The Shock of the Old: Seven Men from Now and the Ranown Cycle

In the summer of 1956, when a taut, swift little B western called Seven Men from Now snuck into American movie houses, the long-lived film genre had begun to show its age, and its most popular stars were looking none too spry themselves. Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and Joel McCrea were all in their fifties; James Stewart and John Wayne were closing fast. For the next few years, a good deal of creative lighting, makeup, costuming, and especially coiffing would be necessary to sustain the illusion that these middle-aged gents were—as the genre seemed to require—lithe, virile, even dangerous hombres in the prime of life. Seven Men from Now said to hell with that, and wisely: its leading man, Randolph Scott, was born in the previous century. His hair was flecked with silver, his face was as craggy and crevassed as the landscapes he rode through, and his pale blue eyes looked as if they’d seen it all (and liked too little of it). The director, Budd Boetticher, a relative whippersnapper of forty, doesn’t emphasize Scott’s age, but he doesn’t try to hide it either. The revenge-bent hero of this picture could be any age but young.

Seven Men from Now wasn’t interested in reviving or revising the western form, much less rejuvenating it. The genre was in fact at the peak of its popularity in the midfifties. Color film and wider screens suited those wide-open spaces to a T, and those technological adjustments did a decent job of supplying a reason for audiences to pry themselves away from their boxy black-and-white TV sets and head out to the picture show. And thanks to a handful of big-budget, Oscar-laureled “adult” westerns like High Noon (four statuettes in 1952) and Shane (six in 1953), the humble oater had even acquired a bit of respectability. It was also, arguably, starting to get a mite too big for its britches.

But beginning with Seven Men from Now, Boetticher and Scott—often in collaboration with the veteran producer Harry Joe Brown and the young screenwriter Burt Kennedy—made a series of westerns in which everything seemed to fit perfectly, nothing too loose and nothing too tight. These movies, known collectively to film critics and scholars as the Ranown cycle (after Scott and Brown’s production company), appear in retrospect a kind of oasis of sanity and low-key professionalism at a perilous moment in the history of the western. The canonical Ranown cycle (Why “cycle”? Beats me.) is generally taken to include Seven Men, The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Broader-minded critics will sometimes grudgingly admit Westbound (1958), starring Scott and directed by Boetticher but not produced by Scott and Brown, to the exalted company. Seven Men wasn’t actually a Ranown production either, but it’s a lot better and more distinctive than Westbound, about which Boetticher later said, “I made the picture and it wasn’t that bad. But it wasn’t one of my pictures.” Seven Men was too fine a specimen of horseflesh to get all particular about, though, so the critics and the academics with a taste for tidy classification just went ahead and herded it into the Ranown corral.

Marvin’s cocky and perversely charming villain provides all the personality this picture needs, leaving Scott to do what he does best, which is next to nothing. It works beautifully. When Seven Men from Now opened in Paris a year after its U.S. release, the brilliant critic André Bazin, who judged the film “perhaps the best western I have seen since the war,” praised “the sublime lack of expression in [Scott’s] blue eyes,” and noted, in wonder: “Never a facial gesture, never the shadow of a thought or a feeling.” And Bazin expressed his enthusiasm for the movie itself in comparably negative terms: “No symbols, no philosophical backdrops, no psychological shading, nothing but ultra-conventional characters in totally familiar occupations.” Backhanded compliments? Pas du tout. Bazin had been worried that the genre, which he loved, had lately strayed too far from the straight path, had wandered into no-exit thickets of psychology, social consciousness, and strenuous mythmaking. The no-nonsense lucidity of Seven Men from Now looked to him like an overdue correction.

What the Frenchman couldn’t know, because Seven Men was the only Boetticher-Scott western released in his home country before his untimely death in 1958, was that the promising course charted by this picture was only a temporary detour in the long history of the movie western. When we look back from the perspective of 2021, it’s clear that the Ranown gang rode this trail pretty much alone. Boetticher and Scott were ideal companions for one another at this stage in their careers, because both were essentially journeymen in the Hollywood of the 1950s—each, however, with a streak of orneriness that would serve these stories well.

Boetticher got into the movie business through the back door, as a technical adviser on Rouben Mamoulian’s 1941 bullfighting drama Blood and Sand; he had trained as a matador (and the art remained a lifelong passion). By 1944, he was directing B pictures himself (initially under his given name, Oscar Boetticher Jr.), and in the early fifties he graduated to modestly budgeted A movies—the first and best of which, Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), he coproduced with John Wayne. His twenty-two pre-Scott features show solid craftsmanship and a talent for brevity (only one runs longer than ninety minutes), and a handful—notably Bullfighter and the Lady, the Robert Ryan western Horizons West (1952), and the stark noir The Killer Is Loose (1956)—are considerably better than not bad. But except for Bullfighter, which was clearly a labor of love, they’re more like Westbound than Seven Men from Now: they’re not really his pictures.

Scott, too, had settled into a comfortable rut. He was known in Hollywood as a shrewd businessman, and sometime in the late forties he seems to have made the executive decision to appear only in westerns. Seven Men was his twenty-sixth in a row; the nine films that followed it before his retirement from the screen in 1962 were all westerns too. (He ended in glory, costarring with Joel McCrea in the last of the great classical westerns, Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country.) Sound choice, really, especially for an actor whose primary interest in his profession was the keeping up of a steady flow of income: Scott was too old and too stiff to be a plausible romantic lead (or even second lead, as he’d often been early in his career), but he could still sit a horse and draw a six-shooter and throw the odd punch, and his physique still fit the movie westerner’s template—lean and long. He looked right, and that was usually enough.

When Boetticher’s and Scott’s well-worn paths converged for the first time in Seven Men from Now, something interesting and wholly unexpected happened: these two weary pros elevated one another. The dynamics of such creative partnerships are always mysterious, magical-seeming. In this case, it feels as if the rhythm of Kennedy’s deceptively simple script—which is both tight and relaxed, both implacable and constantly surprising—somehow brought out the paradoxes in the temperaments of the director and the star, revealed the stubbornness, the sheer cussedness, that in both men had been too long sacrificed to professional adaptability.

And that combination of traits more or less describes the heroes of the Ranown westerns, at least the ones Kennedy wrote: Seven Men, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station. In Decision at Sundown (written by Charles Lang), Scott’s character is all obsession, unbendingly intent on avenging a loss that he has, we learn, gravely misunderstood; it’s the bleakest movie in the series. Buchanan Rides Alone (also by Lang) swings the pendulum in the opposite direction; the hero rides into a corrupt border town with no discernible purpose and a big, goofy grin on his face, and spends the next seventy or so minutes simply reacting to various outrages visited on him by the town’s plentiful bad guys. They’re both very much worth seeing, but they’re mighty odd. (In the generally well-ordered world of the Ranown series, Decision is the brooding loner at the end of the bar, and Buchanan is the garrulous town drunk.)

In Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, Boetticher, Kennedy, and Scott restore the rolling rhythms of their first collaboration, and the delicate equilibrium of the hero’s obsessions and his adaptability. (They also return to the versatile, slightly ominous desert-and-hills terrain of Lone Pine, California, where Seven Men and The Tall T had been shot.) The charismatic, cajoling, soft-voiced villain, of the sort played by Marvin in the first picture and Richard Boone in the second, rides along again too, now incarnated by Pernell Roberts (in Ride Lonesome) and Claude Akins (in Comanche Station). These final two Ranowns—both of them beautiful, stirring, and deeply satisfying tales of grown-up (i.e., melancholy) heroism—are so similar to Seven Men from Now as to seem virtual remakes. Is the near-sameness of westerns, maybe of all genre films, crucial to their appeal? Robert Warshow thought so. In his famous 1954 essay on the western movie, he wrote: “It is an art form for connoisseurs, where the spectator derives his pleasure from the appreciation of minor variations within the working out of a pre-established order.”

To this genre connoisseur’s mind, the Ranown cycle’s most fascinating set of variations on the western form play out in The Tall T, which effectively adds another collaborator to the smooth Boetticher-Kennedy-Scott trio, and a powerful one: Elmore Leonard. The movie is based on an early short story, “The Captives,” and Kennedy didn’t do a whole lot to it: the basic situation and its development and even the characters’ names are all Leonard’s, and most of the superbly crafted dialogue is too. Leonard’s flinty, anti-psychological brand of storytelling seems right at home on the Ranown range; if anything, his no-nonsense approach might have been a tad too strict even for this rigorous team. The movie’s few embellishments on the lean-and-mean original story are designed to make the chief villain a shade more understandable—at times, like Marvin in Seven Men, semi-likable. And those modest additions, in the form of campfire colloquies with stony-faced Scott, allow Boone to create the most memorable character in the whole Ranown series, a bad guy of almost Shakespearean complexity.

Boone galloped off to television (for six seasons of Have Gun—Will Travel), where the western—in black and white, on a small screen—had begun to put down roots, with fewer old-timers and plenty of eager young guns like Steve McQueen, James Garner, Robert Culp, and Clint Eastwood. (Boone got one more great western role, again as an Elmore Leonard villain, in Martin Ritt’s Hombre [1967].) By the midsixties, some of the elders had hung up their spurs like Scott, but most were still letting out their britches and heaving themselves up onto their long-suffering horses, often with the help of Burt Kennedy, who spent the remainder of his Hollywood days mostly as a serviceable director of geriatric western fare. Post-Ranown, Boetticher made a terrific gangster movie, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960); an execrable low-budget western called A Time for Dying (1969); and—his dream project—a bullfighting documentary, Arruza (1972). Westerns, of course, were never the same, because they couldn’t be. They didn’t change along the clean lines the Ranown cycle laid out. Going up against Sergio Leone’s operatic cynicism and Peckinpah’s conflicted romanticism, Boetticher’s cool poise and savvy didn’t stand much of a chance. That trail is gone now, obscured by too little use and too much new growth. In its short day, though, it sure was a fine place to ride.

The Shock of the Old: Seven Men from Now and the Ranown Cycle

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