Ride Lonesome

Ben Brigade, a bounty hunter, catches a killer and sets off to take him to the town where he will hang. Two drifters join on the road, each wanting to deliver the man himself because there is a pardon promised for it. A woman is with them too. Behind them come the prisoner's brother and his men. Brigade is in no hurry, which is strange; he seems not to want to arrive. Budd Boetticher directs. Randolph Scott plays Brigade. Burt Kennedy wrote the screenplay. The film belongs to the run of westerns Boetticher and Scott made together, all short, cheap and built on the same idea: few characters, open country, and tension that advances through talk. The secret of the narrative is the hero's intention. Why Brigade takes the prisoner so slowly is withheld to the end, and when it is stated the whole film changes in retrospect. Pernell Roberts and Lee Van Cleef are in the cast, along with James Coburn in his first film. It runs under seventy five minutes; no scene is superfluous and the landscape is used directly as part of the narrative. The hanging tree at the end is among the most cited images in the western. Who it is for: viewers who like classical westerns and plainly built genre films. Who it is not for: the characters are barely explained, the action is limited, and the female character has a narrow function.