A Film Canon

With Ride Lonesome, the formalistic tendencies of the Ranown cycle reach their logical conclusion, producing a stark, minimal aesthetic that is one-dimensional at it's weakest, and iconographic at it's strongest. As with earlier instalments, the narrative turns on an unlikely concatenation of types - a bounty hunter (Randolph Scott), his bounty (Billy John), his nemesis (Pernell Roberts) two gunslingers (James Coburn and Lee van Cleef) and a widow (Karen Steele) - gradually thrown together over the course of a journey - or, rather, whose gradual integration and conciliation with each other produces a journey - but with an unprecedented elision of interiority or introspection, as if simply elaborating the terms and processes in a mathematical equation. As a result, the strongest moments are highly imagistic, with iconography merely being the most marked instance of Boetticher's tendency to overwhelm these figures with Cinemascope's vast assaults upon the eye, as the narrative alternates between sieged constriction (and the ancillary preoccupation with imprisonment and amnesty) and seemingly interminable expanses of space, suffused with the alienating, objectifying gaze of the omnipresent Indians, until the final spectacle of the crucifix-like 'hanging-tree' exudes a holiness that almost defies a direct gaze: "It's been plain...so plain I couldn't see it." The result is something like how Bergman might have directed a Western, perhaps explaining the clumsy speechiness of the (admittedly spare) dialogue, which tends to be overdubbed, or disembodied during the inkier night interludes.