Jackson Pollock and Piero Ride Lonesome
Unpublished, 1992
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As a young painter I went to live and paint in the desert of the Southwest. I was fascinated by the unlimited, unlocated space of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and felt that I had found an equivalent in the vistas of Northern Arizona and Southern Utah. By painting the Big Space of the landscape I hoped to better understand Pollock’s space and learn how to use it in painting. At the time I didn’t realize how much my view of this space - both in the landscape and in Pollock’s paintings - had been determined by the western movies I had seen while growing up.
Budd Boetticher’s ‘Ride Lonesome’ (Ranown/Columbia, 1959) is a spare, CinemaScope western. It lasts only 73 minutes. The director of photography is Charles Lawton, Jr., and the script is by Burt Kennedy. It is the next to the last in a series of eight westerns all starring Randolph Scott, directed by Boetticher and produced by Scott, Boetticher, and Harry Joe Brown. Westerns are always variations on classic prototypes. The films in this cycle continue classic western themes, but they also break these traditions in wildly inventive ways. Since the same star, director, producers, writers, and cinematographers often worked together in this series, the films are unusually collaborative in conception. ‘Ride Lonesome’ had a shooting schedule of only twelve days. Watching the film one senses the freshness of quick, instinctive decisions.
To be understood this movie must be seen on a large screen in CinemaScope. Then the screen opens to vision as does a painting by Pollock. The space and light are vast and unlimited, but the story is very simple. This contrast creates the tensions and meanings in the movie.
The narrative is a journey lasting 72 hours, 3 days and 3 nights. Alternations of day to night and of night to day mark each of the three main locations: the Wells Junction swing station, Dobie’s corral, and the hanging tree.
There are six characters in the story, five men and one woman: Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott), Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts), Billy John (James Best), Frank John (Lee Van Cleef), Wid (James Coburn), and Mrs. Lane (Karen Steele).
All the scenes are outdoors surrounded by swirling dust and distant mountains. There is a visual balance between the human figures and the landscape. Neither dominates. This is like the balanced figure/ground relationship in Jackson Pollock’s overall space and it has the same effect. Watching this movie one is constantly visually alert, scanning the whole landscape and trying to take it all in. When one sees a detail one is always aware how it fits into the whole.
More than any other director of westerns, Boetticher has an unusual appreciation and understanding of horses. There are horses in almost all the scenes. The first line is spoken by a horse and the second to a horse. Horses tie the humans to the landscape. They are as important as the human characters. When Boone proposes to Mrs. Lane, inviting her to live a fantasy life with him on his ranch, she is saddling her horse, and he walks towards her leading his. It’s almost as if it’s the horses that need to talk and the humans are just there to help them.
‘Ride Lonesome’ is not a psychological western. It’s about physics -- movement through space, time, location and light. The only scene referring to an interior is a view out from the swing station porch. This framed view of the landscape is the fulcrum from which the journey begins. We watch Brigade, Mrs. Lane, Boone, Billy and Wid file by individually. Later we see Frank and the boys arrive and ride through the same framed view, repeating the path followed by the others. This path is so clear it can be drawn in a diagram.
There are two locations off the diagram - Santa Cruz, where Billy is to be turned in and Boone’s homestead in Socorro. The domestic interior life which Boone fantasizes he can live with Mrs. Lane and Wid is different from anything we see in the outdoor scenes. We have however viewed the landscape from an interior at the swing station and because of this we feel Boone can reach his goal.
It’s tempting to write of composition when writing of the scenes in this movie, but as in Pollock’s paintings, that is really not what is going on. The camera is almost always moving, showing figures from below when close-up and from above when further away. There is a classic CinemaScope scene in which the camera follows along sideways with Brigade and Boone as they ride talking on horseback. As we move along with them we are aware before they are of the Mescaleros appearing over hills on the far left of the screen. Motion either from the camera or within the scene is what is important, not composition. Boone doesn’t just leave a scene, he throws Wid a rifle. We identify with this movement and CinemaScope gives the gesture a remarkable naturalness, as direct and immediate as the gestures in Pollock’s paintings.
Just before he charges Brigade in their final showdown, Frank sits motionless on his horse and one notices the trees blowing gently behind him. This movement in the trees, while Frank and Brigade are frozen, has an eerie but naturalistic quality. At this moment of final confrontation we don’t identify with the human characters but with the landscape instead.
