2023 Saturdays with the Stars Recap

Yesterday we finished up our month with Kris Kristofferson, and today, we are putting the final cap on our "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood" season.  I will totally own this, our fifth season, is probably my favorite season we've done since Season 2 (when we tackled sex symbols), and maybe my favorite ever.  I knew going into this that westerns have always been one of my favorite genres, and getting to see such a wide array, including a lot of hidden gems that have been on the To Do list for a while, was an absolute treat.  But I didn't realize how many of the films would end up being downright classics, from Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy to some of the gorgeous westerns that Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart, there are movies on this list that have quickly catapulted to my favorite westerns list, and I have even added a few already to my home collection.

The biggest thing that excited me, though, was how this really ended up being the tale of Hollywood, starting with The Big Trail and ending with Heaven's Gate, and how much of Classical & New Hollywood came in-between.  This has been the case in all of our seasons, but seeing it through the most American of genres, the western, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time.  We'll get into our sixth season, where we will be "Crowning America's Sweethearts," on Saturday, but one last time, take a look at some of the best from this season of "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood."

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Gary Cooper, Man of the West

February: James Stewart, The Naked Spur

March: Gregory Peck, The Gunfighter

April: Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

May: Randolph Scott, Ride the High Country

June: Yul Brynner, Westworld

July: John Wayne, The Shootist

August: Franco Nero, Querelle

September: Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

October: Robert Redford, Barefoot in the Park

November: Sam Elliott, Molly and Lawless John

December: Kris Kristofferson, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Marlene Dietrich

Clint Eastwood

Robert Redford

James Stewart

John Wayne

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

James Stewart, The Man from Laramie

James Stewart, The Naked Spur

John Wayne, The Shootist

12 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Big Country

Destry Rides Again

A Fistful of Dollars

For a Few Dollars More

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

High Plains Drifter

The Naked Spur

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Ride the High Country

Westworld

Winchester 73

Witness for the Prosecution

Top 12 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Ellen Burstyn, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Dan Duryea, Winchester 73

Mariette Hartley, Ride the High Country

Burl Ives, The Big Country

Katy Jurado, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Diane Ladd, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Elsa Lanchester, Witness for the Prosecution

Charles Laughton, Witness for the Prosecution

Una O'Connor, Witness for the Prosecution

Lee van Cleef, For a Few Dollars More

Lee van Cleef, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ride the High Country (1962)

Film: Ride the High Country (1962)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Mariette Hartley, Ron Starr, Edgar Buchanan

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout this month, we've tried a different approach to the career of Randolph Scott, discussing much of his early career, while the actual films we've watched have been exclusively the iconic Budd Boetticher movies that Scott made late in his career, generally considered to be some of the most important pictures of the actor's long stardom, and some of the signature westerns of the era.  We're going to finish this month looking beyond Scott's partnership with Boetticher with him working in another western (one of the only stars this year we'll devote entirely to westerns and no other genres) with his work in the film of another great western director, Sam Peckinpah, who seven years later would make his most famous film, The Wild Bunch, which would largely redefine the western genre by bringing true violence to a genre that had largely kept that offscreen.  Peckinpah's film would in many ways mark the end of the Classic Hollywood western, but in 1962 he was working within its framework with one of the genre's most important stars...a cowboy who was about to walk into the sunset.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about two former friends and partners who have lived in very different circumstances.  Steve Judd (McCrea) is an aging lawman, one who is clearly destined soon for retirement, but who is pretty reputable and is hired by a bank to transport gold to California.  He enlists the help of Gil Westrum (Scott), who is now a charlatan in a traveling act pretending to be a famous sharpshooter but who is really a carnival conman, who works with his hotheaded sidekick Heck Longtree (Starr).  It's pretty clear early on that Gil, despite his past friendship with Judd, wants to steal the gold for himself, and will do so in a double cross with Heck, but fate steps in when they hole up with a farmer and his daughter Elsa (Hartley), and Heck initially falls for Elsa, though after some romance he attempts to rape her (we'll get into it in a second, but he's stopped by Gil & Judd) and she runs off to the arms of a local ruffian who marries her, but when she won't have sex with him right away on their wedding night, he passes out and her brothers then attempt to rape her, until Judd & Heck stop them and bring her back to her father.  While on the way, Gil attempts the double cross, but Heck has decided to abandon the plan, taking a prison sentence because he's seen the error of his ways.  Gil initially doesn't agree, and tries to escape, but knowing that the brothers will come back for Elsa, Heck, & Judd, he returns, and in one last stand he & Judd kill the brothers...but in the process, Judd dies.  Gil, now back to the side of justice, vows to Judd on the latter's deathbed that he will bring the gold to California and honor his commitment.

