LGM Film Club, Part 216: Ride Lonesome

Went back to the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott trough last night to check out 1959’s Ride Lonesome. May watch another of their collaborations tonight. What better way to spend an evening? One of the things that makes the Boetticher films work that I did not talk about the other day is that the bad guys are pretty interesting. Well, not the Indian bad guys, who are just the stereotypes all too common during this era and primarily exist for our heroes to shoot. But the white ones sure are. In Ride Lonesome, Randolph Scott plays his typically not very interesting stoic western character, in this case a bounty hunter bringing a bad guy to town to hang, though Scott also has another agenda. He runs into a couple of other bad men. Like in Comanche Station though, these guys actually are deeply complex characters and provide the film its real meaning. James Coburn plays one of them, though he’s played as kind of dumb. But Pernell Roberts’ character is a quite multifaceted character and in the end, it’s his story that keeps the film moving. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.