Budd Boetticher | One Mysterious Night | Horizons West | The Tall T | Buchanan Rides Alone | Ride Lonesome | Westbound | Comanche Station | The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond | Stopover

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Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher directed many Hollywood films. He is famous for his Westerns, and for three films he made about bullfighters. He worked steadily in film and television (1944 - 1961), then made a handful of films later.

Some common visual style aspects of Boetticher's films:

• Camera movement that goes from left-to-right or right-to-left across the sets or landscapes, often following characters
• Camera movement that involves either pans or a traveling shot, or a combination of both
• Open spaces: landscapes, street scenes or large rooms
• Box-like spaces that contain the hero, often of unusual geometric shape
• Color coordination of clothes
• Slightly elevated angles to reveal the layout of large open spaces
• Steep overhead angles
• Groups of characters that move in organized processions
• Occasional action staged in long shot, with isolated tiny figures in a landscape

Imagery in Boetticher:

• Rocky landscapes, often shot near Lone Pine, California
• Streams and rivers that are forded
• Thirsty characters, who drink coffee, water, liquor
• Men in groups with common, similar clothes
• Poles, sticks, spears and other phallic symbols associated with men in groups
• Leather clothes
• Men who get tied up or put in handcuffs
• Radio used by the police
• Prayer scenes: communal, and with social satire overtones
• Communal meals
• People who sleep in groups or pairs
• Isolated characters on journeys, in a group
• Burial scenes
• Intrigue over a valuable treasure

Characters in Boetticher:

• Heroes whose wives have died
• Men with disabilities
• Crooks who try to go straight, and work on the side of the law.
• Authority figure and reforming crooks who like to play games with each other.
• Good-looking, naive young men, who throw in with villains, and who wind up dead
• Swaggering, often sarcastic and knowing villains, who are minor outlaws or crooks
• Smooth, handsome gangster villains who rise from nothing to take over towns and become sinister dictators
• Strong, decent women, who work in a position of equality in a man's world
• Women who are treated as personal property of wealthy men
• Men who bond with other men
• Men who use disguise
• Sexual tension over a woman in a group of men
• Characters from a working class background

Not all of these are in every Boetticher film, of course.

One Mysterious Night

One Mysterious Night (1944) is Boetticher's first feature (or at least the first one where he gets onscreen credit). It is part of the long running series of Boston Blackie films, about a reformed thief who tries to track down crooks. Like most such Hollywood series, it has quite a bit of comedy, and is low budget and short - just over an hour. The title has little to do with the actual movie: much of the action takes place during the day, and certainly transpires over more than a 12 hour period! Like most Hollywood crime series films, One Mysterious Night is definitely NOT a film noir, a movement then gathering steam in Hollywood. It does not resemble film noir, in either style or content.

Boston Blackie is a master of disguise, like many sleuths. This is part of his characterization throughout the series. Boetticher includes plenty of disguise in One Mysterious Night. Disguise is used by the crook in The Killer Is Loose.

Camera Movement

The most notable feature of One Mysterious Night is the large amount of camera movement. In scene after scene, Boetticher's camera is swooping around.

The camera movements tend to have a left-to-right or right-to-left motion.

The movements often go from one side of the set to another, and then often back again, in the reverse direction - all in the same shot. Some shots, such as one in the inspector's office, or the shot after the shooting on the street, involve more than two movements back and forth across the set. Boetticher can follow characters, as they move back and forth from one side of the set to the other. Or he can simply have the camera explore the scene.

Sometimes, Boetticher uses simple pans to move back and forth across the set: the early shot of the police crossing the street to get into the hotel, the back-and-forth panning in the inspector's office. Other times, Boetticher can combine panning with tracking, as in the first shot in the Chinese restaurant, in which a back-and-forth pan seems to give way to tracking that follows the waiter.

Boetticher can use a slightly elevated angle for his pans and tracks, that reveals the layout of the sets, and makes clear the motion of his characters through it. The elevated angle is steepest in the scene near the end, in which Blackie and the police arrive at the crooks' hideout. He can also pan or track head-on, with a non-tilted camera.

Boetticher can also move his camera forward, often to frame his characters more tightly. This can occur alone, or as part of an otherwise panning-based sequence. More rarely, he can move his camera straight back a little, also to reframe.

