Budd Boetticher | One Mysterious Night | The Bullfighter and the Lady | Horizons West | The Killer Is Loose | The Tall T | Maverick: War of the Silver Kings | Maverick: Point Blank | Maverick: According to Hoyle | Buchanan Rides Alone | Ride Lonesome | Westbound | Comanche Station | The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond | The Rifleman: Stopover
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Some common visual style aspects of Boetticher's films:
Boston Blackie is a master of disguise, like many sleuths. This is part of his characterization throughout the series. Boetticher includes plenty of disguise in One Mysterious Night. Disguise is used by the crook in The Killer Is Loose.
The camera movements tend to have a left-to-right or right-to-left motion.
The movements often go from one side of the set to another, and then often back again, in the reverse direction - all in the same shot. Some shots, such as one in the inspector's office, or the shot after the shooting on the street, involve more than two movements back and forth across the set. Boetticher can follow characters, as they move back and forth from one side of the set to the other. Or he can simply have the camera explore the scene.
Sometimes, Boetticher uses simple pans to move back and forth across the set: the early shot of the police crossing the street to get into the hotel, the back-and-forth panning in the inspector's office. Other times, Boetticher can combine panning with tracking, as in the first shot in the Chinese restaurant, in which a back-and-forth pan seems to give way to tracking that follows the waiter.
Boetticher can use a slightly elevated angle for his pans and tracks, that reveals the layout of the sets, and makes clear the motion of his characters through it. The elevated angle is steepest in the scene near the end, in which Blackie and the police arrive at the crooks' hideout. He can also pan or track head-on, with a non-tilted camera.
Boetticher can also move his camera forward, often to frame his characters more tightly. This can occur alone, or as part of an otherwise panning-based sequence. More rarely, he can move his camera straight back a little, also to reframe.
Both at the apartment, and at the pawnshop, Boetticher includes camera movements that sweep behind walls of the sets, following the characters from room to room. These are relatively common in movies. Still, such shots can have a non-realistic quality, and are quite conspicuous. These do not seem like "invisible" camera movements. They were a form of "Hollywood magic" that might be noticeable even to naive audiences. These room-to-room tracks also move from left to right, and right to left, like most of the camera movement in One Mysterious Night.
There are also some vertical camera movements. Boetticher moves up from the police playing cards, to the crooks hidden above them, pretending to be tailor's dummies. And Boetticher moves straight up, following his heroes' attempt to escape from the Murphy bed.
The women, who work on terms of equality in a man's world, anticipate the later women in Boetticher's Westerns. The emotionally strong switchboard operator, and her brother, the weak-kneed punk who gets involved in the robbery, anticipate the strong decent woman-lesser crooked male husband and wife of Seven Men From Now.
A group of reporters hang out at police headquarters gathering crime news. They are dressed in similar suits, that are well groomed, but which have a working-man feel to them.
The police Inspector Farraday and Blackie have a close relationship. The dialogue refers to it as "a beautiful friendship". This phrase has overtones of special male bonding. It is used in this sense in Ellery Queen's mystery novel The Dragon's Teeth (1939) (Chapter 1), and at the end of the film Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1941). Farraday keeps threatening Blackie with arrest, something which Blackie makes clear he enjoys, in dialogue at the end of the film. It is part of the men's duel of wits, a game they play.
Dialogue emphasizes the close bond between Blackie and his assistant Runt, characters who are familiar from previous Boston Blackie movies. Not only do the two men work together, but they sleep together in the same room. They are together 24 hours a day. Sleeping scenes run through later Boetticher, often showing people sleeping in a group. After this dialogue about sleep early in the film, later we see Blackie and Runt sleeping in bed together.
Some earlier episodes of Boston Blackie had bits of left-wing politics. Confessions of Boston Blackie (Edward Dmytryk, 1941) talks about Boston Blackie stealing pearls from the rich, and handing them out to people on bread lines. One wonders if the relentlessly working class nature of One Mysterious Night is designed to make it a "proletarian film".
The jewel exhibit is to raise money for the war effort of the United Nations, a favorite term among left wingers to refer to the Allies as a group (this is not what we today think of as the UN, which had not yet been formed.)
Blackie himself is working for a tool manufacturing company. He is depicted as a "businessman", so the film is not anti-business.
The anonymous costume designer of One Mysterious Night must have liked the look, because a very similar leather jacket is worn by guest star Steve Cochran in Boston Blackie's Rendezvous (Arthur Dreifuss, 1945). Both jackets have a series of button fastenings up the front, and diagonal pockets; neither has any zippers.
