It's not even the violence in The Tall T, but the threat of violence that strikes so hard and cutting into one's soul. That is one of those not too well kept secrets of the movies, or at least something that Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott know, which is that it isn't seeing violence that effects an audience but how characters wield it, and how those around it (who try to hold on to a moral tether) react and have to break out of the bone-curdling fear that the men with those guns like Richard Boone and Henry Silva carry like a shield. Oh, and how Boone laughs with an unabashed (yet very human) nastiness when Randolph Scott's Brennan bumps his head on that cave is the kind of moment the movies were made for, or rather how art could come out of Hollywood at the "B" level.
Maybe it sounds like film critics trying to redeem what has been so often looked down upon as simplistic popcorn entertainment, especially since this was not on the high plain even of like Ford's the Searchers just a year earlier (Boetticher had Technicolor but certainly not Vistavision) inasmuch as calling something like the Tall T as Existential or an even Poetic rendering of Bad Outlaws Taking a Good Tough Cowboy and a Woman Hostage. I know that there are times even I get into such Auteurist ideology without thinking about how many awesome craftspeople and even the producer of this film had as much to do with why a film is special outside of one director's supposed vision on a seemingly simple piece of entertainment.
But the fact is this had in 1957 as much to say about life and death in its own way as The Seventh Seal or Paths of Glory did (if in a slimmer volume of text), and at a time when perhaps the makers of the film thought audiences were ready for something a little nastier and tougher (within the confines of the "Code" but managing to smuggle in some moral complexity). This is a story where such things as who gets to stay alive and who gets killed and who goes to send word about money and who stays comes down to not simply economics but who places the coldest, most brutal value around it. And when Boone has his talk with Scott after laughing at him it's such a great moment because he sees himself in his own way as trying to make his way into having a decent life... just that, well, a body or two or four may pile up along the way.
Boetticher and the writers (one of them no less than Elmore Leonard) makes everyone complicated and morally Grey, including the wife played by Maureen O'Sullivan who didn't have the most gentle heated reasons for taking up with her small minded husband. And while one knows that Scott will do whatever it takes to win out in the end because he makes us believe he can outmaueveur and out-flank these dirty little tough-guys (one of whom, Silva, we get a little back-story in a couple of lines that, frankly, makes him far more understandable than any other movie would attempt to do), you can't be sure just how he will go about it.
There's taut suspense in so much of The Tall T, but like another Leonard-Western story from 57, 3:10 to Yuma, it's a tremendous and searing story more of how wielding violence can pay... until it doesn't, and our world of guns and attitudes and twisted morals makes that more possible than not, with Boone especially nearly stealing the production from Scott and O'Sullivan. I should not neglect to say that it looks glorious and there's a lovely score throughout.
Maybe it sounds like film critics trying to redeem what has been so often looked down upon as simplistic popcorn entertainment, especially since this was not on the high plain even of like Ford's the Searchers just a year earlier (Boetticher had Technicolor but certainly not Vistavision) inasmuch as calling something like the Tall T as Existential or an even Poetic rendering of Bad Outlaws Taking a Good Tough Cowboy and a Woman Hostage. I know that there are times even I get into such Auteurist ideology without thinking about how many awesome craftspeople and even the producer of this film had as much to do with why a film is special outside of one director's supposed vision on a seemingly simple piece of entertainment.
But the fact is this had in 1957 as much to say about life and death in its own way as The Seventh Seal or Paths of Glory did (if in a slimmer volume of text), and at a time when perhaps the makers of the film thought audiences were ready for something a little nastier and tougher (within the confines of the "Code" but managing to smuggle in some moral complexity). This is a story where such things as who gets to stay alive and who gets killed and who goes to send word about money and who stays comes down to not simply economics but who places the coldest, most brutal value around it. And when Boone has his talk with Scott after laughing at him it's such a great moment because he sees himself in his own way as trying to make his way into having a decent life... just that, well, a body or two or four may pile up along the way.
Boetticher and the writers (one of them no less than Elmore Leonard) makes everyone complicated and morally Grey, including the wife played by Maureen O'Sullivan who didn't have the most gentle heated reasons for taking up with her small minded husband. And while one knows that Scott will do whatever it takes to win out in the end because he makes us believe he can outmaueveur and out-flank these dirty little tough-guys (one of whom, Silva, we get a little back-story in a couple of lines that, frankly, makes him far more understandable than any other movie would attempt to do), you can't be sure just how he will go about it.
There's taut suspense in so much of The Tall T, but like another Leonard-Western story from 57, 3:10 to Yuma, it's a tremendous and searing story more of how wielding violence can pay... until it doesn't, and our world of guns and attitudes and twisted morals makes that more possible than not, with Boone especially nearly stealing the production from Scott and O'Sullivan. I should not neglect to say that it looks glorious and there's a lovely score throughout.