Tall Man Riding

This is a 1955 Randolph Scott Western, directed by Lesley Selander. It starts out in the usual way, a man riding a horse, alone in Western, open, idyllic country. But then he comes upon a shootout, and instead of getting out of the way, he gallops over, saves a guy, kills a guy. He and the guy he saves have some common past, but it's not spelled out yet. But something's up. A little later, he rides into town, goes to the saloon, drinks some whiskey. There's a card game going on, an attractive woman who sings at the saloon, a gunslinger named “The Peso Kid” standing at the bar—the usual. We start to get to know a complex web of characters. Then, up in his room with a guy, Randolph Scott removes his shirt, but they don't make love. Instead, he shows the guy the scars on his back from when he was whipped by someone. Not in a good way. So very quickly, we find out that revenge is the motive here. Soon we'll also find out that there's a woman involved (Dorothy Malone). Scott has his usual look, sharply dressed, including a neck scarf. His overall appearance is a little ragged, though, including his hat, and I think this means something. Maybe he's in store for some self-improvement. RS gets ambushed, knocked over the head with a board. Before the dudes can kill him, however, the woman who sings at the bar, Reva, rides up shooting with her rifle and saves him! She's kind of the real star of this movie—earlier she gave him a good lecture about hate, and told him he should just leave. She's totally right, too, but of course, then we wouldn't have a movie. She's played by Peggie Castle, who I'm not familiar with. Internet says she specialized in playing the “other woman.” I guess I know what that means, but I never gave it much thought—that's an interesting concept to dwell on. Anyway, there's a lot of politics in this movie—I won't go into it all—but it's a good one. It's the not uncommon setup where you have corrupt, weak, and villainous people in a town—pitted against corrupt, weak, and villainous people at a ranch. Randolph Scott is against all of them (except for Reva, who being a woman, sane, good, interesting, and not the top-billed star, gets the short end of the stick). The odds are totally against RS, and he'd be pretty much screwed if he wasn't, you know, the star of the movie. The ending is one of those that both kind of drops in from the heavens, and drops the ball. The less said about the ending, the better.