The Tall T (1957), directed by Budd Boetticher. DVD at home with Aunt Betsy, Thursday, March 23.

I think one definitely sign of my being out of touch is that I like Westerns. When I work at places with a lot of young people, at some point I’ll mention I like Westerns, or John Wayne, or I’ll be seen reading a Western novel, some classic like Butcher’s Crossing or The Searchers. The very few times Westerns have screened at either the Heights or Trylon, they’ve flopped, and I mean big-time. Enough to keep those places from ever showing them again (though I give the Trylon credit for screening a bunch of Peckinpah Westerns soon, though I bet they’ll also do poorly).

To a degree, I get why people don’t like Westerns, especially the ones that glorify the killing of indigenous peoples. But there’s a lot that don’t, The Tall T being one of them.

There were a number of these B-movie Westerns made, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott (I believe they both produced them as well). These movies are economical, tense, Scott is a charismatic lead, and, strangely enough, they have a surprising brutality and vulnerability to them.

The Tall T is, very simply, the story of a man, Pat Brennan, who loses his horse in a bet, hitchhikes a ride on a stagecoach back to his ranch, and then gets caught up in heist-turned-kidnapping. There’s three effective bad guys holding Brennan and Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Sullivan) hostage. The characters–good, bad, and ugly–feel enormous pain, they get their faces literally blown off, they scream and clutch at their bodies when they’re shot. Look, the action starts with the murder of a kindly man, a father, and his boy, who’s maybe 10. I can’t think of a classic Western other than The Searchers where a child is killed. When Scott asks about the boy, before knowing the child’s fate, Henry Silva’s bad guy, Chink (yeah, I know), points his rifle to his left. “He’s in the well.”

True, like all Westerns, there’s a sense of machismo, but there’s also grief, the grief of death and the grief of abandonment, and there’s frustration, anger, and, as I noted, pain. The Boetticher films have been referred to as “Western noirs”, and while I’m not sure I’d call them that, they are a nice tonic to the usual John Wayne heroics.