Both at the apartment, and at the pawnshop, Boetticher includes camera movements that sweep behind walls of the sets, following the characters from room to room. These are relatively common in movies. Still, such shots can have a non-realistic quality, and are quite conspicuous. These do not seem like "invisible" camera movements. They were a form of "Hollywood magic" that might be noticeable even to naive audiences. These room-to-room tracks also move from left to right, and right to left, like most of the camera movement in One Mysterious Night.

There are also some vertical camera movements. Boetticher moves up from the police playing cards, to the crooks hidden above them, pretending to be tailor's dummies. And Boetticher moves straight up, following his heroes' attempt to escape from the Murphy bed.

Young Punks and Strong Decent Women

The young hotel assistant manager who is involved with the theft seems to be the first of the no-good young man characters who get involved with crime, and who wind up dead, caught in the crosshairs of intrigue involving older, tougher and smarter men: see Buchanan Rides Alone. This is a common Boetticher character type.

The women, who work on terms of equality in a man's world, anticipate the later women in Boetticher's Westerns. The emotionally strong switchboard operator, and her brother, the weak-kneed punk who gets involved in the robbery, anticipate the strong decent woman-lesser crooked male husband and wife of Seven Men From Now.

Male Groups

In later Boetticher films, crooks often have entourages, young men who largely dress alike. Although they are not crooks, or followers of a leader, One Mysterious Night has some striking male groups. One Mysterious Night opens with police walking in a V-wedge on a city street. They seem ominous, a tough looking, all-uniformed group. We only gradually learn they are on the way to guard a jewel exhibit. A later scene with the police in the pawnshop, has all the policemen carrying nightsticks. This adds a striking visual note.

A group of reporters hang out at police headquarters gathering crime news. They are dressed in similar suits, that are well groomed, but which have a working-man feel to them.

The police Inspector Farraday and Blackie have a close relationship. The dialogue refers to it as "a beautiful friendship". This phrase has overtones of special male bonding. It is used in this sense in Ellery Queen's mystery novel The Dragon's Teeth (1939) (Chapter 1), and at the end of the film Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1941). Farraday keeps threatening Blackie with arrest, something which Blackie makes clear he enjoys, in dialogue at the end of the film. It is part of the men's duel of wits, a game they play.

Dialogue emphasizes the close bond between Blackie and his assistant Runt, characters who are familiar from previous Boston Blackie movies. Not only do the two men work together, but they sleep together in the same room. They are together 24 hours a day. Sleeping scenes run through later Boetticher, often showing people sleeping in a group. After this dialogue about sleep early in the film, later we see Blackie and Runt sleeping in bed together.

A Working Class Film

One Mysterious Night is unusual among series crime films in that everyone in it seems so working class. Men stay in suits throughout the film: there are no evening clothes, which were de rigeur in many crime series movies. The cop uniforms are standard, if sharp, and there are no motorcycle cops or fancy police uniforms that run through other entries in the Boston Blackie series. These look like regular working cops, and they talk with each other about how tiring their work shifts are. Both of the female leads are conspicuously working women: a switchboard operator, and a reporter, the only female among the otherwise all-male crime reporters. There are other female switchboard operators who work with the heroine, and a woman who runs a cigar stand in the hotel. There is also a dignified Chinese waiter in a Chinese restaurant, who is seen briefly. Even the relatively affluent patrons of the restaurant, and visitors to the jewel exhibit, are firmly middle class people in suits and ties, not the rich society people who so often show up in Hollywood movie series.

Some earlier episodes of Boston Blackie had bits of left-wing politics. Confessions of Boston Blackie (Edward Dmytryk, 1941) talks about Boston Blackie stealing pearls from the rich, and handing them out to people on bread lines. One wonders if the relentlessly working class nature of One Mysterious Night is designed to make it a "proletarian film".

The jewel exhibit is to raise money for the war effort of the United Nations, a favorite term among left wingers to refer to the Allies as a group (this is not what we today think of as the UN, which had not yet been formed.)

Blackie himself is working for a tool manufacturing company. He is depicted as a "businessman", so the film is not anti-business.