As we've seen throughout this year, one of my favorite motifs in westerns is "the one last ride" concept, and it works remarkably well here.  Scott & McCrea are both longtime figures in the western, and while I've talked this month about (headed into this month) my reluctance with Scott as a leading man, he does well here.  It helps that this is his final film (and what a way to go out) has gorgeous western skies & a lovely score.  The whole cast is good, though the best of the bunch is Mariette Hartley.  Hartley has a tricky part, playing a woman who has to be "in love" with two men she's pitting against each other, not realizing in both the cases the men are bad news & she's over-her-head.  It's nice that the film acknowledges the violence her character endures-this is not sugarcoated or romanticized, though it has to be said she clearly will "end up with" a reformed Heck at the end of the movie.  It's definitely further than you'd expect a film at the tail-end of the Hays Code to have gone with the subject matter.

Scott, as I mentioned, never worked in movies again after this, despite being alive for another 25 years.  He and his longtime wife Patricia retired after this, living off of the string of investments that Scott had made at the peak of his fame that had made him a fortune.  Scott would spend his retirement relatively uneventfully, getting involved in political fundraising for Ronald Reagan (Scott was an ardent Republican), golfing, attending church (he was an ardent supporter of Billy Graham's church), and about the only clear movie star thing he did was go to Dodgers games with his best friend Fred Astaire.  He died in 1987 at the age of 89.  Next month we're going to shift gears away from someone like Randolph Scott, whose career would become synonymous with westerns throughout his decades above the title card, and move to an actor who came onto Hollywood's scene in a splash in the mid-1950's in about every genre you can think of except for westerns...but by the end of his career this was where he would find his most consistent work.

Ride Lonesome (1959)

Film: Ride Lonesome (1959)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Karen Steele, Pernell Roberts, James Best, Lee van Cleef, James Coburn

Director: Budd Boetticher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout this month, we've watched two films (and a third today) from the storied partnership between our May star Randolph Scott and filmmaker Budd Boetticher, but we haven't actually talked about their partnership, until today.  By the late 1950's, Scott was still a hot commodity, though nowhere near as important as he was in the early 1950's, when he was a Top 10 box office draw.  His partnership with Boetticher happened by accident.  Boetticher, who had once studied to be a matador, had been working in Hollywood for over a decade as a director, most notably in the Robert Stack film Bullfighter and the Lady (for which Boetticher had been nominated for an Oscar), but had not really had much success, and was largely a for-hire director.  John Wayne had originally been offered the lead role in 7 Men from Now, but because he was making The Searchers, he had to turn it down and instead recommended Boetticher try making the film with Randolph Scott.  This set off a creative partnership between the two men that was moderately successful at the box office that spawned seven films (known as the "Ranown Cycle"), and with the possible exception of John Wayne & John Ford's collaborations, is the most-noted in the annals of classical Hollywood westerns.

(Spoilers Ahead) Today we're going to focus on one of the final films in the partnership, Ride Lonesome, which stars Scott as Ben Brigade, a bounty hunter who has captured Billy John (Best), the brother of a famed outlaw named Frank (Van Cleef).  As he's taking him into custody, they come across a way station, being run by Carrie Lane (Steele), a beautiful widow (she doesn't know it yet, but she's about to be a widow), who lives there waiting for her soon-to-be-dead husband.  Also there are two low-time crooks who want in on the Billy John capture, Sam Boone (Roberts) and his (rather stupid) sidekick Whit (Coburn).  As the film goes, we learn that Ben is really more after revenge, as Frank killed his wife by hanging her from a tree, a tree they happen across.  The movie ends with Billy John strung up by said tree, drawing Frank out, and allowing Ben to kill him.  He gives Billy John (and the reward) to Sam, Whit, & Carrie (whom we get the impression will fall for Sam as he's been lusting after her the whole movie, albeit with little reciprocation), telling them to change their ways, and the film ends with him burning the tree to the ground.

The Ranown Cycle is remarkable largely for the sheer, bleak artistry that it brings.  The films are beautifully-shot, almost exclusively outdoors & on location, and feature Scott in roughly the same, stoic character.  They all feature ominous music, characters with mixed moralities (though Scott is always the good guy), and a relatively dour ending, even the happy ones.  This was atypical for westerns at this point.  While The Searchers and Shane had a lot of commentary about the invincibility & heroic natures of the cowboy, by-and-large most films of this era showed uncomplicated lawmen or ranchers who fought the bad guys & got the pretty girl.  It wasn't until the 1960's with movies like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Wild Bunch that the clear violence & ambiguity of this genre would become the norm.  As a result, the Ranown Cycle stands apart as ahead-of-its-time in addition to being well-constructed.