Leather jackets were just becoming popular for men in this era, and One Mysterious Night (1944) is one of the earliest films known to me where it is worn as a fashion statement (as opposed to occasional jackets worn by cab drivers, pilots, fisherman, etc.). They will recur in High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941), The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1945), San Quentin (Gordon Douglas, 1946), Railroaded! (Anthony Mann, 1947), The Street With No Name (William Keighley, 1948), The Undercover Man (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), The Man From Planet X (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951) and 99 River Street (Phil Karlson, 1953), where they are largely worn by tough working class good guys on the edge of the law, like Boston Blackie himself. There are hints in most of these films that there is something exciting and not quite respectable about men wearing such jackets - which probably made them more popular than ever in real life. Blackie is a reformed crook, the heroes of Railroaded! and 99 River Street are innocent but tough working men falsely accused of crimes, the hero of The Street With No Name is a government agent going undercover as a crook in a gang, etc.
The police of various cities wear them in Desperate (Anthony Mann, 1947), The Undercover Man and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), and Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952), followed by the black leather jackets of LAPD cops in The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953), Code 2 (Fred Wilcox, 1953) and Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954). Villainous-but-glamorous bikers wear them in Thérèse Raquin (Marcel Carné, 1953) and The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1954), films which cemented a sexy bad boy image for men in leather jackets.
The street sign is on a large crossroads-style pole. And it gives way to a street scene that soon will be full of police, in striking formation. There are two other images in the film that also combine poles, revolving objects, and glamorized police.
At the gem show, the crooks steal a kid's pinwheel. This is a revolving object on a tall, pole-like stick. A kind-hearted and handsome policeman tries to help the kids out.
At the pawnshop, the police carry really long, black nightsticks. Once again, these include some good looking cops, in spit and polish police uniforms. The police do not spin these nightsticks at the pawnshop.
But soon, in an alley, the crooks see and are scared by a giant shadow of a policeman. This shadow is indeed spinning his nightstick. It makes for an archetypal image of a policeman, gigantic, and with the pole-like nightstick in full rotary motion. This too is a figure of style, on the borders of non-naturalistic imagery.
Street scenes will recur in The Killer Is Loose and Buchanan Rides Alone, which also involve rapid movements of individuals along the streets.
The newsstand at the hotel contains the woman who runs it.
The desk at the women's hotel contains the clerk.
The Chinese restaurant has a booth, built into the wall. Blackie and the switchboard operator have dinner there, seated inside the booth.
The woman reporter uses a phone booth.
At the end, the police ascend to the crooks' apartment through the hall staircase. This staircase is not shown through overhead or tilted angles, the way stairs are frequently (and gloriously) depicted in film noir. Boetticher instead uses a radically different approach. He shoots the upstairs hall and the staircase from the front. We see the hall, and we can see down the stairs, in a deep focus shot. Soon the staircase fills up with climbing policemen. The stairway forms a "box", a container for the men in it. This is one of Boetticher's boxes, three-dimensional spaces that contain people. And it is a strange shape: a hallway with a staircase leading down from it: a familiar sight, but actually geometrically quite odd and complex, once you come to think of it.
The fire escape down which the crooks flee is in a box shaped alley, tall and narrow. It connects with the rest of the world through a brick wall, joined at a non-90 degree angle. Boetticher will include more odd shaped alleys in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond: another giant "box". The alley in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond will also turn on a polygonal corner, rather than a 90 degree right angle. It too will feature a fire escape.
Blackie and his assistant get tied up by crooks, upside down on a Murphy bed. We see them hanging there, in the closet that contains the Murphy bed. In later Boetticher films, Rock Hudson will get tied up in Horizons West, and there are lots of captives in other Boetticher Westerns. Earlier, Blackie had been handcuffed to a chair at the police station by the inspector; and Blackie and the Inspector get tied up a third time, at the film's climax. Blackie himself uses handcuffs on his friend the police inspector, in the taxi.
There is a striking camera movement near the end, when the hero moves forward endlessly down the tunnel, on the way to the arena. He passes many other bullfighters. They are a Boetticher group of men dressed alike.
Soon, the matadors enter the arena, in a geometric procession.
There is a striking overhead pan, showing the car leaving the arena. This is one of several Boetticher shots from a steep overhead angle - at its start, at least.
Horizons West is basically a gangster film, although it is set in the old West. Ryan's character rises to power through illegal means, just like a gangster in 1930's Chicago, and he has a group of henchmen who aid him in his task. As in many gangster films, we see the anguish of the honest family who love him, but who are opposed to his crooked ways. Robert Ryan resembles the later Legs Diamond. Both are well dressed smoothies who both charm and cheat their way to the top.
