they stand at the opposite ends of the street and the music swells up and shot, reverse shot between them and it's building it up. It's more like just, oh, there's no...nothing glamorous at all about it.
SVW: Yeah, there's no quick draw, you know, dueling in the streets here.
DH: No, no, there's a little of that in some of the movie, in some of the Boetticher/Scott movies, but not in the same way.
SVW: Not in this film, The Tall T.
DH: No. I mean, this movie could be like an urban drama even, you know. It's really just about human greed and right and wrong. Another thing that is really interesting to look at, think about this, making seven movies together in three years. And these are movies, you know, on location out in the West, in the Sierras. It's not like they just set up in a studio the old way. They had these very fast shooting schedules, but they made seven of them in three years. And they made other movies too in the same period. It reminds me, you know, sometimes there can be a great artistic partnership. And in a particular time and place and...that leads to a unique body of work that is just almost in and of itself an interesting thing to look at. So you've got this writer, this director, this star, and it reminds me of a few. We talked about Preston Sturgis, who made seven screwball comedies in four years. Seven of the greatest screwball comedies ever made. Certainly the greatest group by one writer, director ever in the 40s. Right before this one, there was Anthony Mann making five Westerns. These were A pictures starring James Stewart. This was the early 50s, so they had to have been an influence on this. The two of them got together and they made five Westerns in like five years. And then we did a show on Val Luton. That's another example. The producer of Val Luton who made these horror films for RKO, like I Walked with a Zombie, The Cat People, et cetera. They made. made nine horror films in four years.
SVW: And the last time that I revisited Val Luton and actually saw some of the films for the first time, I watched one every night for about a week and it was an amazing experience. It certainly makes me want to visit these Randolph Scott collaborations.
DH: I'm certainly no expert on art or the artistic process, but often, you know, you can look at an artist, say a painter, and there's all these great paintings you associate with them. And then sometimes they're a body of work throughout their life, but sometimes their greatest work was done in a short period of time. And it seems like in movies, there's a certain situation that can come up with certain, know, because movies are very much, even though we think of this as there's an auteur here, Bud Boetticher, it's a collaboration. It's several artists coming together to make something like this.
SVW: And cribbing from Martin Scorsese, who he says that this collective, body of work in a short time between the director and the star basically are one picture with different stories.
DH: You could almost see it like that, especially since they're all in the same location, they’re, you know, the same production company, they do have a very similar feel to them. And what's great about them, I just, for this, to do this show, I hadn’t watched any of them in a long time. So we're talking about the tall T, but I watched four others too. So in watching these five, at first, sometimes you're going, oh, here's the formula again, you know, it's the same, and then it'll, especially in the last act, know, boy, Ride Lonesome has got an incredible surprise and flips the script on you. And what's great too is, you know, a couple times I paused my DVD player and I'm like, oh, you know, I gotta take a break. And I look at it and I'm like, wait, there's only eight minutes left. And they don't feel like a TV episode, do they? Like The Tall T feels like a full movie.
SVW: It feels like a full movie, as I mentioned earlier. It feels like an A picture to me.
DH: Yeah. But they do it, all these movies, they did them in 75 minutes.
SVW: Fantastic. Okay Scott, thanks for talking.
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