Saturdays with the Stars: Randolph Scott

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we focused on Marlene Dietrich, an actress known for exotic roles in early sound films who found an unexpected career chapter in westerns.  This month, we're going to shift back to a cowboy, and an actor who is more traditionally synonymous with the western.  His handsomeness and southern dialect would make him well-suited for westerns, but despite plenty of success, he didn't find much payoff as an actor in the genre until near the end of his career, when a chance partnership with a visionary film director gave him a partnership in many ways similar to that of Dietrich & Josef von Sternberg, and would cement his legacy as a performer.  This month's star is Randolph Scott.

Born in Virginia but raised in North Carolina, Randolph Scott was the stereotypical definition of an all-American boy.  Excelling at sports, he would serve in World War I in active duty for the army in France, and afterward got work as an accountant, which he didn't enjoy.  His father was a business associate of Howard Hughes, who in the early 1920's was trying his hand at Hollywood, and cast Scott in one of his movies as an extra.  Eventually, he started working in bit parts on Poverty Row until a studio contract with Paramount led him into the first major break of his career, getting to star in a number of 'B' westerns based on novels by Zane Grey.

Randolph Scott is not an unusual choice for a series about western actors-he would throughout his career be defined by the genre.  He is, however, an unusual choice for me to pick for a series on this blog, as I don't really like Randolph Scott.  Many of the criticisms of his acting (too wooden, lifeless, and frequently lumbering in pictures) are criticisms that I share, and I normally wouldn't spend a month highlighting an actor just to rag on them.  But I have never seen any of the films that most cinephiles consider to be the best chapter of Randolph Scott's career, which he made right before his retirement in the early 1960's: the seven films that he made with Budd Boetticher.  Boetticher & Scott's partnership would later be known as "The Ranown cycle" and were low-budget westerns the two men made together that are considered to be masterpieces of the form by modern critics.  So this month we're going to do something we've never done before.  We will track Scott's carer like normal, talking about his decades of success at a variety of studios, as well as his friendship with Cary Grant which would invite nearly a century's worth of rumors about both men's sexuality.  But we will not do so while tracking films of the era we're discussing.  Instead, we will focus on three films that Scott & Boetticher made together, and one additional western Scott made at the tail-end of his career, talking through whether or not this creative partnership deserves the acclaim that it has long endured.