This is true of Ride Lonesome.  In terms of the Boetticher/Scott films we saw this month, it's my least favorite.  It doesn't have enough tension between Roberts & Steele, and Van Cleef's Frank needs more scenes.  But it's still good.  I love the way that Scott's Ben feels so detached the entire movie, as if he gave up on life long ago, and will surely disappear into oblivion at the end of this film.  It's the one movie that I've seen of him this month where it's very obvious he's not ending up in a resolved place after this (likely suicide or riding off into increasingly dangerous situations that will result in him joining his dead wife).  I wish that we were maybe a minute or two later in the Hays Code era so that he could say this out-loud, indicate he's beyond redemption, but alas...it's just implied.

The Tall T (1957)

Film: The Tall T (1957)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Richard Boone, Maureen O'Sullivan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Skip Homeier, Henry Silva, John Hubbard

Director: Budd Boetticher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Two weeks ago (I'm aware we missed last week-we'll catch up in the next week so that Scott gets a full slate of Saturday's, don't worry), Randolph Scott was becoming a star in B-Westerns, primarily those based on the novels of Zane Grey.  This week, we're going to discuss Scott's career as an A-Grade actor.  By the mid-1930's, Scott was a bankable star at Paramount, getting put in important films of the day with top leading actresses as diverse as Irene Dunne, Mae West, Shirley Temple, and Joan Bennett.  He was nearly cast as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, but by the 1940's he was done at Paramount and wanted to try something new at other studios, including Fox and his old stomping grounds of RKO, where he made the 1940 hit romantic-comedy My Favorite Wife with the actor that Scott would be most associated with in modern pop culture: Cary Grant.

Though both men were married to multiple women in their lives, if you bring up Randolph Scott's name, you're probably going to hear quite a bit of speculation about his personal life, specifically in relation to his longtime friendship with Grant.  The two lived together in Malibu in the early 1930's (they made the film Hot Saturday together in 1932) & remained roommates well into both of the men being rich enough to live apart (they were still in the same house as late as 1944 when both were two of the most bankable names in Hollywood).  It has been long-rumored (though denied by both men's families) that the two were lovers, which several openly queer men who were contemporaries of the two (including fashion critic Richard Blackwell) have alleged.  No one can say what's true here (they could've just been pals, but that's a long time to live with a guy you don't need to), but if you're going to talk about Randolph Scott, you can't ignore the Cary Grant of it all.

(Spoilers Ahead) As I mentioned in our first article, we're not matching up our films with the discussion of Randolph Scott's career (i.e. no Cary Grant movies today), but instead continuing into his partnership with Budd Boetticher.  Today we are focusing on The Tall T, where Scott plays a ranchman named Pat Brennan, who takes a job escorting a newly-wed couple (O'Sullivan & Hubbard), the wife of whom, Doretta, is the daughter of the richest man in the county.  When they're stood up by a gang of stagecoach robbers, Doretta & Pat must work together to get away from the men, demanding ransom for Doretta's return...even though they have every intention to kill them both.

This is another great pairing between Scott & Boetticher (call me a convert on Scott's taste in scripts even if not on his acting late in his career).  This is one of the better performances we got from the lanky actor this month, as he plays Patt less as an archetypical cowboy who is marbled in fortitude, and instead as a flesh-and-blood man.  There's a moment where he's staring death in the eye, and the villain asks if he's afraid, and instead of some sort of bravado, he says "yes," an acknowledgement that self-preservation doesn't disappear when you just want to live.

The movie, appropriately for our conversation about Scott & Grant, is rife with homoerotic undertones.  O'Sullivan gets the only major role for an actress in the cast, and she's not implied to be a great beauty.  Instead the bandits all kind of have a type of lust for one another, particularly Richard Boone's Usher and Henry Silva's Chink, heavily flirting with Scott's Brennan...who's also a "confirmed bachelor."  The conversations between the three men are drowning in Celluloid Closet double talk, not the first time we've run into such a situation this year (The Gunfighter had a lot of that too when we discussed Gregory Peck), but definitely something new in Boetticher's films with Scott.

