Review: Budd Boetticher’s Horizons West on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray

The film sees Boetticher operating on a more epic scale but still with his distinctively ruthless efficiency.

Horizon’s WestMost famous for the westerns, commonly referred to as the “Ranown Cycle,” that he made with actor Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown between 1956 to 1960, Budd Boetticher spent the prior dozen years as a journeyman and director-for-hire, making noirs, romantic dramas, and adventure films in addition to oaters. While the knotty, ambiguous morality and intense psychological complexity of the Ranown films aren’t as strongly felt in many of those earlier works, Boetticher was, from the get-go, a filmmaker skilled at narrative concision.

Part of what made Boetticher so perfectly suited to directing films like The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, and Ride Lonesome was how their constricted time frames or confined settings complemented his uncanny ability to mine the conflicted feelings of his heroes and villains, often blurring the line between the two with brutal, unflinching efficiency. As such, it’s a bit of a surprise when Horizons West reveals its epic scope, both in terms of its theme and the plot’s time frame, which spans the decade following the Civil War. The film parallels the moral decline of its protagonist, Dan Hammond (Robert Ryan), with the widespread corruption in the South during the years of Reconstruction. Boetticher rarely touched so directly on such macropolitical concerns, and across Horizons West he proves rather deft at interlacing the personal and the political, tracing the various ways in which the unchecked power and massive capital of carpetbaggers served as a pernicious force that destroyed individuals and communities alike.

In true Boetticher fashion, the sprawling narrative is compressed into a taut 82 minutes. And the filmmaker’s striking use of ellipses to skip ahead months and sometimes years forces us to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to discerning how Dan works his way up the social ladder from a broke soldier at the end of the war to a ruthlessly corrupt landowner in his hometown of Austin, Texas. Fittingly, Horizons West is most acutely observant when tracing Dan’s ascent—that is, when the integrity instilled in him by his parents (John McIntire and Frances Bavier) and brother, Neil (Rock Hudson), gives him pause when it comes to fully committing to the cutthroat world of illegal wheeling and dealing run by men like Dan’s adversary, the pompous Northerner Cord Hardin (Raymond Burr), and the self-imposed dictator of the area’s Mexican region, General José Escobar Lopez (Rodolfo Acosta).

Advertisement

Boetticher’s propensity for plumbing the morally grey regions of his characters’ interiority is in full force as Dan gradually starts to commit transgressive acts, even as he still ponders the consequences his actions have on friends and family alike. And there are few classic Hollywood actors more suited to depicting a tumultuous struggle with internal demons than Ryan, so this second act is particularly vivid in capturing the corrosive power that took hold in lawless times and how temptations of riches seduced demoralized soldiers unwilling to work themselves to the bone merely for enough money to survive.

Horizons West deflates this inner tension in its final act, which settles comfortably into a clear-cut battle between good and evil, with Neil stepping in as the almost angelic protector of the traditional ranching community. Yet, even when its conflicts are more broadly drawn, the film stands as a scathing indictment of the Confederacy, suggesting that while Northern carpetbaggers supplied capital after the war, the actual muscle behind their illicit dealings were former Confederate soldiers looking to get their piece of the pie, even if it meant betraying their friends and neighbors. If the depiction of morality here is more cut and dry than it is in Boetticher’s best films, Horizons West bears evidence of his skill at bending even epic narratives and larger social critiques to his own distinct economical mode of filmmaking.

Image/Sound

The lush beauty and rich color palette of Horizons West’s Technicolor images are dutifully preserved on Kino Lorber’s new transfer of the film. The blue skies and verdant hills in the exterior shots are gorgeous, while the range of reds, blues, and purples in the costumes, particularly those worn by Julie Adams as the social climbing Lorna, really pop against the town’s dustier, brown landscape. The picture remains sharp and detailed throughout with nary a sign of damage or debris. If anything, the image is almost too clean, and the lack of grain leaves it looking a bit overly digitized, but that’s only a niggle. The audio benefits from a nicely layered mix that boats a well-defined separation of elements.

Advertisement

Extras

Film historian Toby Roan’s impeccably researched commentary track provides an abundance of historical background information about the careers of Budd Boetticher and all the film’s main actors. It’s undoubtedly informative but also a bit dry, and many stretches feel like a pure information dump. Roan rarely comments on the film’s themes or visual style, and while he touches on Boetticher’s work at Universal, it would have been beneficial if he’d discuss how his later, more independent work at Randolph Scott’s Ranown Pictures was different. The only remaining extras on the disc are an assortment of trailers.

Overall

Horizons West sees the great and still undervalued Budd Boetticher operating on a more epic scale but still with his distinctively ruthless efficiency.

Score: 
 Cast: Robert Ryan, Julie Adams, Rock Hudson, Judith Braun, John McIntire, Raymond Burr, James Arness, Dennis Weaver, Frances Bavier, Tom Powers, John Hubbard  Director: Budd Boetticher  Screenwriter: Louis Stevens  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 82 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1952  Release Date: May 11, 2021  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.