Leather Jacket

Many Hollywood films, especially musicals, have the hero in ordinary clothes at the start, and get him increasingly dressed up through the course of the film, ending with the hero in evening clothes. One Mysterious Night takes a parallel but different approach. Blackie wears a suit in most of the film, but disguises himself as a uniformed messenger in a leather jacket at the end. The leather jacket is glamorous, like the evening clothes of a conventional film: but it is also distinctly working class looking.

The anonymous costume designer of One Mysterious Night must have liked the look, because a very similar leather jacket is worn by guest star Steve Cochran in Boston Blackie's Rendezvous (Arthur Dreifuss, 1945). Both jackets have a series of button fastenings up the front, and diagonal pockets; neither has any zippers.

Leather jackets were just becoming popular for men in this era, and One Mysterious Night (1944) is one of the earliest films known to me where it is worn as a fashion statement (as opposed to occasional jackets worn by cab drivers, pilots, fisherman, etc.). They will recur in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1945), San Quentin (Gordon Douglas, 1946), Railroaded! (Anthony Mann, 1947), The Street With No Name (William Keighley, 1948), The Man From Planet X (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951) and 99 River Street (Phil Karlson, 1953), where they are largely worn by tough working class good guys on the edge of the law, like Boston Blackie himself. There are hints in most of these films that there is something exciting and not quite respectable about men wearing such jackets - which probably made them more popular than ever in real life. Blackie is a reformed crook, the heroes of Railroaded! and 99 River Street are innocent but tough working men falsely accused of crimes, the hero of The Street With No Name is a government agent going undercover as a crook in a gang, etc. The police of various cities wear them in Desperate (Anthony Mann, 1947), Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), and Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952), followed by the black leather jackets of LAPD cops in The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953), Code 2 (Fred Wilcox, 1953) and Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954). Villainous-but-glamorous bikers wear them in Thérèse Raquin (Marcel Carné, 1953) and The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1954), films which cemented a sexy bad boy image for men in leather jackets.

Revolving Poles

One Mysterious Night opens with a strange figure of style. A static street sign suddenly begins to revolve, then sinks down out of sight. I have never seen anything like this in any other film. It is really cool. It is a non-naturalistic effect, something that "stylizes" reality.

The street sign is on a large crossroads-style pole. And it gives way to a street scene that soon will be full of police, in striking formation. There are two other images in the film that also combine poles, revolving objects, and glamorized police.

At the gem show, the crooks steal a kid's pinwheel. This is a revolving object on a tall, pole-like stick. A kind-hearted and handsome policeman tries to help the kids out.

At the pawnshop, the police carry really long, black nightsticks. Once again, these include some good looking cops, in spit and polish police uniforms. The police do not spin these nightsticks at the pawnshop.

But soon, in an alley, the crooks see and are scared by a giant shadow of a policeman. This shadow is indeed spinning his nightstick. It makes for an archetypal image of a policeman, gigantic, and with the pole-like nightstick in full rotary motion. This too is a figure of style, on the borders of non-naturalistic imagery.

Open Areas: Large Street Scenes and Rooms

Much of the action of One Mysterious Night takes place in large scale, open places. These include city streets, large exhibit rooms, the hotel assistant's large office, the pawnbroker's, and apartment living rooms. These open spaces, while purely urban, anticipate the large scale open landscape arenas of Boetticher's Westerns. They give plenty of room to stage action, have his characters move around, and allow sweeping camera movements with no obstructions.

Street scenes will recur in The Killer Is Loose and Buchanan Rides Alone, which also involve rapid movements of individuals along the streets.

Strange Shaped Spaces

Boetticher films often contain small, box-like spaces, which contain the characters. There are a few of these in One Mysterious Night, right at the start of Boetticher's career.

The newsstand at the hotel contains the woman who runs it.

The desk at the women's hotel contains the clerk.

The Chinese restaurant has a booth, built into the wall. Blackie and the switchboard operator have dinner there, seated inside the booth.

The woman reporter uses a phone booth.