7 Men from Now (1956)

Film: 7 Men from Now (1956)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed

Director: Budd Boetticher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in the kickoff to this month, we're going to be doing something unusual this month for Randolph Scott's career.  While normally we would watch a movie to match the era that we're discussing, with Randolph Scott, we're actually going to focus our viewings on a specific era, with three of the seven films that he made with Budd Boetticher, generally considered to be the most important films of his career.  We are going to discuss that partnership more in-depth in the third week of this month, but today, we'll kick off and discuss Scott's career from its beginning.  Scott got his start doing stage work at the Pasadena Playhouse, which led to a long-term star contract with Paramount.  Tall & handsome, he was made for the movies, and westerns quickly became his calling.  The earliest part of Scott's career was actually focusing on the novels of Zane Grey, who in the early 1900's was one of the bestselling novelists, and along with Louis L'Amour, was one of the most important western novelists of the 20th Century.  At the time, Scott made ten Zane Grey adaptations in short order for Paramount, and while these didn't get him into A-List stardom (he'll hit that next weekend), they did make him a notable in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) We're now going to shift over to 7 Men from Now, which was the first film that Boetticher & Scott made together, and they only did so because John Wayne was busy.  The movie is about Ben Stride (Scott), the former sheriff of a western town called Silver Springs, who comes across a young couple named John & Anne Greer (Reed & Russell) who are stuck in the mud.  After he pulls them out, they insist he join them along the trail, as they head to a town called Flora Vista, which we soon learn is where a group of men are holed up after a Wells Fargo robbery.  It turns out that these men killed Ben Stride's wife, where she worked as a clerk to make money after Stride refused to become a deputy after he lost the sheriff's election.  Along the way, the three meet up with Bill Masters (Marvin), an old nemesis of Stride's from Silver Springs, who has his eye set on both the Wells Fargo box and Anne Greer.  As the film progresses, in a surprisingly good twist for a western of this era (I didn't see it coming), John Greer turns out to be an unknowing accomplice of the "7 men" having the Wells Fargo box in his wagon the whole time.  This sets up a showdown, one from which only Stride & Anne are left standing.

The movie, as I mentioned, was originally intended for John Wayne (who was busy making The Searchers), and as a result Wayne recommended Scott, his costar from The Spoilers which we talked about last month.  Wayne is a much better actor than Scott, who even in his best films rarely equalled his more magnetic costars, and this is true in 7 Men from Now, where Lee Marvin knocks Scott off of the screen every time he enters as a dastardly, lusty villain.  But what makes Boetticher's film work with Scott is that he really employs that stoicism.  If you have an actor who isn't expressive, make that part of the script, and here Scott plays this dignified relic of the west, someone who is already part of the myth, who doesn't need to prove himself because everyone else stands back in awe.  As a result, the two-dimensional approach Scott frequently made to his films becomes an asset to the picture itself.  We'll cover two more Boetticher collaborations between the two, and I'm curious if this will continue into those movies.

The film, though it's made on-the-cheap, has some great technical aspects as well.  William Clothier, who would eventually get a pair of Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography in the 1960's for some of the late-era westerns, uses a variety of inventive camera angles to make the film look like it's more expensive than it is, such creative care you wouldn't normally expect from a low-grade 1950's western.  And Henry Vars' music is wonderful.  I have a soft spot for the western dirge's that frequently opened movies like this in the 1950's, and the title song is appropriately solemn and over-the-top, but the music throughout really rings well.  Combine that with Marvin's excellent work as the villain, and you've got a strong picture, one that audiences at the time didn't really subscribe toward, but I'm glad critics eventually rescued.

Saturdays with the Stars: Randolph Scott

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we focused on Marlene Dietrich, an actress known for exotic roles in early sound films who found an unexpected career chapter in westerns.  This month, we're going to shift back to a cowboy, and an actor who is more traditionally synonymous with the western.  His handsomeness and southern dialect would make him well-suited for westerns, but despite plenty of success, he didn't find much payoff as an actor in the genre until near the end of his career, when a chance partnership with a visionary film director gave him a partnership in many ways similar to that of Dietrich & Josef von Sternberg, and would cement his legacy as a performer.  This month's star is Randolph Scott.

Born in Virginia but raised in North Carolina, Randolph Scott was the stereotypical definition of an all-American boy.  Excelling at sports, he would serve in World War I in active duty for the army in France, and afterward got work as an accountant, which he didn't enjoy.  His father was a business associate of Howard Hughes, who in the early 1920's was trying his hand at Hollywood, and cast Scott in one of his movies as an extra.  Eventually, he started working in bit parts on Poverty Row until a studio contract with Paramount led him into the first major break of his career, getting to star in a number of 'B' westerns based on novels by Zane Grey.

