The Tall T

Elmore Leonard’s “The Captive” is the basis for this tough western, one of many collaborations between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott. Filmed at Lone Pine, California, THE TALL T was the first Leonard property to be turned into a motion picture. The prolific Burt Kennedy (SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF) wrote the screenplay, which is one of those thrillers that cast the hero and the villain as two sides of a coin. With Kennedy’s words and the fine actors speaking them, however, the “we’re a lot alike, you and I” trope doesn’t feel cliched.

Scott is, of course, the hero, a bull-riding rancher traveling on a stagecoach with driver Arthur Hunnicutt (CAT BALLOU) and newlyweds John Hubbard (BIG JIM MCLAIN) and Maureen O’Sullivan. Now, O’Sullivan the actress was a gorgeous woman — check out those old MGM Tarzan movies — but she is dressed down here to play a plain woman, the daughter of a millionaire whose husband married her for her money...and she knows it.

All are waylaid at the nearest relay station by three hard men played by Skip Homeier (CRY VENGEANCE), Henry Silva (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE), and Richard Boone (THE SHOOTIST), the leader. Boone is flat-out brilliant as the cold, intellectual leader, a Bizarro Paladin who just wants enough money to buy a little piece of land, which is also Scott’s goal.

That’s just one of the similarities between the Scott and Boone characters brought out in THE TALL T. Kennedy’s plot may be routine B-movie fare you could find in any Wild Bill Elliott second feature for Monogram, but the characters aren’t. They’re mature and complex, and the actors give them a lived-in quality that vaults the film above most other 1950s westerns. A terse exchange just after Boone and Scott meet in which Boone asks Scott if he knows what’s going to happen to him says as much about their characters as twenty minutes of backstory.

Except for some ill-conceived slapstick near the beginning, Boetticher’s western classic is a taut, uncompromising thriller in the Elmore Leonard tradition. It was the second of seven westerns that teamed Scott with the director. All are worth watching, and THE TALL T is among the best of them.