At the end, the police ascend to the crooks' apartment through the hall staircase. This staircase is not shown through overhead or tilted angles, the way stairs are frequently (and gloriously) depicted in film noir. Boetticher instead uses a radically different approach. He shoots the upstairs hall and the staircase from the front. We see the hall, and we can see down the stairs, in a deep focus shot. Soon the staircase fills up with climbing policemen. The stairway forms a "box", a container for the men in it. This is one of Boetticher's boxes, three-dimensional spaces that contain people. And it is a strange shape: a hallway with a staircase leading down from it: a familiar sight, but actually geometrically quite odd and complex, once you come to think of it.

The fire escape down which the crooks flee is in a box shaped alley, tall and narrow. It connects with the rest of the world through a brick wall, joined at a non-90 degree angle. Boetticher will include more odd shaped alleys in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond: another giant "box". The alley in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond will also turn on a polygonal corner, rather than a 90 degree right angle. It too will feature a fire escape.

Blackie and his assistant get tied up by crooks, upside down on a Murphy bed. We see them hanging there, in the closet that contains the Murphy bed. In later Boetticher films, Rock Hudson will get tied up in Horizons West, and there are lots of captives in other Boetticher Westerns. Earlier, Blackie had been handcuffed to a chair at the police station by the inspector; and Blackie and the Inspector get tied up a third time, at the film's climax. Blackie himself uses handcuffs on his friend the police inspector, in the taxi.

Overhead Camera Angle

The Murphy bed scene includes an unusual overhead camera angle, something that will recur in later Boetticher films.

Horizons West

Color

The great beauty of Horizons West (1953) as a color film can not be overemphasized. Both the clothes and the sets are richly colorful. The subtle colors make harmonies with each other. As in the musical, the Western offers a chance to escape into a different world, one in which every color is rich and vibrant. Whether it's Julie Adams' fiery red dress and headdress, or Rock Hudson's purple leather vest, the colors are at the center of visual interest at all times. They are the most important things on the screen at any moment. It is not individual colors alone, but their combination into color harmonies and compositions that is striking.

Civil Rights

Robert Ryan's gray underscores his pride in being a former Confederate officer, a pride the film constantly suggests is misplaced. Boetticher's films offer a consistently liberal commentary on Civil Rights, the most important political and social issue of their day. We see the US Army's prideful, disastrous attack on wronged Native Americans in Seminole, and the discrimination against the young Mexican hero of Buchanan Rides Alone. The fact that villainous Ryan is a product of the Confederacy suggests that there is something wrong with both.

Characters

It is fun to see Dennis Weaver in the role of Dandy, a flashily dressed henchman of Ryan's. Weaver is not the first actor who comes to mind when thinking of screen dudes, after all the naive types he's played on TV shows. But he really goes to town with this role. Boetticher has a fondness for villainous men whose pride causes them to be dressed to the teeth: see Legs Diamond, or the bad guys in Buchanan Rides Alone and Decision at Sundown. The gifted Weaver has appeared in lots of good movies. He starred in one of the best of all TV movies, Ishi: The Last of His Tribe (Robert Ellis Miller, 1978), and he also appeared in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and Curtis Harrington's What's the Matter with Helen? (1971), both classics.

Horizons West is basically a gangster film, although it is set in the old West. Ryan's character rises to power through illegal means, just like a gangster in 1930's Chicago, and he has a group of henchmen who aid him in his task. As in many gangster films, we see the anguish of the honest family who love him, but who are opposed to his crooked ways. Robert Ryan resembles the later Legs Diamond. Both are well dressed smoothies who both charm and cheat their way to the top.

The Tall T

Boetticher's compositions show his predilections for bold, purely geometric patterns. One shot depicts Randolph Scott crouching down and talking, against a landscape background. His thighs make a V pattern. The lines of the V are directly continued in the landscape. On the right of Scott there is an unusual rock formation. Both parts of it exactly match the line of his thigh. Such compositions made up of continued lines are an important part of design in traditional European oil painting. The formation has a spherical boulder on its top. This too is a pure geometric figure. Boetticher's interest in bold geometric figures recalls Sternberg.

An overhead shot of the station shows its architecture as a series of rectilinear forms. The sides of the rectangles are parallel to the frames of the screen.

A silly note: despite careful watching of this film, I can't figure out why it is called The Tall T. It's a good name, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the plot. (I've since learned this title was reportedly slapped on the film after it was finished by a producer - and that Boetticher and Burt Kennedy were just as bewildered as I was!)

