68/100
Second viewing, last seen at the Walter Reade in 2002. Boetticher's Ranown Westerns—I'm gonna inaccurately include Seven Men From Now among those, both because it's very much of a piece with the other five and because it's my favorite—are not unlike Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons and Hong's structural diptychs and Ozu's practically everything from 1949 on, being minor variations on a template; Burt Kennedy, who wrote all of them, tended to recycle the same basic narrative ideas and character dynamics from film to film. Yet they're all nonetheless distinct, with the similarities making for ready comparisons. Ride Lonesome struck me then and still strikes me now as slightly less accomplished than The Tall T and significantly less powerful than Seven Men, squarely good but lacking any element that sets it apart. Which seems to be a mighty lonesome opinion, given that (for example) They Shoot Pictures ranks this highest of all Boetticher's features. (Though it's still nowhere near their top 1,000. Justice for Budd!) In my most cynical mood, I'm inclined to speculate that people tend to forget which one's which if they haven't watched several recently and gravitate toward Ride Lonesome because it sports the most romantic title—it sounds like it should be the pinnacle (and indeed Buchanan Rides Alone basically just runs with it again, though adding the name weakens it slightly...except, no, just realized that Buchanan came first, so Ride Lonesome is in fact a savvy refinement). Nothing captivates a cinephile like loneliness. Hence the "Actually, Jackie Brown…" brigade.
I seem to have drifted afield. (Let's see generative AI do that!) Ride Lonesome's virtues are fairly straightforward, surrounding Randolph Scott's hunk of weathered rectitude with the usual woman he must protect but can't allow himself to love, a craven bad guy seeking to get the drop on him before being delivered to the law, and a third figure who wavers throughout between ally and nemesis. (Plus the screen debut of James Coburn as that last character's slightly goofy sidekick.) Scott modulates his performance a bit here, coming across more embittered and less soulful than was typical of his heroes; it's rather bracing when Mrs. Lane tells Brigade "You just don't seem like the kind who would hunt a man for money" and he simply replies "I am." Turns out, of course, that another motive's driving his actions, which on the one hand is a decent little twist but on the other hand makes it impossible for Lee Van Cleef, who's barely glimpsed until the last 20 minutes (admittedly the film runs only 73), to have the sort of charismatically loathsome impact that Lee Marvin does in Seven Men. Pernell Roberts occupies that role here, and, well, there's a reason he was primarily a TV star. Likewise, Karen Steele does perfectly fine work but is no Gail Russell, and the unspoken attraction that must be ignored never quite ignites here. Boetticher handles daylight exteriors with his standard expertise but struggles with la nuit américain—first nighttime sequence has that uncanny weird-shadowed quality Cahiers loved, but the second is really Who are you trying to kid, man, it's fuckin' high noon out there.
Also, there's really no reason, apart from saving it as a surprise for we viewers, why Brigade doesn't just tell Boone that he can have Billy and the reward once Frank's been dispatched. I guess the idea is that Brigade doesn't make that decision until the last minute, having been convinced that Boone genuinely intends to go straight henceforth and deserves a chance, but too little attention's been paid to their relationship for this pivot to feel properly earned. That's how I feel about this movie as a whole, basically. The extra touch of inspiration that pushes solid into special just isn't there. Major exception: Ride Lonesome probably boasts the best final shot of any Ranown(-ish) Western, symbolically expressing our hero's repressed emotions into a forbidding conflagration. That may well be another factor in folks thinking of it as the finest example, now that I think about it.