August 15th
There’s an unforgettable moment in Mel Brooks’ 1974 “Blazing Saddles” when Bart tries to convince the townspeople not to leave declaring “you’d do it for Randolph Scott.” With an almost religious fervor, the residents repeat his name as the soundtrack soars and a choir sings out “Randolph Scott.”
Unfortunately, a lot of people these days don’t get the joke because they don’t have a clue who Randolph Scott is.
That’s their loss.
Scott was one of the most indelible Western stars during Hollywood’s Golden Age-one of the top 10 box office draws for three years in the 1950s. John Wayne may have collaborated with the likes of John Ford and Howard Hawks on some of the most seminal Westerns including 1939’s “Stagecoach,” 1948’s “Red River” and 1956’s “The Searchers,” but Scott made seven influential Westerns with director Budd Boetticher from 1956-1960 and ended his 34 year career with Sam Peckinpah’s early masterpiece, 1962’s “Ride the High Country.”
Besides Boetticher and Peckinpah, Scott worked with such noted directors as Michael Curtiz, King Vidor, Allan Dwan, Fritz Lang, Henry King, Henry Hathaway, Ray Enright, Edwin L. Marin and Andre de Toth. His leading ladies ran the gamut from Mae West to Marlene Dietrich to child star Shirley Temple.
His well-chiseled face-minus the eyepatch- even was the model for the logo of Las Vegas Raiders.
TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars” is giving Scott the attention he deserves on August 15. Though most of the schedule is devoted to his sagebrush sagas, there are also some of his non-Westerns such as 1936’s Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers classic musical Follow the Fleet and the Cary Grant/Irene Dunne 1940 screwball comedy My Favorite Wife.
Tall-6’2”-lanky, athletic and handsome, Scott was born in Virginia and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina where he excelled in football, baseball, horse racing and swimming. He saw action in France in World War I as a member of the 2nd Trench Mortar Battalion.
Returning home, he went to college where a back injury caused the end of his college football career. Eventually, he dropped out of school and went to work as an accountant where his father was a CPA. Nearing 30, he decided he wanted to become an actor and armed with a letter from his father to Howard Hughes, he came out to Hollywood. Hughes got him an uncredited part in the 1928 Western “Sharp Shooters.” It was Cecil B. DeMille- Scott appeared in an uncredited part the director’s 1929 “Dynamite”- who suggested the best way to improve his acting was to do theater. So, he trod the boards at the Pasadena Playhouse and signed a seven-year-contract with Paramount after doing plays in Hollywood.
It was 1932’s “Heritage of the Desert,” based on a Zane Grey story, that began his career as a Western hero. In between riding tall in the saddle, he appeared in several non-westerns including 1935’s “She” and the Astaire/Rogers musical “Roberta,” the 1936 Mae West comedy “Go West Young Man,” 1938 Shirley Temple musical “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and the 1940 Errol Flynn Civil War action-adventure Virginia City, which airs on Aug. 15.
During his career, Scott rarely played the villain. But he got the opportunity to figuratively wear the black hat in 1942’s The Spoilers which starred Wayne and Dietrich. Scott oozes sleazy charm as the new and horribly corrupt gold commissioner in Nome, Alaska who goes mano a mano with Wayne in a classic fight sequence which lasts six minutes and took ten days to film.
According to TCM.com, Scott made an effective villain and “is a formidable opponent for Wayne’s character. During filming, it was reported that Scott and Wayne didn’t get along, mostly due to creative differences. Scott took a more artistic approach to acting than Wayne who had a very unpretentious approach to the craft.” The trio also starred that year in the drama “Pittsburgh.”
Unlike most of the stars of the era, Scott let his acting talk for him, rarely giving interviews. In one of his rare chats in 1961, he explained why he didn’t like publicity. “I always remember something that David Belasco said and had incorporated in the contracts of his stars. His theory was ‘Never let yourself be seen in public unless they pay for it.’ To me, that makes sense. The most glamorous, the most fascinating star our business ever had was Garbo. Why? Because she kept herself from the public. Each member of the audience had his own idea of what she was really like.”
Scott fought in World War II in Hollywood starring in several combat films including 1943’s “Bombardier” and “Gung Ho!” and 1945’s “China Sky.”
But it was the 1943 Western “The Desperadoes” that changed his career. He would later partner with that film’s producer Harry Joe Brown, Boetticher and writer Burt Kennedy for the seminal “Ranown Cycle” Westerns.
After the forgettable 1947 holiday movie “Christmas Eve,” Scott decided only to make Westerns. “They have been the mainstay of the industry ever since its beginning,” Scott once said. “And they have been good to me. Westerns are a type of picture which everybody can see and enjoy. Westerns always make money. And they always increase a star’s fan following.”
Scott was then 49. Though still fit and handsome, he looked his age. His face was weathered and leathery. In fact, the older he got, the more he resembled the famed silent Western star William S. Hart. And Scott’s laconic, stoic and minimalist acting style suited his Western character. He could do so much by simply doing nothing.
One of the best westerns he did at Warner Bros was 1952’s Carson City, which is part of Scott’s day on TCM. Carson City was one of the four films Scott made with De Toth. The director doesn’t rewrite the genre, but it’s good, solid filmmaking. And Scott is in such great shape he spends a chunk of the running time shirtless.
The New York Times wrote of the film: “The scenarists; Andre de Toth, who directed, and practically the entire cast have performed their assignments with a competent jauntiness that suggests they weren’t out to fool anybody.”
Despite being a Western superstar, De Toth found “he had a tremendous inferiority complex about his acting ability and that made him so stiff…he creaked. Good actor, he wasn’t. He was Randy Scott. I called him ‘Granite Jaw.’”
The director described him, though, as a perfect gentleman who enjoyed reading the Bible and the Wall Street Journal. “He was a blue-book millionaire via his wife and in his own right, with a hobby, he thought was acting.”
Joining him in most of his Westerns was Stardust, his gorgeous palomino American Saddlebred horse. Not as well-known as Roy Roger’s Trigger, Scott and Stardust were a popular duo among Western fans. Though he didn’t own the horse, Stardust’s owners made sure he was available whenever Scott needed him for a movie. In fact, they made a dozen films together between 1948-1960.
Scott was 58 when he entered his golden era. And he owed it all to John Wayne. A young screenwriter Burt Kennedy had sold his Western script “7 Men from Now” to John Wayne’s Batjac Productions for the Duke to star. But Wayne was involved in “The Searchers,” so he recommended Scott.
Though not considered a “pure” Ranown Western because it was produced by Batjac, the 1956 Western set the formula for the Scott-Boetticher collaborations-a solitary man who had seen it all and was often seeking revenge. In “7 Seven Men from Now,” he was tracking down the seven men who killed his wife in a robbery. Taciturn, he would let his guns do the talking. Though he was the good guy, his white hat was now speckled with various shades of grey.
Terrence Rafferty wrote for Critierion.com that everything fit perfectly “in these films, nothing is too loose and nothing too tight” and, in retrospect, were a kind of “oasis of sanity and low-key professionalism at a perilous moment in the history of Westerns.”
The legendary French film critic Andre Bazin praised “7 Men from Now” declaring it “perhaps the best Western I have seen since the war” and singled out the “sublime lack of expression in [Scott’s] blue eyes-never a facial gesture, never the shadow of a thought or a feeling.”
The influence of these films can be seen in the work of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood
TCM is airing 1959’s Ride Lonesome, as well as 1959’s Westbound, which, just as “7 Men from Now,” is not a true Ranown oater. It was the actor’s final film under his Warner Bros. contract. “I made the picture, and it wasn’t that bad,” Boetticher said. “But it wasn’t one of my pictures.”
But Scott saved his best performance for last when he teamed up with another veteran Western star Joel McCrea for Peckinpah’s second film, 1962’s Ride the High Country, which is included in the Aug. 15 lineup. Just as Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece “The Wild Bunch,” Scott and McCrea are dinosaurs in the rapidly changing Western landscapes. One stays the course; the other is seduced by greed.
McCrea plays Steve Judd, a retired marshal now transporting gold from mining towns to the local bank. Scott’s former lawman Gil Westrum is working at a carny show. Judd happens to be looking for someone to help him transport gold. When he encounters his old friend at the carnival, he asks him to help. Unbeknown to Steve, Gil has taken a walk on the bad side and has set his sights on stealing the gold. Get out your hankies for the last 15 minutes.
Ironically, McCrea was initially cast as Gil; Scott was set to play Steve. But McCrea didn’t want to play the bad guy; Scott was tired of playing another “straight, honest, guy.” Thankfully, they switched roles.
Ride the High Country is lyrical, poetic and melancholic. There is a haunting sadness to the main theme of George Bassman’s score. Lucien Ballard’s cinematography captures both the beauty of the countryside and the ugliness of the mining town.
Rob Nixon and Jeff Stafford wrote in TCM.com that the two stars were “perfect choices for the roles, each one having played iconic Western heroes almost exclusively for the latter half of their long careers. The elegiac sense of this film is amplified further by the two stars’ advancing age and the fact that this was Scott’s final picture before his long retirement.”
The film bombed at the box office. It was relegated to the second feature in double bills or drive-ins after an MGM executive thought it was one of the worst films he had ever seen.
Still, it managed some strong reviews, and its reputation has only grown in the past 60 years. And in 1992, Ride the High Country was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
So why did Scott ride off into the sunset?
He certainly didn’t need the money. Thanks to shrewd investments supposedly he was a multi-millionaire when he retired.
One of the reasons was the impact of television.
“All the old movies are turning up on television, and frankly, making pictures doesn’t interest me anymore,” Scott explained.