Buchanan Rides Alone

A Gay Relationship

Buchanan Rides Alone can be seen as the queerest of Boetticher's Randolph Scott Westerns. Scott was gay in real life, but usually played straight characters on screen. Here, however, he has what is essentially a love relationship with the noble young Mexican, Juan. Both men are instinctively attracted to each other, and they remain loyal and true throughout the rest of the movie.

Abe Carbo: Talent and Waste

Abe Carbo (played by Craig Stevens) is vastly classier than anyone else in Agry Town. As manager of the Judge's estates, he is clearly a much more intelligent and able person than the Agry family, or the other sleazy denizens. He is also the only person in town who is well dressed. He is clearly a person that could have a success in the big world. Unfortunately, he has built his career on these crooks, and is deeply corrupt himself. He recalls the Robert Ryan character in Horizons West, Legs Diamond, and other elegant men in Boetticher who are ambitious crooks. There is also an element of pathos to him. Boetticher's other villains become big wheels, at least temporarily before their inevitable downfall, but Carbo's only reward is to become boss of Agry Town. It is such a two bit little place. There is an element of satire, suggesting that many of the worldly goals toward which we work are pathetically minor and unworthy of our abilities.

Staging: Varied Use of the Sets

The staging in Buchanan Rides Alone shows great respect for real space. The main town area is one huge set, and it is easy to figure out where we are in it at all times. Boetticher often moves his camera around the town, making it clear exactly where everything is. He gets tremendous amount of visual variety from this one location.

Similarly, Boetticher uses great ingenuity with his interiors, photographing them from every possible angle and direction. The bar is used in repeated contexts. First it is the location of the killing. Later, the awful trial is staged there.

Ride Lonesome

The Opening: Boetticher approaches

Ride Lonesome (1959) shows a number of Boetticher's characteristic approaches in its opening.

Strange Shaped Spaces. Scott appears, riding through a narrow canyon or passage in the rocks. Later, at the station, he rests at night between the stagecoach wheel, and the passenger coach: an odd shaped, narrow space.

The heroine is introduced in the doorway of the station. The small doorway is just big enough to contain her.

Elevated camera angles, to show geometric layouts. The opening overhead shot of the canyon is a classic example.

Pans. Boetticher pans vertically in the ravine to follow Scott, then moves up and to the right, to reveal the bad guy. This is an outstandingly complex shot.

There are soon many other pans and occasional tracks to follow Boetticher's characters through the landscape. These are usually left-to-right or right-to-left, in the Boetticher tradition.

Leather clothes. The hero wears a buckskin shirt. He also wears a leather gun belt that is an exact match for the buckskin shirt, in terms of color. It is a fancy outfit, one whose bright color calls attention to it. The shirt looks like it is a bit hard and time consuming to put on or take off, like the stiffly buttoned-up leather jacket worn by the hero of One Mysterious Night.

Color coordinated clothes. The hero wears a reddish shirt and gun belt: a color harmony. He is immediately contrasted to James Best's bad guy, who wears a green top. Soon, they are joined by two more men. Parnell Roberts' green shirt links him to Best: a color coordination between the two men's costumes, like the paired black outfits worn by the heroine and Adam West in Stopover. And Parnell's sidekick (James Coburn) is in a red shirt, that echoes Scott, although much less dressily.

Red and green color contrasts are found in Fritz Lang's color films, such as Rancho Notorious (1952) and The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959).

Handcuffs. Bounty hunter Scott is soon handcuffing crook Best. Best enjoys it, laughing, and urging Scott to put on the cuffs. It is a game the two men enjoy playing.

Crooks going straight. Parnell Roberts and his sidekick are crooks trying to reform, go straight, and get fixed with the law, hoping to win an amnesty. They recall Boston Blackie and his sidekick in One Mysterious Night, also reformed crooks turned detectives. Roberts is glib, comic and charming, also like Blackie. Scott has the role of "authority figure of the law" to them, a bit like the police Inspector in One Mysterious Night. Like the Inspector, he gives them a hard time through the film, then supports them at the end, where it counts. There are hints that Scott's seemingly harsh and demanding treatment of reforming crook Roberts is a game the two men are playing, just like the Inspector and Blackie - and one that both men are enjoying. Roberts seems to really like and admire Scott.