Randolph Scott is not an unusual choice for a series about western actors-he would throughout his career be defined by the genre.  He is, however, an unusual choice for me to pick for a series on this blog, as I don't really like Randolph Scott.  Many of the criticisms of his acting (too wooden, lifeless, and frequently lumbering in pictures) are criticisms that I share, and I normally wouldn't spend a month highlighting an actor just to rag on them.  But I have never seen any of the films that most cinephiles consider to be the best chapter of Randolph Scott's career, which he made right before his retirement in the early 1960's: the seven films that he made with Budd Boetticher.  Boetticher & Scott's partnership would later be known as "The Ranown cycle" and were low-budget westerns the two men made together that are considered to be masterpieces of the form by modern critics.  So this month we're going to do something we've never done before.  We will track Scott's carer like normal, talking about his decades of success at a variety of studios, as well as his friendship with Cary Grant which would invite nearly a century's worth of rumors about both men's sexuality.  But we will not do so while tracking films of the era we're discussing.  Instead, we will focus on three films that Scott & Boetticher made together, and one additional western Scott made at the tail-end of his career, talking through whether or not this creative partnership deserves the acclaim that it has long endured.

OVP: The Spoilers (1942)

Film: The Spoilers (1942)

Stars: Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Margaret Lindsay

Director: Ray Enright

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Marlene Dietrich: click here to learn more about Ms. Dietrich (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We have alluded a lot this month to Marlene Dietrich's legendary personal life.  Dietrich's sex life is arguably the most storied in terms of rumor & legend, and it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.  There are the affairs that pretty much everyone agrees happened (Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Yul Brynner) and those that are harder-to-track-down, but are too salacious not to at least mention (Frank Sinatra, Claudette Colbert, Joseph P. Kennedy...and his son President Kennedy).  Dietrich is inarguably the actor I most wish had had a tell-all interview with Oprah.  

One of the actors that pretty much everyone agrees that Dietrich had an affair with was John Wayne, with whom she made a series of pictures in the wake of the success of Destry Rides Again.  After the success of Destry, the studio was adamant to get her back into a western, and Dietrich (according to legend) selected Wayne as her leading man by telling producer Joe Pasternak "Mommy wants that for Christmas" after seeing Wayne for the first time in the Universal Pictures commissary.  The pair made three films together, two westerns (Seven Sinners and The Spoilers) and a rags-to-riches drama called Pittsburgh, and of the trio I thought The Spoilers looked the most interesting (and was an unsee part of the OVP) so we're going with that for our movie today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in Nome, Alaska, the movie is honestly kind of a mess of a plot, but I'll sort through it just to ground you.  Dietrich, as is her wont in this era, plays a saloon proprietor who has a heart of gold.  That heart belongs to Roy Glennister (Wayne), her old beau who is back from a trip to Europe with a more proper match, the judge's niece Helen (Lindsay).  However, the judge, like most in the film, is corrupt and Roy finds this out too late when he sides with him and the new gold commissioner Alex McNamara (Scott) rather than his old mining partner.  The partner forgives him, and (after donning blackface) they try to disguise themselves and steal back their money from the judge.  The movie ends with Randolph Scott punched in the face, and Dietrich left in Wayne's arms.

The movie doesn't work, and it's partially because the plot is absurd, and occasionally offensive.  Marietta Canty, who plays Dietrich's maid, is arguably the best-in-show in a stereotypical role, getting most of her one-liners out well, though she has to pretend that Wayne in blackface is an actual African-American man which...no.  Not acceptable.  Weirdly, despite real-life heat between them, there's no chemistry between the cavier-and-corn chips pairing of Dietrich & Wayne onscreen.

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for Art Direction, and I get it.  The beach landing sequence, in particular, is impressively shot and you almost feel like it's actually in an Alaskan shore, it gives off the aura of being properly cold.  But the real achievement is the costume design.  Dietrich's costumes are INSANE, with her wearing ornate choker necklaces and solid gold dresses in the middle of the 19th Century wilderness of the Alaskan Territory, looking like she'd just gotten done cleaning out Bergdorf Goodman.  Costume hadn't been created as a category yet by the Academy, but if it had, it'd have been easy to look beyond the historical inaccuracies & given this a nomination because Dietrich looks that good.