The Hawkins' story precedes Joseph Hayes' novel The Desperate Hours (1954), which Hayes made into a play (1955) and film (1955).
Poole the criminal is also an example of a Boetticher trickster character. He enjoys tricking the prison guards and Highway Patrol - although this is much more sinister than the cops tricked by Boston Blackie or Maverick. He uses disguise.
In several Boetticher films, the hero is solitary or has a single sidekick, and the villain has an entourage. In The Killer Is Loose this situation is reversed: the villain is conspicuously a man on the run alone, while the policeman hero has a large supporting team.
The murdered prison guard winds up dead in a ditch, like the victim shot dead in the stream in Comanche Station. This also recalls characters who get submerged in water troughs in The Tall T and Comanche Station.
The rain which engulfs the latter parts of the film, recalls the fog in Escape in the Fog, and the snow in Stopover.
The finale of characters walking around, being suspense targets for a possible shoot-out, anticipates Buchanan Rides Alone.
In the same scene, the wife and husband are shown cooking breakfast, anticipating the meal preparation in Stopover. While the wife is the primary cook, the husband is shown helping her with both the food, and setting the table. It forms a contrast to The Tall T and War of the Silver Kings, in which cooking is regarded by society as "woman's work", much to the resistance of the characters. As in War of the Silver Kings, the hero is conspicuously uninterested in the food which the heroine tries to provide for him.
The hero in The Killer Is Loose tries to distract the heroine from discussing serious issues, by helping with the cooking. It doesn't work! There is perhaps a suggestion, that by helping in the kitchen, the husband is trying to placate his wife, symbolically offering her support. The husband cooks in a purely voluntary manner, like the good guy men in Stopover, and utterly unlike the villain's henchman who has to be forced into it in The Tall T, who loudly regards it as woman's work.
Later, the villain Poole will force Mrs. Flanders to cook for him. This bad guy is insisting on traditional gender roles in the kitchen. The villains in The Tall T also force the heroine to cook for them, something which plainly makes her uncomfortable.
The bad guy is engulfed in the system of farming and food production. His whole prison escape, and later his passing through the Highway Patrol roadblock, centers on this.
We also see the little boy eating fruit, while watching television. He seems to be feeding himself, rather than having women do it for him.
The truck cabins are also spaces containing the bad guy.
After the shooting of Poole's wife, Poole is discovered in a space in the corner, behind a chair.
The murderous hoe used by Poole, is another of the long poles in Boetticher.
The heroine and hero's kitchen is purely rectilinear, with wallpaper covered in large squares. Boetticher shoots it frontally, which emphasizes this, during the "making the breakfast" scene. The screen becomes a pleasing series of rectilinear regions.
The wall map of the city is divided up into numerous polygonal regions. It adds a striking jigsaw quality to the scenes shot in front of it. There is also a circle on the map, showing a radius where the missing man might be. In this scene, the hero's head is framed by one of the polygonal regions, while his assistant's (Michael Pate) head is located at the join of several line segments on the map. It is standard classical Hollywood procedure to frame characters against regions of the background. Boetticher is following this tradition, but taking advantage of his highly unusual polygonal map to offer a striking variant example of such a composition.
At the Flanders home, Poole is shot in front of wallpaper covered with numerous small squares.
The Flanders house is on a curved road.
The uniformed cop Denny is dumb, and does comedy relief. He recalls the equally none-too-swift uniformed cops who get bamboozled by the pad guys in the pawnshop in One Mysterious Night.
An overhead shot of the station shows its architecture as a series of rectilinear forms. The sides of the rectangles are parallel to the frames of the screen.
The ranch owner wants Scott to be his #2 again. In this, he wants Scott to become like Abe Carbo in Buchanan Rides Alone. It also resembles the rich town boss in War of the Silver Kings, trying to hire Maverick as his lieutenant. Just like Maverick, Scott resists. Scott is not smart enough to stay out of the boss' gambles - and maybe he even enjoys being caught in his net. But Scott has the determination, to avoid going back to work for his old boss again.
The actual shooting of Billy Jack, is staged with sexual symbolism. The rifle is positioned like a phallic symbol, and it looks as if the two men are having a sexual encounter. The rifle perhaps becomes another of the long poles in Boetticher.
Billy Jack is the main character in leather clothes in The Tall T, wearing a spectacular pair of chaps that call attention to his body. Earlier we saw Scott's difficulties in getting his black leather boots on.
The motion of the cart, at a right angle, anticipates such moving characters in the famed opening camera movement of Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958).
Soon, Boetticher stages a nice tracking shot, sticking closely to the hero and Rintoon as they cross the street.