Thirsty men. Best offers Scott coffee, not altogether sincerely (it's a trap). Soon, the heroine is offering Scott coffee, for real.

Long poles. This is more gruesome in Ride Lonesome than elsewhere in Boetticher: the long spear is sticking out of the stagecoach driver's chest.

A burial - and a prayer that does not quite happen. Roberts and sidekick have to bury the victims of the stagecoach attack. They say it's a shame that no prayers are said over the internment. Boetticher has prayer scenes elsewhere: this is one that does not quite happen. The dialogue has comic overtones, common in Boetticher's communal prayer scenes.

Working class characters. Everyone in Ride Lonesome seems to be working for a living. They are all explicitly people without money - no big shots.

The villain's entourage. Villain James Best has four men in his entourage, hidden in the hills.

Action staged with tiny figures in long shot, embedded in a landscape. We see Best's four entourage members emerging one by one, in long shots. They are small figures in the rocky landscape.

Westbound

Curved Shapes

Boetticher shows a predilection for curvilinear forms. In Westbound (1959), there are numerous shots of winding roads through the California hills. The hills are curved, and the roads are complex 3D curved paths, running on curved hills, and themselves twisting and turning. Boetticher includes many stable shots, showing the stagecoach moving along the roads.

In The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), there is a restaurant with many curved arches. These low, wide arches are constantly kept in the background of the shots, adding to the composition. Other shots show the circular corrida itself. The arches seem parabolic; the angled shots of the corrida form an ellipse on the screen. This fondness for conic sections is a structural motif of the film.

Boetticher's Characters

Both The Bullfighter and the Lady and Westbound open with the hero trying to make friends with another man. In both cases, the friendship seems preparatory to the hero going into business with the new friend, or at least sharing a profession.

Boetticher characters often have entourages. These are bands of men who follow him around and support him. They are usually seated all around the character during our first meeting with him. They are in a subordinate position, either seated at his feet, or below him at the head of the table. Boetticher carefully composes the men in the entourage. They form a detailed geometric pattern. Their gestures and body postures exude arrogance. They are only tough because they are part of this team however: it is clear that without their leader they would be pretty two bit. It is only villains and second leads who have entourages - never the hero. And never rich, respectable characters. It is men who specialize in machismo who have the entourage. The men in the entourage also wear the same sort of clothes as the hero. It is not a uniform - the clothes are all varied - but they clearly all follow the same dress code.

Protagonists in Boetticher are often motivated by a hatred of routine work. This is often symbolized by farming, which probably requires the toughest effort of any profession. Robert Ryan in Horizons West (1953) and Michael Dante in Westbound both come to mind. Both end up dead, as does the gangster in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). These are all characters who want a more adventurous life, but who reach too far.

Boetticher's characters are often tempted by women who are married to rich, somewhat older men. Sometimes these are former loves of the heroes. These women often look like the most expensive possessions of their wealthy husbands, all dolled up in elaborate clothes to match their husbands' fancy houses.

Comanche Station

Comanche Station (1960) is the last of the Boetticher-Kennedy Randolph Scott Westerns.

Camera Movement

Comanche Station is full of pans. They are largely slow and stately, following the slow progress of the riders through the Western landscape. They follow Boetticher traditions, in being:

• Mainly from left-to-right or right-to-left
• Moving from one end of the landscape to another
• Following the progress of the characters as they move across the landscape

The film also has a number of tracking shots. These also tend to follow the characters' movements. They start out right in front of the column of moving riders, and gradually move towards the viewer along with the riders. The riders tend to be arrayed in a diagonal line in such shots, with the camera also moving back along this diagonal.

Strange Shaped Spaces

Comanche Station largely takes place outdoors, and there is little opportunity for the box-like spaces that often contain characters in Boetticher. But the trough into which Scott pushes the heroine to protect her during the Indian attack certainly qualifies. This trough is trapezoidal, making it exactly the sort of odd-shaped space that Boetticher loves. It is connected by an odd angled overflow arrangement to a square well, which further emphasizes the unique geometry of the construction. Like the alleys in One Mysterious Night and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, this space is connected to the rest of the world through an angle that is not 90 degrees.

