Film, we’re told, is a serious art form, but it certainly hasn’t produced much of a serious literature, least of all when it comes to books about movie stars. Most Hollywood biographies, for instance, are ill-written compilations of gossip, while “filmographies” (to use the ugly but inevitable neologism) tend to be the work of fawning, obsessively compulsive fans. So it is a treat to report that Robert Nott’s The Films of Randolph Scott (McFarland & Company, 235 pp., $39.95 paper) is as discriminating as it is thorough, a worthy tribute to an insufficiently remembered actor whose best work is much deserving of revival.
As a young man Scott made movies of all kinds, but after 1947 he specialized exclusively in the Western, a once-beloved genre that has all but died out in recent years. His on-screen demeanor, as I wrote in a 2002 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, was distinctive to the highest possible degree:
He always played the same character, a lanky, dryly amusing cowboy with a Virginian accent who spoke only when spoken to and shot only when shot at, and you could take it for granted that he’d do the right thing in any given situation. If he’d been younger and prettier, he would have been too good to be true, but Scott was no dresser’s dummy: he had a thin-lipped mouth and a hawk-like profile, and wasn’t afraid to act his age on screen. Nobody in Hollywood, not even John Wayne, looked more believable in a Stetson.
Most of Scott’s later movies were variously satisfying but predictable B- to B-plus Westerns in which he stuck closely to the heroic stereotype that made him popular. In the final years of his screen career, though, he made a number of films, most of them directed by Budd Boetticher, that were tougher in tone and austere to the point of stoicism. Boetticher’s “Seven Men from Now,” “Ride Lonesome,” and “Comanche Station” are all masterly variations on the same no-nonsense theme, terse moral tales of a vengeful drifter who seeks to right a wrong, and Scott’s disillusioned, flint-faced presence is a large part of what makes them so memorable.
Robert Nott, an arts and entertainment writer for the Santa Fe New Mexican, is a Western-loving film buff who has gone to the not-inconsiderable trouble of watching and writing about every surviving film that Randolph Scott made, not a few of which, he freely admits, weren’t worth the trouble: “You can be a fan of Scott’s and yet not be a fan of all of his movies. . . . For diehard Western film fans, part of the challenge of focusing on Randolph Scott’s film canon is sitting through the melodramatic misfires and embarrassing epics he made outside of the sagebrush genre.” Yet he somehow manages to write interestingly and amusingly about even the least of Scott’s efforts, and when the film under consideration is a good one, he always rises to the occasion. No matter how much you think you know about Randolph Scott’s oeuvre, Nott’s unpretentious synopses, which incorporate both original interview material and pointed excerpts from contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews, will point you in the direction of unfamiliar films that are worth watching (I can’t wait to get a look at “Carson City” after reading about it in The Films of Randolph Scott) and enhance your appreciation of the ones you’ve already seen.
It’s currently being whispered in film-buff circles that all of the Westerns Scott made with Budd Boetticher in the 50’s have been transferred to DVD and will be released as a boxed set this fall. I’ll believe that when I see it, but should these wonderful films finally be made available on home video, I strongly suggest that you acquire a copy of The Films of Randolph Scott to go along with them.
