The Tall T (1957)

Film: The Tall T (1957)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Richard Boone, Maureen O'Sullivan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Skip Homeier, Henry Silva, John Hubbard

Director: Budd Boetticher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Two weeks ago (I'm aware we missed last week-we'll catch up in the next week so that Scott gets a full slate of Saturday's, don't worry), Randolph Scott was becoming a star in B-Westerns, primarily those based on the novels of Zane Grey.  This week, we're going to discuss Scott's career as an A-Grade actor.  By the mid-1930's, Scott was a bankable star at Paramount, getting put in important films of the day with top leading actresses as diverse as Irene Dunne, Mae West, Shirley Temple, and Joan Bennett.  He was nearly cast as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, but by the 1940's he was done at Paramount and wanted to try something new at other studios, including Fox and his old stomping grounds of RKO, where he made the 1940 hit romantic-comedy My Favorite Wife with the actor that Scott would be most associated with in modern pop culture: Cary Grant.

Though both men were married to multiple women in their lives, if you bring up Randolph Scott's name, you're probably going to hear quite a bit of speculation about his personal life, specifically in relation to his longtime friendship with Grant.  The two lived together in Malibu in the early 1930's (they made the film Hot Saturday together in 1932) & remained roommates well into both of the men being rich enough to live apart (they were still in the same house as late as 1944 when both were two of the most bankable names in Hollywood).  It has been long-rumored (though denied by both men's families) that the two were lovers, which several openly queer men who were contemporaries of the two (including fashion critic Richard Blackwell) have alleged.  No one can say what's true here (they could've just been pals, but that's a long time to live with a guy you don't need to), but if you're going to talk about Randolph Scott, you can't ignore the Cary Grant of it all.

(Spoilers Ahead) As I mentioned in our first article, we're not matching up our films with the discussion of Randolph Scott's career (i.e. no Cary Grant movies today), but instead continuing into his partnership with Budd Boetticher.  Today we are focusing on The Tall T, where Scott plays a ranchman named Pat Brennan, who takes a job escorting a newly-wed couple (O'Sullivan & Hubbard), the wife of whom, Doretta, is the daughter of the richest man in the county.  When they're stood up by a gang of stagecoach robbers, Doretta & Pat must work together to get away from the men, demanding ransom for Doretta's return...even though they have every intention to kill them both.

This is another great pairing between Scott & Boetticher (call me a convert on Scott's taste in scripts even if not on his acting late in his career).  This is one of the better performances we got from the lanky actor this month, as he plays Patt less as an archetypical cowboy who is marbled in fortitude, and instead as a flesh-and-blood man.  There's a moment where he's staring death in the eye, and the villain asks if he's afraid, and instead of some sort of bravado, he says "yes," an acknowledgement that self-preservation doesn't disappear when you just want to live.

The movie, appropriately for our conversation about Scott & Grant, is rife with homoerotic undertones.  O'Sullivan gets the only major role for an actress in the cast, and she's not implied to be a great beauty.  Instead the bandits all kind of have a type of lust for one another, particularly Richard Boone's Usher and Henry Silva's Chink, heavily flirting with Scott's Brennan...who's also a "confirmed bachelor."  The conversations between the three men are drowning in Celluloid Closet double talk, not the first time we've run into such a situation this year (The Gunfighter had a lot of that too when we discussed Gregory Peck), but definitely something new in Boetticher's films with Scott.