Much bigger than Boetticher's usual spaces are two fenced-in regions. One is at Comanche Station. The other is the front yard of the heroine's home, at the end. Both of the spaces are used to block off people, with people standing inside or outside of the fence also being separated in terms of the plot. Both regions look like pathetic attempts by humans to build something, in a huge, indifferent desert landscape.

Male Groups: The Indians

The Indians are largely seen as a male group, like the policemen in One Mysterious Night. The have special costumes marking them off as a group, like the police. And just as the police in One Mysterious Night were often linked to phallic symbols of poles and nightsticks, so are in the Indians in Comanche Station constantly associated with phallic symbols: spears, the rifle, arrows, standards, even the horned helmet worn by one man.

Male Groups: The Entourage

Dobey (Richard Rust) and Frank (Skip Homeier) are the entourage of the bad guy. In some ways, they are the sort of young punks that fall in with the villain, and come to a bad end: a common type in Boetticher films. But Dobey also has an idealistic side, that lifts him above this level. He and Frank also form the sympathetic male pair, that one found in Boston Blackie and Runt in One Mysterious Night. Like that pair, Dobey and Frank are shown sleeping near each other. Also like Boston Blackie, Dobey and Frank dress in leather, wearing sets of fancy chaps.

There is a comedy scene in which Dobey reads the stage coach schedule, with great difficulty. He is both pathetic in his lack of skill, and admirable in his persistence and determination to read. Boetticher will return to this subject, with the admiration he has for the schoolteacher in Stopover. This was the era just after Sputnik, when Americans became deeply concerned with improving educational levels. Both of these films reflect that milieu.

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond

Strange Shaped Spaces

The hero of The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) shows an affinity for odd-shaped spaces. The hero shows a propensity for movement, in all of these spaces.

In the film's second shot, he moves under a gigantic, jutting portico on a city street, a cubical area jutting out at an odd angle. Soon, he is pushing his brother into a strange region behind a newsstand, out of the way of a robbers' shoot-out. Later, he will use a roof to commit a robbery. The strange trapezoidal skylight through which Legs descends is featured. And he will retrieve the jewels from his girlfriend's purse while in a curtained kitchenette. We also see Legs inside a grilled cage in the prison visiting room.

When he is waiting by the elevator at Rothstein's, he takes up a polygonally shaped angle of the room, different from the other henchmen. (Shades of Fritz Lang, who loved polygonal regions.) And soon Legs is inside the elevator, another space that is always shown from outside, making it look both more complex, and emphasizing its spatial, box like properties as a whole.

When going to kill henchman Moran on the fire escape, Boetticher gives an overhead view of the alley. The alley turns at a polygonal corner. The whole alley image forms an irregularly shaped, giant box. This is one of the most striking images in the film.

When attacking Jesse White, Legs emerges unexpectedly out of the dumb waiter, another unusual containing space. When Legs is shot and recuperating in bed, we see the cavity of the Murphy bed behind him - Legs is essentially in a different space from everyone else in the room - and an unusual one.

Stopover

Stopover (1961) is a Boetticher Western about which nobody seems to know. It is the only episode of The Rifleman TV series directed by Boetticher. The show is around 25 minutes long, like most episodes of the series. Joseph H. Lewis directed 52 episodes of The Rifleman, many first rate. One wishes there were a similar huge body of Boetticher TV films.

An Ensemble: Meals, Drink, and Prayer

Like other Boetticher movies, Stopover is an ensemble piece, about a group of characters. Series regulars Lucas and his son Mark are less central here than they are in other Rifleman episodes. The meal, with six people around Lucas' table, is the biggest crowd I've ever seen at Lucas' ranch. Such a communal experience is typical of Boetticher.

Young Mark says Grace before the meal. Like the funeral prayers in Buchanan Rides Alone, this comments in a revealing, and slightly comic way, on the characters and the story.

People in Stopover are always drinking: coffee, liquor, water, medicine. Boetticher characters are really thirsty. One recalls the coffee always being served by women in Seven Men From Now, and the saloons in Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone.

