Ride Lonesome

By Kirk Ellis

Ride Lonesome, the fifth film in the “Ranown cycle,” is both the best and most representative of the whole cycle, which has been called “the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking.” Director Bud Boetticher captures the alienation and loneliness of an America faced with the Cold War and the daily threat of nuclear annihilation. Shot in seventeen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism.

Veteran screenwriter Kirk Ellis brilliantly unpacks the themes, narrative, visual language, and editing in this seminal film. In Ride Lonesome he not only shows how this one film embodies a turning point for the Western, but he also explores the unique vision and contributions of director Boetticher and his writing partner Burt Kennedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826364623

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Ben Stride, Matt Brennan, Ben Brigade, and Jeff Cody

Loners. Drifters. Men bent on vengeance. Laconic in manner, economical in gesture, slow to anger but deadly when provoked. Each man an endlessly reflecting mirror image of the other. All played with stoic gravitas by Randolph Scott, a longtime marquee name then in the twilight of his career, in a remarkable and influential series of B Westerns made in the late 1950s that have come to be known (somewhat misleadingly) as the Ranown cycle, so-called for the production partnership of star Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown.

As generally defined by critics and scholars, the Ranown cycle encompasses six films: Seven Men from Now (1956), made under the auspices of John Wayne’s Batjac Productions and released by Warner Bros., and five Columbia Pictures entries: The Tall T and Decision at Sundown (both 1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Directed by Budd Boetticher and largely written by Burt Kennedy, the films recast the traditional Western in a sparsely populated, existential landscape suited to the atomic times, at once tied to the classical tradition that preceded them and anticipating the genre disruptions of the sixties and seventies.

Boetticher’s reputation as a journeyman director was greatly enhanced among European auteurs for this handful of efficient, unpretentious pictures, made with a regular circle of collaborators. The Ranown films, observed British critic Mike Dibb, marked one of those rare moments when the right group of people managed to come together at the right time and place. The ground rules were set, but, exploiting rather than resisting the limitations, Budd and Co. found an unusual degree of harmony and freedom. ¹ Together they achieved something utterly unique for Westerns of the time. Using a word frequently employed to describe the Ranown aesthetic, Seattle Times film critic and writer Sean Axmaker, whose interviews with Boetticher from 1988 to 1992 comprise an invaluable record of the director’s modus operandi, singles out the quality of grace [that] permeates these films, not merely of visual style … but a respect for the friendships that can never be and the world that hammers characters on the anvil of the terrain.²

Marked by echoes of character, theme, and even dialogue from film to film, the Ranown series reached its apotheosis in Ride Lonesome, one of the starkest, leanest, and most unrelenting films in any genre of the period.

The movie’s plot is characteristically simple. Bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Scott), en route to the town of Santa Cruz with his wanted-for-murder prisoner Billy John (James Best), is waylaid at a remote stagecoach relay station by charismatic outlaw Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts, soon destined for Bonanza) and Boone’s lanky partner Wid (James Coburn in his film debut). Boone and Wid seek to steal Billy from Brigade and deliver him to authorities themselves, taking advantage of an amnesty offered for Billy’s capture. Together with the stationmaster’s widow, Carrie Lane (played by Karen Steele, Boetticher’s paramour at the time), the wary opponents make their way to Santa Cruz. Meanwhile, the party is trailed by Billy’s brother Frank (Lee van Cleef) and his gang. As the journey progresses, it becomes evident that Brigade’s real quarry isn’t Billy—it’s Frank, whom Brigade once rode in for murder as sheriff of Santa Cruz. Brigade faces off against Frank in a circular clearing dominated by a skeletal, cruciform hangtree, whose branches harbor a terrible secret known only to Brigade. The movie ends with one of the most extraordinary shots in any Western: Brigade standing stone-still as flames consume the hanging tree, black smoke swirling heavenward.

