Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tall in the Saddle!

TitS, for short.

Like noirs, slashers, rom-coms and found footage flicks, the western proliferated mainly because it was cheap to produce en masse, leading to an endless succession of mediocre entries with generic titles that could easily be mistaken one for another. The best entries often combined the setting with an unusual genre angle: the original 3:10 to Yuma largely foregoes action for suspense, and silent classic The Wind is an eerie psychological character study. Tall in the Saddle likewise takes a detour through murder mystery territory, though I barely noticed on the first viewing, because the plot is easily and cheerfully forgotten amid a rapid-fire procession of great scenes and oddball characters.

A little-acknowledged cliché is rendering exposition scenes more dramatic/hilarious by having characters eavesdrop from bushes.

John Wayne is Rocklin, an easygoing Chad who breezes into town courtesy of one of the great western geezers played by George "Gabby" Hayes. This cross-generational buddyship sets the affable tone for the picture, with Hayes' ham-and-cheese gurning counterpointing Wayne's laconic deadpan to consistently endearing effect.

A whole road trip movie with these two would have been perfectly acceptable.

Rocklin's pursuit of a property claim is complicated by murder and intrigue, and a classic male fantasy conceit in which a blonde Betty (Audrey Long) and brunette Veronica (Ella Raines) appear to vie for his affections.

Which way western man/porque no los dos?

The ubiquity of this dynamic must speak to some deeply Jungian archetype in the male psyche. Long embodies the demure tradwife, while Raines chews scenery as the gun-toting bad girl. Perhaps the key to the fantasy is that either way, you win.

>ywn be fatally shot by ella raines because she overheard a third-hand rumour that you caught her brother cheating at cards
Why even live?

In this series I aim to bring attention to forgotten gems as much as praise the classics, so I'm tending not to say too much to keep what may be your first viewing fresh. With Tall, however, there's not much I want to say other than to recommend it at the end of a long day's work. Each genre is a list of variations on a theme, and sometimes the variables of plot, setting, characters, cast, dialogue and so on just align the right way, like a pleasing passage of improvised jazz. Tall isn't the most ambitious or ""important"" western, but if time spent smiling like a fool while watching it is any sort of worthy metric, it's in a class of its own.

Sometimes you just want to see John Wayne ride horses, drawl folksily, and punch people.

It's often remarked upon how seldom movies scale the heights of Great Art, but it's less often recognised how seldom they're great entertainment. So many movies start out strong but lose their way and become maudlin as they drag out that late-act-two low-point, possibly out of misplaced fear that they'll be dismissed as frivolous without some po-faced moping making up the "drama" quota for srs art. Others make the even worse gaffe of trying to make some point or other about society, religion, politics or some other heady subject matter on which they're utterly unqualified to speak. Tall makes no point, makes no attempt to make a point, and even makes its melodramatic low-points somehow cheerful, more a well-judged ebb than an indulgent wallow.

We're even treated to some scenery porn at just the right moments, giving the mostly town-bound action physical space to breathe.

"But why single this assembly-line western out among all others?" you sound out, as though phonetically, brows knitted in simianesque concentration. Let me put it to you this way: if I can eat anywhere, I might gamble on some froo-froo haute cuisine, but if I want a burger, no amount of esoteric shit is going to satisfy me like a burger, and in that context, Tall is like a Five Guys in a world of Big Macs.

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