Boetticher Traditions: Links to Seven Men From Now

Stopover shows many typical Boetticher situations. It is about a group of people thrown together in isolated quarters, while traveling out West. A group that is riven by sexual tension over one sophisticated, strong woman in their midst. And by greed over an alleged treasure, and by tension between good guys and outlaws. And with trouble stirred up by a bitingly sarcastic man who knows how to push everyone's psychological hot buttons, by telling unpleasant truths. In short, it's right in the tradition of Seven Men From Now, The Tall T and Comanche Station.

However, there are big differences. There are no demons inside these characters, and no one who is essentially a gangster. This leads to a complete different resolution from any of the Ranown cycle of Westerns.

The casting of Adam West also subverts Boetticher traditions: maybe in a good way, and certainly in ways understood by the director. West is a man who oddly embodies class. He was ideally cast both as the heroic Batman and his secret identity, millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne. West has a gentlemanly, intellectual way of speaking, that serves his character here well. While tall, handsome smoothies like West tend to be corrupt gangster types in Boetticher - Robert Ryan in Horizons West, Craig Stevens in Buchanan Rides Alone, Legs Diamond - the noble West suggests something very different. West also reverses imagery and outcomes associated with Michael Dante in Westbound. And his back-story has links to some Randolph Scott characters in the Ranown films. Since much of the film is about the mystery of West's character, I will not say anything more or spoil the plot.

Sexual Ambiguity

The sarcastic man makes a big deal about how the heroine failed to arouse interest in Adam West's character during the stage coach ride, even though she flirted with him relentlessly. This leads to the question: is this character gay or straight? Later, the heroine and West become friends. But West's character never in fact expresses sexual interest in the heroine. There is no actual "signal of desire", to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris. This is in contrast to Lucas and Mark, both of whom show explicit, unmistakable signs of being attracted to the heroine sexually. West's character in fact remains ambiguous to the end of the show. Such ambiguity about male characters, not clearly shown to be gay or straight, is found elsewhere in Boetticher.

Color

This whole characterization and mystery of West is helped by the pure black clothes costume designer Robert B. Harris has for West. These were usually reserved for gunslingers and desperadoes, both on The Rifleman, and in Westerns generally. Later, West will sleep in Lucas' black leather chair, keeping to his color scheme. When West gets out of the chair, Boetticher gives us a close-up of the lower part of West's body, both front and back, highlighting many details of his costume.

The heroine is also in black clothes, something unusual for a Western, and which serves to link her to West. Such coordinated outfits in Boetticher are typically worn by an outlaw and his henchmen: all-male groups. Here, both West and the heroine are social outsiders. Are they bad people? That is part of the mystery of the show.

The whiteness of the snow that is everywhere is also striking. Boetticher gets a great deal of mileage out of it in his images.

Even though this film is in black and white, not color, Boetticher puts emphasis on colors that viewers can see, like the intense black of the costumes, and white of the snow.

Overhead Camera Angles

Boetticher includes two overhead angles showing the stagecoach outside the McCain ranch: one at the start of the show, the other near the end. I do not recall seeing such overhead angles at the ranch in any other episode of the series. Similarly, there is a high angle at one point inside the living room, also atypical.

Strange Shaped Spaces

At the beginning, there is talk when Mark nearly goes under a tilted ladder in the barn. This forms a triangular region, one of the "strange shaped spaces" one sees in Boetticher. These are large, oddly shaped, three-dimensional regions in which the characters move. Such spaces are part of Boetticher's visual style.

Mark sleeps behind a hanging blanket, through whose open bottom he can see the heroine disrobing (just her feet - this is a family show!). His half of the bedroom behind the blanket is a tight space in which he is placed.

West and Melford wind up standing on top of the stagecoach at the end. This recalls the way Legs Diamond is up near the skylight. A slanting barn roof is above them, creating another strange shaped space.

The overhead angles in front of the ranch emphasize the box-like nature of the porch: we see its roof and pillars that support it. The steep angle also makes the stagecoach look like a box. The overhead angle recalls the similar high angle on the box-like alley in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.

Recommended Reading

Horizons West (1969) by Jim Kitses is a landmark study of the Western, focusing on the films of Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah.