Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

Although she can keep unwatched episodes of Best Week Ever and The Hills on our DVR indefinitely with no repercussions, my wife still expresses surprise and/or disgust when I freak out if she suggests erasing some of the movies I recorded off Turner Classic Movies. Unbelievably, she doesn't seem to appreciate the historical significance of the Ranown cycle, the seven westerns director Budd Boetticher made in the late '50s with star Randolph Scott. Either that, or she didn't like the fact they'd been on the DVR for almost a year. Whatever.

I'd already seen four of the Ranown films (Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station). Seven Men from Now is the only one of these out on DVD -- the others I saw on VHS tapes I ordered from Comet Video, a little operation that has to this to say about watching Westerns with pals and a root beer: "That's livin!" That's awesome.

Anyway, I finally sat down to watch Decision at Sundown, sans pals or root beer, to see if it could measure up to the first four Ranown films I'd seen, all of which I'd liked a lot (especially Ride Lonesome). Unfortunately, I was a wee bit disappointed. I shall quote myself, from over at criterionforum.org:

I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand, I liked the concept of the revenge-bent hero fighting for the wrong cause, who Scott played extremely well, and I thought the against-the-grain ending was brilliant. On the other, a lot of the dialogue made me realize how dependent Boetticher was on Burt Kennedy for the other Ranown films (imdb has him as an uncredited writer on Buchanan Rides Alone, which is the only one of the Ranown cycle I haven't seen [sic: I haven't seen Westbound either]). Any scene involving Doc was painful, and, though I'm not a huge fan of High Noon, at least the townspeople's behavior was consistent and believable. Here, after some preachiness from Doc, suddenly the entire town grows balls and stands up to Kimbrough, whose pernicious impact on the town is never effectively conveyed. I wonder if Kennedy would've done better with this story, but then again, all his scripts for Boetticher were set in the harsh landscape of the West instead of in towns, where people can mess up a good Western by talking.

This had the potential to be a great psychological Western, with Scott realizing too late he was seeking vengeance for no good reason and having his quest thwarted when Ruby shoots Kimbrough in the shoulder, prematurely ending the showdown. The real kick to the nuts comes in the next scene, as Kimbrough, the bad guy, and Ruby, the whore, ride off together, to live happily ever after, I guess, while Scott gets loaded at the bar. The irony (besides the good guy failing and the bad guy winning) is that Ruby is a whore and Kimbrough doesn't care, whereas Scott's wife was a whore (not officially, but in practice, we're told) and he was blind to it -- that misperception of his wife's purity is what led him on his fruitless mission of revenge in the first place. The image of him riding out of town, pulling one empty horse, reminding us of his partner's senseless murder, is a potentially devastating one. Unfortunately the last bit of dialogue from the film is some lame business from Doc about how glad the town was that Scott came to town and helped them come to their senses. As if these yokels learning their lesson and standing up to the class bully is really what the movie is all about. The problem is, that last scene didn't come out of nowhere -- that kind of bad dialogue, poor acting and misplaced, heavy-handed thematic statement had permeated the film up to that point anyway. To be honest, I was kind of waiting for that ending to be ruined. This is why I missed Burt Kennedy, the screenwriter of the other Ranown films I've seen -- I think he would've kept the conflict centered on just the main characters, and we would've felt Scott's pain much more.