Hangman's Knot (1952)

Film: Hangman's Knot (1952)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Donna Reed, Claude Jarman, Jr., Frank Faylen, Lee Marvin

Director: Roy Huggins

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Today we're going to continue our journey with Donna Reed oddly with another western (this was not intentional, as this wasn't exactly a staple of Reed's filmography, but last week's first choice became unavailable so I had to pinch hit with Apache Trail to hit our deadline): Hangman's Knot.  It is filmed a decade after last week, and a lot happened between the two films.  For starters, Reed made during this time the most famous film of her career It's a Wonderful Life, which was nominated for multiple Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor, but wasn't something that Reed herself would gain a citation for despite it being probably the best role of her career.  This wasn't a hit for MGM, where she was under contract, though (It's a Wonderful Life was made when she was on loan to RKO), and the quality of her roles didn't improve, perhaps in part because the movie was not commercially successful at the time (it gained much of its popularity when it fell into public domain & became a Christmas classic in the years ahead).  Eventually, tired of playing the same wife & girlfriend roles, Reed moved to Columbia, and made a number of lower-tier films (and one classic we'll discuss next week which would become her other signature film role), one of which was Hangman's Knot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of confederate soldiers who find out in Nevada in 1865 that the war has ended (and they lost).  They also have intercepted a large amount of gold, which their commanding officer Major Matt Stewart (Scott) thinks they should give back to the Confederacy to help rebuild, while his compatriots, specifically Rolph Bainter (Marvin) thinks it would be better in his pocket.  As they are headed back, they come across both a group of bandits who are looking for the gold thieves (and more importantly, the gold), and a stagecoach that's carrying two people (unmarried), including a war nurse for the Union, Molly Hull (Reed).  They take the two, along with a station agent & his daughter, hostage while they hole up in a small building, trying to stave off the bandits who return & are looking for the gold.  This results in a showdown not just outside, but in, as Rolph wants to take the gold & Molly for himself, even though Matt Stewart has similar designs.  In the end, the bigger name on the marquee wins, and Matt Stewart gets the girl and brings the gold back to Virginia.

The movie is honestly pretty good.  I have always struggled with Randolph Scott as an actor (I have heard his movies with Budd Boetticher are what will change your mind about him, and they're on the list but I haven't gotten there yet), but you don't really need him to be good to enjoy this movie.  The Technicolor is beautiful, gorgeous vistas shot in the famed Corriganville Movie Ranch (most-noted for being where the John Ford classic Fort Apache was made).  Our Star of the Month Donna Reed doesn't get a lot to do, it's worth noting.  She kind of just serves as the love interest once again, not a lot different from her days at MGM, and I suspect looking into 1953 she was hoping for different (as we'll discuss next week, she both did & didn't get that).

The best performance in the movie is from Claude Jarman, Jr., who plays the young twink who has never killed a man despite being in the war for years.  Jarman, who was a child star in the 1940's for MGM (he's best known as the boy in The Yearling), was making his first foray into adult film roles with Hangman's Knot, and he has a sensitivity here that stands out.  He wouldn't last as an adult star, though.  He'd make his final film role four years later is Disney's The Great Locomotive Chase, and would soon run the San Francisco International Film Festival and work behind-the-scenes in movies.  At the age of 88, he's one of the last living contract players from MGM in the 1940's.

OVP: Bombardier (1943)

Film: Bombardier (1943)

Stars: Pat O'Brien, Randolph Scott, Anne Shirley, Eddie Albert, Walter Reed, Robert Ryan

Director: Richard Wallace

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Yesterday I made the comment (while reviewing When Ladies Meet) that frequently films of the 1930's & 40's were some of the best when it came to actually putting major actresses in leading roles opposite each other, actually caring about the stories of women rather than just focusing on their relationships with men. That doesn't mean the era was completely impervious to movies that just focused on the stories of men, with women merely props that are there to be ogled (but even then are criticized for being a distraction).  This is sadly the case with Bombardier, a 1943 war picture where there is just one woman in a major role (Anne Shirley, one leg of a love triangle), but is more focused on the importance of bombardiers (the crew that would drop bombs) during World War II.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in 1941 (spoiler alert: Pearl Harbor is going to be mentioned), with two bombardiers in the US Army Air Corps, Major Chick Davis (O'Brien) and Captain Buck Oliver (Scott) at odds on how to handle a new class of recruits, taking different attitudes about the young men's readiness to be bombardiers.  They also are clearly in love with the same woman, Burt (Shirley) whose brother Tom (Albert) is one of the new cadets, but is afraid of flying.  The film continues with the men enduring hardship & accidents, including at one point Tom heroically saving another man in a sequence...only to as a result fall without a parachute to his death (more on that in a second).  The ending of the film (which at 99 minutes still feels long) has Buck taken prisoner by a group of Japanese soldiers, and sacrificing himself to destroy the Japanese camp, as he signals to the troops to bomb the encampment even though it will mean his death.

