Westbound

Virginia Mayo and Karen Steele face off in red and pink in Westbound

Budd Boetticher's Westbound, released in 1959 though it sat awhile on the Warners' shelf, has more the feel of a routine programmer than his collaborations with Harry Joe Brown and Burt Kennedy. Still, this Randolph Scott vehicle zips along the course of its 72 minutes. Set unconvincingly in the Civil War era, Scott plays a stagecoach manager responsible for trucking bullion back east to finance the Union effort. Confederate allies Andrew Duggan and Michael Pate stand in his way.

The WarnerColor photography is startlingly intense, especially for a B. Boetticher expertly frames the magnificent vistas and stages the action scenes for maximum impact. Scott is usual sturdy self. He is one of the better riders in Hollywood and adds a dash of physical grace to the Western genre. Virginia Mayo and Karen Steele are both more than fine. Westbound is more attuned to the emotional barometer of women than most oaters. Mayo was supposed to be the female lead, but roles were tweaked, probably due to Steele's dalliance with the director. Michael Dante and Duggan are less satisfactory. Duggan, a lumbering presence, always sticks in my mind because of his star turn as George Washington in the theatrical production of Paul Green's We The People. This production was supposed to be (my home state) Maryland's contribution to the Bicentennial in 1976, but it turned out to be a fiasco that closed after a few performances at Merriweather Post Pavilion. I remember hearing about the production and thinking, yeah Andrew Duggan, that'll pack them in. Kathleen Turner, who graduated from UMBC in 1977, was also in that ill-fated production.

As usual in a Boetticher film, there is more going on than in your standard B. Boetticher uses the color red to symbolize the vanity and hollow materialism of Duggan and Mayo's characters. Steele is mostly in soothing blues, greens and pinks. When she dons red it signals a rise in her material fortunes: when her farm is expanded into a way station and when her husband teaches her bookkeeping. The film functions as a critique of materialism. The setting is, significantly, Julesberg, Colorado. When the bad guys force a stage to tumble into a ravine, killing women and children, the first words out of their mouths is "Let's get the gold." One wonders if Sergio Leone saw the film. Duggan's office and home, ornate and festooned with red velvet, resemble the gaudy lairs of Leone's villains in films where the materialist critique was amplified by Marxism.