Running a tight seventy-three minutes, Ride Lonesome imbues this prototypical story with elemental force. As the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult—inconceivable, really—to imagine a world existing beyond the characters themselves; civilization is always over the next rise, unseen and unattainable. Boetticher and Kennedy turn traditional Western tropes into rituals of reenactment and revenge. It’s no coincidence that the final killing ground resembles a bullring. Boetticher himself was a professional bullfighter. His entrée to Hollywood came as technical adviser for Rouben Mamoulian’s 1941 remake of Blood and Sand, and he saw the Western in distinctly tauromachian terms. Frequently compared to Ernest Hemingway (even by the director himself—on more than one occasion), Boetticher shares with the author of The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls the same uninflected style and unrepentant masculinity. In Ride Lonesome, more than any other of the Ranown films, Boetticher, Kennedy, and their stock company capture the dislocation and loneliness of an America confronting the uncertainties of the Cold War and the daily threat of nuclear annihilation. B pictures they may be, but they’re also perfectly attuned time capsules.

The West of Ride Lonesome is one of limited options and predetermined outcomes. Some things a man can’t ride around is a line spoken by more than one character in more than one Ranown film. Boetticher’s and Kennedy’s protagonists are hollowed-out men, men who suffered a long-ago hurt from which they can never recover, men trapped by their own unrelenting codes of conduct—more spirits than men. The bravura opening crane shot of Ride Lonesome, in which Brigade materializes out of the preternatural rock landscape of Lone Pine, California, makes the notion plain. Visually and aesthetically, Ride Lonesome more than justifies New York Times critic Richard T. Jameson’s assessment of the Ranown cycle as the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking (rivaled only by Val Lewton’s 1940s horror films for RKO).³ Shot in a mere thirteen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism, at once epic and austere.

My passion for the film stems from a decade-long association with Budd Boetticher that began while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/Television (now known by the highfalutin moniker USC School of Cinematic Arts). In the summer of 1982, as president of the department’s film society, I curated one of the first comprehensive Boetticher retrospectives in the United States. Burt Kennedy contributed his memories in a series of question-and-answer sessions, as did James Coburn and L. Q. Jones. A visibly nervous Peter Bogdanovich ("Is Budd really here?") moderated the closing-night discussion. That initial encounter blossomed into a mentor–disciple relationship and ultimately a professional partnership. In 1985 I served as one of the producers on Budd’s final film, the semi-documentary My Kingdom For …, an account of his post-Hollywood life as a breeder of exceptional Spanish Andalusian and Portuguese Lusitano horses. My colleague and fellow Boetticher aficionado Robert Nott has called this hard-to-see film, partly shot by an ex-student crew, a film made by Boetticher about Boetticher.⁴ In the succeeding years, I struggled to find financing and distribution for several of Budd’s late passion projects: the picaresque cowpoke dramedy When There’s Sumpthin’ to Do, the screen adaptation of his published autobiography When in Disgrace (slated to star Burt Reynolds, then Kurt Russell), and his sweeping, Spanish-set romance A Horse for Mr. Barnum. Our association allowed rare insight into not only the man’s considerable talent but also what the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington termed a rough, combative, sometimes obsessive personality [that] belied his genial manner and inner sensitivity.⁵

Through Budd, I came to know Burt Kennedy, whose co-creatorship of the Ranown cycle has yet to receive its proper due. Over the course of our friendship, which outlasted my own rift with Budd (more on that later), Burt shared his recollections of those early years. During hundreds of hours spent in his memorabilia-laden backyard cabin office, Burt imparted his considerable wisdom as a seasoned veteran of the movie wars—advice I didn’t fully appreciate until my own career as a screenwriter of historical drama began a few years later. Burt’s four Ranown scripts—for Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station—represent a singular Western universe. As Martin Scorsese has rightly observed, the quartet of films plays as one extended movie…. It’s a variation of themes and ideas; one flows into the other.⁶ Both Burt and Budd were at their peak working together and never ascended to the same heights individually.

Near the beginning of Ride Lonesome, Brigade confronts his antagonist, Sam Boone, with a question that serves as an epigram for the entire Ranown cycle. A man needs a reason to ride this country, he declares in one of Kennedy’s most self-quoted lines of dialogue. You got a reason? Boone doesn’t have an answer—not much of one anyway. That’s the point of Ride Lonesome, the notion that makes the film so forward-looking. Reasons no longer exist. There is only the ritual. And every man is doomed to reenact the never-changing rites.