War films of this ilk are always a struggle for me.  For starters, films made in the 1940's tend to not be particularly sensitive in terms of the opponents during World War II, and the depiction of the Japanese enemies in the film is super offensive & stereotypical.  In addition, films of this era that focus solely on men have toxic masculinity issues.  Anne Shirley's Burt is simply a prize to be won between the men, a beautiful bauble that is there to cry & be flirted with, but not an actual person.  And the film kills off Eddie Albert's Tom (bravely, in easily the most jaw-dropping sequence in the movie), halfway through...but Eddie Albert was the only person keeping the film from being a total dirge, which it is for the second half of the movie.

The film was made in complete cooperation with the Air Force, and as a result the effects are kind of impressive, if relatively routine after a while.  They filmed on the Kirtland Army Air Base, and some of the film's photography is of actual fighter planes, and the film's bombings are realistic, though not quite what you'd expect from a movie of this era (though I though the trick photography in the scene with Albert trying to save his fellow airman, and then dying in the process, was genuinely frightening & well done).  I also have to knock off a point, though, for a throwaway moment where Pat O'Brien for some reason has to ward off a moth, which is clearly a visual light trick, and so bizarrely inconsequential to the plot I had to rewind to wonder if it was just a take that was done incorrectly.

Colt .45 (1950)

Film: Colt .45 (1950)
Stars: Randolph Scott, Ruth Roman, Zachary Scott, Lloyd Bridges, Alan Hale, Sr.
Director: Edwin L. Marin
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ruth Roman-click here to learn more about Ms. Roma (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

For film historians, when you think of Randolph Scott frequently collaborating with a film director, you think of his seven pictures in conjunction with Budd Boetticher, including movies like Seven Men from Now and Ride Lonesome which are considered classics of the western genre.  Scott, however, made a habit of working with the same directors over-and-over, and one of those men was Edwin L. Marin.  This was the sixth of nine films that the two men made together before Marin's death just under a year after the release of Colt .45.  Marin was one of those directors who simply stood as studio-for-hire being a contract player (but hardly what we'd consider an "auteur" like Boetticher would be considered among future historians), doing long stints at MGM, RKO, and at the end of his career, Warner Brothers.  Warner brought him in conjunction with Scott, and our star of the month, Ruth Roman, Colt .45's leading woman.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Steve Farrell (Randolph Scott), a gun salesman who is trying to sell the new Colt .45 repeating pistols to a local sheriff, when suddenly there's a breakout at the local jail with Jason Brett (Zachary Scott), getting out, shooting the sheriff, and then framing Farrell for the crime as he leaves town.  Farrell is locked up for a few months before the new sheriff (Hale) lets him out because he believes him to be innocent.  He vows revenge & to catch Brett, and sets off to steal back his two Colt .45 pistols.  Along the way, he makes the acquaintance of a woman on a carriage ride (in the middle of a gunfight, because this is a western) named Beth Donovan (Roman) who is married to a seemingly blackmailed man named Paul (Bridges), who it turns out is actually fine with working for Brett despite his wife's disgust for the man.  The same can be said for the new sheriff, who is also working in conjunction with Brett (apparently everyone's corrupt that isn't above-the-title), and the almost laughably just Farrell has to go about eventually bringing all three men to justice (though Brett kills Paul in a moment of treachery because we don't want the widow who's going to be hankering for Farrell to get together with the man who shot her husband).

The film is not particularly noteworthy today (it's the sort of forgettable western that's on at 2 in the afternoon on TCM on a Wednesday), but it's interesting to look at from a few curiosity angles.  For starters, the movie is entranced by the title guns.  There's a title card that feels like it was written by a modern-day Republican senator at the beginning of the movie where it says "A gun, like any other source of power, is a force for either good or evil, being neither in itself, but dependent upon those who possess it."  The movie itself tries to prove this by having the evil men (particularly Jason Brett) do ruthless, unspeakable things with the guns and ultimately has one meet his match, while the impossibly honorable Farrell is a worthy possessor of the guns.  The film's glorification of violence is seemingly in-line with the times (violence was always a main staple of the western, and this is no exception), but that title card makes it feel a bit more sadistic as a picture-are all of the people that were killed by Farrell deserving of death, and those that aren't killed by him not?  That Brett kills double-crossing Paul (Lloyd Bridges, dressed in a cowboy uniform that feels more at-home in West Hollywood than the Old West) makes the title card seem like Paul didn't have it coming...but if that's the case, is it appropriate that his wife gets scooped up by the hero anyway?

