'Westbound' vs. the other Scott/Boetticher films: review and comment
I finally got to see Westbound, the least known of the seven films that starred Randolph Scott and were directed by Budd Boetticher. A synopsis, and some comments (and any SPOILERS are flagged)....
Scott is good, as always, and it's nice seeing him play a Union officer (or ex-officer) instead of an ex-Reb, which is how he usually was cast, when the subject even came up. (He was a native Virginian.) The plot is pretty routine, Confederate sympathizers trying to stop shipment of Union gold from California, though oddly they don't seem to plan to try to get it to the South. What are they doing with it? A hazy question, never really answered. Scott is assigned back to his prewar job of managing the Overland Stage Co., to insure the gold gets through pro-southern areas of Colorado. (Were there any?) Whatever -- the film essentially is a series of back-and-forth chases between Scott and his men and the southern sympathizers, paid by town bigwig Andrew Duggan but really bossed around by cold villain Michael Pate. And to complicate matters, Duggan is married to Scott's old girlfriend (Virginia Mayo), while Scott befriends and hires a one-armed ex-Union soldier (Michael Dante), whose farm becomes the stage company's new HQ, which the veteran runs with his sexy wife, Karen Steele. Obviously, in the end, Randolph wins the day (this hardly constitutes a spoiler).
The good stuff includes a particularly nasty bunch of villains. Pate is really menacing, and his fellow louts are generally ruthless (though even they blanch at one particular act of mayhem, which Pate forces on them). Duggan, as a rich weakling who wants to control things short of murder, can't back up his words with force, but this isn't really developed, and even Pate doesn't turn on him as you'd expect.
Though she's second-billed after Scott, Virginia Mayo is clearly the second-rank leading lady in the movie, taking a back seat (in looks, age and screen time) to the gorgeous Karen Steele. Still, Miss Mayo gives it her all: she's quietly effective and looks better than she had in her recent films, or would again. Her career was on a downswing here and would never soar again, and her role here was little more than perfunctory. She's a welcome sight in a thankless part, though it must be said it would have been better had she not been shown dressed in a couple of 1950s nightgowns in a couple of her few scenes. She looks great, but the attire hardly fits the 1860s West.
Karen Steele was a veteran of Scott-Boetticher films by this time: she'd been the leading lady in Decision at Sundown (1957), and was again this same year (1959) in Ride Lonesome. Watch how Boetticher contrives to angle his cameras on Karen in each of these films -- having her walk, turn, stand or pose sideways, the better to get critical shots of her very prominent breasts, accentuated by a sensationally thin figure. She was a beautiful woman (she passed away in 1988 at only 56) and a good actress, but the strained efforts BB made at trying to show her off to maximum advantage for the men in the audience are almost comical at times. But Budd, undaunted, brought it off.
Michael Dante, as Steele's husband, is adequate, nothing more. The rest of the cast, veterans like Wally Brown and others, are good.
Many drawbacks, however. The script is generally weak, with often misplaced humor and events that many times jump back and forth abruptly from light to heavy. Characters' motivations and actions are often poorly handled and contradictory. David Buttolph's music score is too loud and often inappropriate to the action on the screen: the same theme repeats over and over and over every time we see a stagecoach -- a bouncy, jaunty tune that under limited circumstances might be okay but which is not only used every damn time we see a stage, but even when bad things are about to happen to that stage. Buttolph was a good composer but the music here is too often miscued or misused. And Westbound lacks the rough look of Scott's own films released through Columbia (the five of which are contained in the recent Sony box set, for some reason called The Films of Budd Boetticher, with no mention of Scott, though he was the producer as well as star). This movie has the glossy sheen of a typical late 50s Warner Bros. release, but the somewhat more ragged look of the "classic" Scott/Boetticher films is better and more authentic. This is true not only of the cinematography but the overall look of the film, its production design, costumes, etc. It's overlit and too modern in appearance, lacking the stark realism inherent in the ruggedness of Scott's other films with Boetticher. Even the characters seem too stock, lacking the raw edge of those in the other films. This film looks like a movie, rather than hard action shot outdoors, if you understand me.
Still, a few surprises...AND HERE BE SPOILERS....
What happens to Michael Dante. Now, this was a surprise. The movie spends its first half setting you up for an expected happy ending with this guy, learning to live and work with just one arm, his wife glad to have him back home. And then -- he's shot. Dead. (Eventually -- he lingers off-screen, to no point, for a day.) Wow. Totally unexpected, and shocking. And yet it's a measure of this character's ineffective presence in the film that even his death, when it finally comes, doesn't much affect the audience, and by the end of the picture he's hardly remembered, let alone missed. Which brings us to...
Karen Steele vs. Virginia Mayo. Here again, the script seems to be heading for familiar territory: Andrew Duggan gets killed along with the other baddies, Karen and her husband settle down, Randolph gets back his old flame, Virginia. Nope. As mentioned, the one-armed boy gets blown away. More surprisingly, after the bad guys are in fact all bumped off, and Andrew Duggan asks Scott to take care of his wife (comically, Scott's holding him in his arms as you might expect him to do with Virginia), Scott reassures Duggan that he will indeed look after Mayo. Which he does -- by looking after her as he sends her back East on the now-running stage. Real permanent like. (And she plays a copperhead too -- a pro-southern northerner. Bet she'll be welcome back in the East.) So much for Virginia. But is Randolph Scott bereft of female companionship? Nah-ah. Her husband's been in the ground all of two or three days but Karen's ready to move on, or up. There she is, leaning very low out the window (before standing up and striding juttingly toward the front door at her best camera angle), watching RS as he rides up with the stage. She watches apprehensively as Scott bids adieu to Mayo, and her sense of relief when the stage pulls away and she learns that Virginia's disappearing for good is palpable. She'll continue running the station, Scott says he'll be back, she offers to show him her breasts if he comes back soon, he tips his hat and says he will be back soon, and as he rides away she waves and utters softly, "Soon." Okay, I made that part about her breasts up, but she does say something mildly enticing and Randy gets her drift. But seriously, what's notable about this is that it's the last time Randolph ever got the girl in a movie -- in fact, a hallmark of the Scott/Boetticher westerns was that Randolph usually didn't get the girl, though he seems on track to do so in The Tall T and Seven Men From Now. But the whole situation is pretty surprising, and happily so -- at least the script took a few unexpected turns. Karen trades a slightly dull "half-man" (she really punches out the slobs picking on her husband early on) for a 61-year-old former gay guy with money. Nifty.
END SPOILERS
Overall, this is indeed the least of the seven S/B collaborations. A few unexpected plot developments help, the cast is capable and Pate is a great bad guy, but this is still the most conventional, least developed story of all their films together. It's not surprising this film was the least favorite of their seven works for the two men themselves. Not bad, but disappointingly routine; a movie that's kind of just there, with little of the idiosyncracies, style or toughness that characterize their output for Columbia (or their first film, Seven Men From Now, also for Warner). Were it not for this being a Scott film directed by Boetticher -- and so a part, if the least part, of their storied partnership -- it would be largely forgotten. As it is, through no fault or particular quality of its own, Westbound is destined to be the caboose on the Scott-Boetticher train; and as such, it deserves a DVD release, to help complete the Scott -- and Scott-Boetticher -- western oeuvre. How 'bout it, WB?