This is the story of how Burt Kennedy and Budd Boetticher came to Ride Lonesome together.

1. | A Man Can’t Be Too Careful in This Country

You’d never know from talking to him, but Burt Kennedy was a hero.

On September 3 for eight of the last nine years of his life, Kennedy celebrated an Annual 70th Birthday Party surrounded by family, friends, and colleagues at his expansive ranch-style home in Sherman Oaks, California. The guest list read as a Who’s Who of Western celebrities and character actors, all of whom had worked with Kennedy over more than three decades of directing feature films and television movies, including The War Wagon (1967) and Support Your Local Sheriff (1969). In any given year, Western royalty such as James Arness, Angie Dickinson, Ernest Borgnine, Clare Trevor, Fess Parker, Roddy McDowall, Marie Windsor, Jack Elam, Harry Morgan, Gene Evans, Denver Pyle, and Harry Carey Jr. would be among those gathered at poolside tables eating barbecue and helping themselves to the free-flowing drinks. Even more impressive were the testimonials—not from Hollywood but from Washington, DC, from which such military luminaries as Arizona senator John McCain and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell would fax their personal regards.¹

Burt Kennedy in his customary on-set attire. Like his later films, he was modest to a fault.

Like the taciturn characters he wrote for Randolph Scott in Ride Lonesome and his other Ranown films, Burt Kennedy kept a foundational part of his life deeply private—so private that it occupies less than a single line in his anecdotal autobiography, Hollywood Trail Boss. Only the Bronze Star, Silver Star, and Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster, designating exceptional military service and kept on private view in Kennedy’s office, hinted at the kind of backstory he resolutely refused to provide in his screenplays. On February 3, 1945, as a first lieutenant in the Fifth Cavalry Regiment of the US Army’s First Cavalry Division, Burt Kennedy helped liberate nearly four thousand civilian internees from the notorious Santo Tomas prisoner of war camp outside Manila, an expropriated Catholic university campus where occupying Japanese forces had confined all enemy noncombatants—the vast majority American men, women, and children—following the city’s abandonment by the US military in January 1942.²

For everything, then and later, Kennedy blamed Errol Flynn.

Nineteen-year-old Burton Raphael Kennedy of Muskegon, Michigan, volunteered for army service in early 1942, inspired by Raoul Walsh’s rabble-rousing version of the George Armstrong Custer story, They Died with Their Boots On (1941), which starred Flynn as the long-haired glory-seeker.³ The son of the Dancing Kennedys, next-to-last-act performers for the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, young Burton made his stage debut at age five and was a has-been at seven. Following a roaming adolescence after his parents’ divorce, Kennedy was destined for Michigan State University when Pearl Harbor intervened.⁴ With true movie kismet, the Flynn/Custer-stoked Kennedy underwent basic training at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan, and then graduated to six months as a squad leader at Fort Riley, Kansas (where his squad included future fashion designer Oleg Cassini), before transferring to the First Cavalry Division at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. We had horses for four months, then they took our horses away and made us infantry, Kennedy remembered.⁵ Despite its title, the First Cavalry was by now a fully motorized division with infantry units; Kennedy’s war would be fought mostly on foot.

Both the First Cavalry Division and the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, where Kennedy served as an officer, possessed a storied history that provided ample material for the former soldier’s future scripts and movies. Fifth Cavalry troopers had formed a Union honor guard at the Confederate surrender of Appomattox, ridden against the Sioux in the wake of Custer’s annihilation at the Little Bighorn, secured Puerto Rico for the United States in the Spanish-American War, and served under General John Black Jack Pershing in the 1917 punitive expedition against Pancho Villa. In World War II, Kennedy’s regiment formed the vanguard in General Douglas MacArthur’s 1943–1945 campaign to retake the Pacific. MacArthur’s retreat from the island of Corregidor in March 1942 had precipitated the Bataan Death March, and the vainglorious general defeated attempts by rival navy commander Admiral Chester E. Nimitz to bypass the Philippines and pursue a more direct path to Tokyo. [MacArthur] told the Filipinos, ‘I shall return,’ Kennedy wrote, and we used to say, ‘Why did he have to bring us with him?’⁶