Roman is good in what could have been a throwaway part as the woman in the center of all of this.  I got the feeling she didn't do most of her riding stunts, but the ones she did were impressive, and she brings a sharp fire to her scenes in the movie, particularly the ones with Jason Brett.  In many ways she resembles Maureen O'Hara, though she doesn't get as good of writing as the redhead did in her John Ford westerns, in that she feels like she belongs in this old west even though the story just wants her to be gorgeous.  The movie actually finds time for her toward the end, and there are moments where she isn't just a damsel-in-distress, but actually putting herself in danger that feel (on a sliding scale) somewhat feminist.  This is the second western that we've seen from Roman so far this month, and we'll return to at least one more before the month's end (with one of her most significant films), but it's easy to see here what Warner saw in her coming out of The Window and how, with Randolph Scott clearly the star, why her celebrity faded almost as quickly as it arose since it's hard to become a fan of her in such an underwritten part.

OVP: Captain Kidd (1945)

Film: Captain Kidd (1945)
Stars: Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, Barbara Britton, John Carradine, Gilbert Roland
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Charles Laughton is one of the most unlikely of movie stars.  Portly, always, with a rough temper and consistently playing bad guys he is hardly what you'd have considered a fine choice to be one of the biggest headliners of the 1940's, but that's what happens sometimes-Hollywood gives the public what they want, and films starring Laughton is what came as a result of that.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is one of those many pictures that Laughton starred in in the 1940's (he would make twenty films during the decade), a historically inaccurate look at the life of William Kidd, a 17th Century pirate who was more famous than most and more ruthless to go along with it.  He manages to trick King William III to let him sail to India with a crew of pirates in order to bring a ship back from India.  The Indian Lord Fallsworth and his beautiful daughter Lady Anne (Britton) are taken aboard at this juncture, though Lord Fallsworth is soon murdered in an "accident" by Kidd, who then destroys the other ship, but wants to find a way to both bring back his loot from the beginning of the film (a treasure plundered from a ship called the Twelve Apostles) and also become a gentleman in the court of the king (seriously-the guy has mad social-climbing ambitions).

Thankfully for Lady Anne, who has found herself on a ship full of pirates ala Keira Knightley, she's got her own personal Orlando Bloom in the form of Randolph Scott (random thought: is there a better modern day analogy for Randolph Scott than to call him the 1940's Orlando Bloom?) as an undercover pirate who is out to avenge the death of his father, who was the captain of the Twelve Apostles.  Through some swashbuckling sword-fights and a smartly timed trip to shore, the two manage to escape Captain Kidd's clutches, incriminate him to the king, see Kidd hanged at the gallows, and then get married with a fleet of ships from the king as a wedding present.  Seriously-that's how the film ends.  It's the 1940's-what do you expect?

Honestly, the entire endeavor seems rather silly even if you disregard the gross historical inaccuracies (never mind that Kidd went back to New York, not to London before he was eventually hanged-the better question is how did Tower Bridge show up in one scene 200 years before it was actually built-was it time-traveling pirates...cause that's a movie I want to see?!?).  Laughton is always insanely watchable even if he's a giant fussbudget and a bit too worldly and proper to be believable as a pirate.  I've always found Randolph Scott incredibly dull onscreen, a bizarrely popular movie star who doesn't seem to have enough charisma to be a compelling leading man, and who at 47 is too old to be playing this part and twenty years the senior of Barbara Britton.  The film is occasionally fun (I loved the pirate quarrel at the beginning of the film), but once it becomes Laughton vs. Scott I sort of lost interest, as Laughton is always more interesting even if he's being a bit hammy and scenery-chewing in certain scenes.

The film landed one Oscar nomination, for Best Score, though not to impugn nominee Werner Janssen's nomination too much but this was the final year where basically any studio could guarantee a nomination for Best Score just by submitting at least one eligible film.  As a result Captain Kidd was actually one of 21 nominees in this category, three of which actually belonged to Janssen himself.  The music is exactly what you'd expect from a pirate film, and doesn't really compare with some of the contenders it was facing that year, including Miklos Rozsa's winning Spellbound.  I doubt very sincerely that in a five-wide field this would have been one of the ones that made the cut-the score only comes out when they need to cover some action, and relies too heavily on cliches (the light, frilly music whenever Lady Anne comes on, the ominous notes starting at least thirty seconds before we see that Captain Kidd is about to do something unspeakable yet again).  It occasionally takes away from the film, and even if it is boisterous to listen to on its own, that doesn't mean that it's any good when it comes to aiding the story.

Those are my thoughts on this pretty forgettable pirate adventure-has anyone else seen it (it's in public domain, so it's probably one of those $2 DVD's you see in a K-Mart bin)?  If not, what are your thoughts on the careers of Randolph Scott and Charles Laughton?  And anyone want to speculate why they made it so easy to get an Oscar nomination for music back in the day?