The alternation between day and night both marks time and shows a change of mood. Day is for moving. Night is for contemplation and conversation. These night scenes are ‘American night,’ shot during the day with filters. Thus, although it is supposed to be ‘night’ there are strong shadows in the darkness. Sometimes these shadows have an eerie effect, making the night scenes seem kind of darkened day, a day with an awareness of evil and destruction. Shadows cut across limbs and eat into figures, separating heads from torsos and limbs from bodies. At Dobie’s corral, Boone talks to Wid and his head keeps dipping into shadow where it is deformed by the unexplained ultra-darkness.
There is a similar sense of dismembering in another scene in which Billy, the prisoner, gets the drop on Brigade and is talked out of shooting him by Boone. The camera shows the lower part of Brigade’s body with the rifle against his stomach or switches to the top half of his body, never showing his body whole as Billy threatens to ‘cut him in two’, quoting Brigade from their earlier confrontation. This joke of Boetticher’s reminds us that the camera is always cutting the landscape and can cut a body as well.
There’s a balance in this film between the hero, Brigade, and the villain, Boone. This balance is similar to the balance Boetticher achieves between figure and landscape. Neither character dominates the action. Also, we are able to see unexpected sides of both characters’ personalities. Brigade, the hero, is secretive and taciturn. Boone, the villain, is warm and sympathetic. The purpose of Pollock’s all-over space is a kind of psychological integration. This integration is achieved by one character in this film., Boone, and was lost by another, Brigade.
The huge spaces of the landscape and the movement across it imply freedom. ‘Ride Lonesome’ also emphasizes this freedom’s inverse dark side. As Boone says to Mrs. Lane, ‘If a man had you he would never know a black lonely night.’ The amnesty Boone seeks is an escape from the loneliness of the western hero, an integration of his freedom into the social world of other men and women.
In Boetticher’s westerns evil is a force of nature. It is not caused by individual psychology. Frank says he ‘almost forgot’ killing Brigade’s wife. The hero’s advantage is not the goodness of his cause, but only a willingness to risk his life. After Brigade kills Frank, Boone confronts Brigade to take Billy away from him so that he can turn Billy in for his amnesty. By risking his life, Boone becomes a hero himself. Brigade allows Boone to take Billy and Boone rides off with Mrs. Lane and Wid. This is the only Western I know in which the villain not only escapes, but gets the girl.
When I lived in the Southwest, near Oljato on the Navajo Reservation I often painted a tree by a well near my shack. At dusk the leaves of the tree would shimmer silver in the wind. The tree reminded me of the trees in Piero della Francesca’s fresco, ‘The Story of the True Cross,’ a story based on the Golden Legend. When Adam died God told his son to plant a sapling in his mouth. When this tree was cut down, its wood was used to make the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Jesus, the second man, redeeming the first, was just a vehicle to release Adam’s spirit trapped in the wood.
Like Piero’s frescos, Boetticher’s ‘Ride Lonesome’ gives ordinary objects a strange monumentality and significance - rocks, hills, trees seem to hide unexpected powers. The landscape can conceal dangerous outlaws or Mescaleros but there is more hidden in the landscape than just that. As Boone says, ‘Funny ain’t it how a thing can seem one way and turn out altogether something else.’
At the beginning of the film Brigade ironically says that Santa Cruz is his destination knowing his destination is really the hanging tree. The hanging tree is an anti-cross. Instead of attracting a Jesus to release its spirit, it has attracted Frank to seek his revenge and now attracts Brigade to seek his.
In the last scene, Brigade burns down the hanging tree. By burning the tree Brigade is attempting to release the spirit in the tree that has caused him to seek revenge. I doubt he thinks that he can be free, but he does feel that he might help Boone. For Boone is now where Brigade was before the story began. Boone is about to begin a domestic life. Brigade is hoping to keep the narrative from repeating itself, hoping he can help Boone to avoid the dilemmas he faced.
What amazes me is that Boetticher can combine this mysterious sense of the hidden powers in the landscape with the bluntness of his art. For in the art there is nothing hidden or left over. It is simple and direct. Idea and result mesh perfectly. As Boetticher said in an interview, ‘Nothing in those Scott pictures would make the audience say, ‘What did he mean? What was he trying to say?
Boetticher directed the final western of the Ranown cycle, ‘Commanche Station’, a year later. As different characters ride by on another journey one can see the burnt hanging tree in a flooded meadow. No emphasis is placed on the tree. But how can one escape noticing it? Perhaps Boetticher wanted to remind us of the strength of his art. Now the hanging tree is just a tree.