The writer-director’s account of his service, full of the comical asides that marked his Westerns, obscures his rise through the ranks. Arriving with the Fifth Cavalry Regiment in Australia in July 1943, Kennedy was accepted into officer’s school at Camp Columbia in Brisbane, where he became one of 250 to graduate in a class of 850. It was really a tough school, he recalled. It was tough because when you graduated, they’d send you right up north to New Guinea, and some of the graduates were killed 48 hours after they got their commissions.⁷ Assigned to the heavy weapons outfit H Troop, in charge of a battery of water-cooled machine guns, First Lieutenant Kennedy saw action in the hard-fought Admiralty Islands campaign from February to May 1944. That October, Kennedy was among the first wave of Fifth Cavalry troops to land on the beaches at Leyte Gulf, the opening salvo in MacArthur’s effort to end three years of Japanese occupation of the Philippine archipelago. Kennedy and his men beat MacArthur to the site of the general’s notorious walk-on-water return to the Philippines by two days.⁸

Following more than two months of furious combat on Leyte, the First Cavalry proceeded to Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands, destined to become the site of the most destructive campaign in the entire Pacific theater of war. The division landed without incident on January 27, 1945, and quickly assembled for the expected assault on the capital. MacArthur’s orders came down on January 30, 1945. Go to Manila! Go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, save your men, but get to Manila! Free the internees at Santo Tomas!⁹ The prison camp had become an Alamo-like rallying cry for MacArthur and American forces. With every step that our soldiers took toward Santo Tomas University, the general recalled in his memoirs, the Japanese soldiers guarding them had become more and more sadistic. I knew that many of these half-starved and ill-treated people would die unless we rescued them promptly. The thought of their destruction with deliverance so near was deeply repellent to me.¹⁰

According to Santo Tomas survivor Tom Crosby, then an eleven-year-old boy, a kill order had already been given to camp administrators by the Japanese high command.¹¹ Crosby recalled large fuel drums being rolled into the main building at Santo Tomas and placed under stairwells as booby traps. Conditions for internees, crowded into former classrooms and spread out into shantytowns in the courtyards, had reached an appalling nadir by early 1945. Rations had been restricted to two bowls of unhusked, watered-down rice, reducing inmates to boiling leather soles for broth. Beriberi ran rampant among adults and children alike; the disease defeated the efforts of the Angels of Bataan, sixty-four imprisoned US Army and US Navy nurses captured at Corregidor when they remained behind to tend to American wounded.¹²

Stationed at a 30-mm machine gun on an amtank LVT, Kennedy occupied the forefront of the First Cavalry’s Flying Column, which penetrated deep into Japanese territory and achieved a one-hundred-mile dash across central Luzon in an astonishing sixty-six hours. Speed and surprise were of the essence: invading forces were expressly ordered to avoid lengthy engagements with the enemy and charge through pockets of resistance. At 8:40 p.m. on February 3, a Sherman tank of the Forty-Fourth Tank Battalion (named Battlin’ Basic) smashed through the wrought-iron compound gates and breached the high walls that surrounded Santo Tomas. Fifth Regiment troops poured in behind the armored column. The doors to the main building stood open. Ecstatic internees rushed out to greet their liberators. Kennedy and other cavalrymen were moved to tears by the prisoners’ skeletal condition and offered up their personal rations and candy bars.¹³

Unbeknownst to Kennedy and the cavalrymen, camp commandant Lieutenant Colonel Tashio Hayashi and sixty-five Japanese troops had fortified the campus’s Education Building, which still housed 276 captive men and boys. Japanese soldiers barricaded themselves inside with beds, tables, and chairs and used their hostages as shields.¹⁴ When initial surrender negotiations came to naught, a furious firefight broke out between the cavalrymen and Hayashi’s troops. Burt was shooting up at us, not knowing we were in there with the enemy, recalled survivor Crosby, who