The Tall T

This starts out pretty dismal.  For the first 15-20 minutes, you think you’re going to get a featherweight western with the usual tropes.  But once the pivotal event (a hold-up turned kidnapping) occurs, it becomes much darker.  Boetticher strips it down to a kind of a bare essence, waving off the goofiness of those early scenes.  What’s left is a power play of personality types.  Each man has his own code, and survival depends on your ability to assess the other’s nature and exploit it to your advantage, while staying true to your own.

Randolph Scott likewise overcomes the cheese of the opening and stands tall as a cool-under-pressure, intelligent hero, aware of his shortcomings but willing to work around them.  Richard Boone is also really interesting as the main villain, his admiration of Scott not getting in the way of his nefarious ambition.  The rest of the cast are not quite as impressive.  Maureen O’Sullivan doesn’t have much to work with, and doesn’t make much of the little she’s given.  Skip Homeier and Henry Silva (“Chink”? seriously?) are vaguely entertaining as Boone’s trigger men, as is John Hubbard as a real sleazebag, but nothing truly memorable.

Maybe I’ve just developed a greater tolerance for westerns, but I enjoyed this more than the more widely acclaimed Ride Lonesome.  Except for the rough start, it’s a really engaging story with a compelling starkness to it.  The color looks quite nice and there’s an excellent sense of framing to it.  On the whole it’s a little too “standard” to rank among my favorite westerns, but it’s a fun watch, and a quick, easy one at that.  Rating: Good

IMDb