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.

Night Of Bloody Horror

Yes, that’s Emmy-winning star Gerald McRaney of SIMON & SIMON, DEADWOOD, MAJOR DAD, HOUSE OF CARDS, and THIS IS US fame making his film debut in NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR. Then a local New Orleans actor cast by the aunt of executive producer Albert Salzer (NIGHT OF THE STRANGLER), McRaney plays young Wesley Stewart, whose lady friends have a nasty habit of getting dead around him.

Shot in “Violent Vision,” which represents the psychedelic blue swirls surrounding McRaney during his periodic headaches, the film opens with Wesley and Susan (Lisa Dameron presenting the requisite bare breasts) finishing up a roll in the sack. Several slowly paced minutes later, Susan is stabbed in the face while giving confession!

The bikinied body of Wesley’s next girlfriend, a nurse named Kay (Charlotte White) who dragged his drunk ass home one night after he was mugged outside a bar, takes a fatal axe to the chest. Not that two murdered girlfriends and a trip to the cop shop prevent a pretty reporter (Gaye Yellen) from asking him out to a bar to watch a groovy (real) band called The Bored.

Directed by Joy N. Houck Jr. for his father’s Howco International outfit, NIGHT OF BLOODY TERROR is dreadful but watchable, if only for McRaney and Houck’s earnest attempts to be hip. Besides the psychedelic pinwheels, Houck adds fast zooms and solarized effects to The Board’s number while McRaney punches the hell out of a bully. The fight choreography is as bad as the photography and particularly the sound, which was recorded on Louisiana locations with poor acoustics. If you’ve seen PSYCHO — and if you’re reading this, you have — you’ll suss out what’s happening.

The skinny McRaney (who is shirtless a lot) gives a credible performance — he obviously took the role seriously — though you wouldn’t have predicted he’d have the career he did. To his credit, in his later years, he didn’t put NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR down. McRaney did another movie for Houck, WOMEN AND BLOODY TERROR, before moving to Los Angeles and working regularly in episodic television until landing the co-lead on SIMON & SIMON in 1981.

The Prince

Jason Patric (RUSH) is The Prince in this dreary direct-to-video crime meller courtesy of dreary direct-to-video director Brian A. Miller (VICE). At least The Prince is what mechanic Patric (with remarkably clean hands) used to be called in the old days when he was a professional assassin.

Now retired with daughter Gia Mantegna (THE FROZEN GROUND) away at college, Patric is pulled back into his old life John Wick-style when his junkie daughter leaves college to hook up with New Orleans drug kingpin 50 Cent (ESCAPE PLAN). While bashing his way through the underworld in search of Mantegna, Patric gains the attention of Bruce Willis (DIE HARD), a big-time mobster still seething from the deaths of his wife and child by Patric’s hand twenty years earlier, the result of a hit gone awry that led Patric to retire.

The plot by SAN ANDREAS writers Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore is ridiculous. For some reason, Patric drags along his daughter’s cokehead friend Jessica Lowndes (90210) to New Orleans so she can “point out” where to find a drug dealer, but all she had to do was tell him the name of a bar. Willis tells his goons to bring him The Prince alive, yet their strategy is to immediately shoot at him. But the biggest flaw is that Willis’ character doesn’t seem like a heavy. After all, he’s just looking to enact revenge against the hitman who murdered his wife and daughter, which would make him the hero in almost any other movie.

Miller has no idea how to shoot an action sequence. It’s pretty easy for Patric to shoot down a dozen bad guys when they stand right out in the open or run straight at a concealed target. John Cusack (THE SURE THING), of all people, shows up for a few scenes backing up his old pal Patric, “Jung Ji-Hoon aka Rain” (which is how he’s billed) does some kung fu, Johnathon Schaech (THE THING YOU DO) cameos in a gun shop, and the palpably disinterested Willis, who makes no effort to change his appearance in scenes set twenty years apart, never left his Mobile hotel (better tax breaks in Alabama than Louisiana) to shoot his scenes.