The villains force her into a traditional female task, cooking. She can do it - but it is clearly not at the center of her life. The chief bad guy (Richard Boone) later forces Billy Jack to help her with the cooking, despite his assertions that it's "women's work". Cooking was indeed strongly associated with gender in 1950's America: the number one such activity, after child rearing.
In War of the Silver Kings, the main female character throws herself at hero Maverick, giving a speech saying that education in women is not important. Maverick is completely non-interested in her. She emphasizes her skill with cooking throughout the film, showing she is good at what was viewed then as the traditional female role, even if she has no education. The film does not comment: it neither endorses nor condemns her idea. But she raises no interest in the hero Maverick whatsoever.
The heroine of The Tall T is far less proficient at cooking: we see her having trouble picking up a hot coffee pot. But she interests the hero very much. This is the opposite of the situation in War of the Silver Kings.
Such gender issues are treated with the same spectacular story telling efficiency as everything else in Boetticher and Kennedy. They whiz by so fast, one hardly notices they are there. But they form a subplot running through The Tall T.
However, War of the Silver Kings is unusually political. It does not restrict itself to allegory, or Western conventions of "the stranger cleaning up the town". It actually delves into the politics and economics of the town, in a detailed, and highly liberal way. American television of the era actually seems to have been sometimes quite remarkably politically liberal. One can compare the TV shows of Joseph H. Lewis, which are also explicitly political.
War of the Silver Kings is also different from the Scott films, in that the hero never uses violence to achieve any goals, not even in self-defense. He is an entirely non-violent hero. However, he never uses Gandhian non-violent mass protest, either.
Slick, sly handsome smoothies like Maverick are more typically villains in Boetticher. We are used to Legs Diamond, who is in many ways a nasty person, despite the character's deceptive leading man charm. Maverick has all of Legs' good looks and skill as a con man. But Maverick uses his talents entirely on the side of good.
Maverick's story snowballs, just as Legs' does, but always in a benevolent direction. Both characters eventually become hugely prominent. While Maverick is successful at his goals in the other two Boetticher episodes, he does not achieve this sort of huge worldly success in them. His rise in War of the Silver Kings is similar in scale to that of Legs Diamond's, or Robert Ryan's in Horizons West.
At the end of the tale, Maverick turns down a chance to be the town boss' lieutenant, running things in Echo Springs. This is exactly the role played by Abe Carbo in Buchanan Rides Alone to come. Maverick has some interesting dialogue, explaining why this would be bad for the town. In the later film, Boetticher will show the real waste of Carbo's impressive abilities, running his dreadful burg.
Maverick is dressed like the town boss in Decision at Sundown: suit, frilled shirt, fancy vest. The town boss in Decision at Sundown is a bad guy, but not entirely bad, and a source of energy. This kind of character is now using his talents for good, in the form of Maverick.
Instead, Maverick develops an on-going, male bonding relationship with saloon keeper Big Mike (the ultra-macho Leo Gordon). In some ways, this might - or might not - be viewed as a gay relationship.
The great bulk of the Maverick TV series, after Boetticher left after three episodes, portrays its heroes as heterosexual. There is often a romantic encounter between the hero and a pretty guest star. The series as a whole is notably "straight".
At the end, the crowd is carrying clubs, and Big Mike is holding a shovel, to be used as a weapon. These are also poles used by men in a group. The shovel recalls the hoe also used as a weapon by the convict in The Killer Is Loose.
The giant diagram of the mine, in the courtroom, recalls the giant wall map in The Killer Is Loose.
The election writing above the bar, recall the signs there for the boss' wedding celebration in Decision at Sundown.
Both the heroine and hero Maverick wind up manipulating and playing games with people's lives, like the con-man Legs in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. The games become quite intricate. As in that film, the games involve people's love lives, but are used to gain power in monetary situations.
Some male bonding takes place between the Sheriff and Maverick, who are rivals for the heroine. As in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, sometimes this relationship between men takes precedence over those between the hero and a woman. The hero-woman relationship is twisted and manipulated, to strengthen the male-male tie.
In some ways, the Sheriff and hero Maverick, are the Boetticher pair of authority figure and reforming crook. The Sheriff makes great show of locking the hero up in jail, and ordering him about. Such attentions often come from the authority figure, but they are often a bit tongue-in-cheek. The Sheriff also gives Maverick support when it counts, like other seemingly stern authority figures. Maverick's "reforming crookedness" is very mild compared to other such Boetticher characters, though: he is a two-bit, non-violent con man, who only runs a dodge when he is hungry.
The Sheriff (Richard Garland) wears a leather vest, making him another Boetticher man dressed in leather. He also has a conspicuous Sheriff's star on it.
Also like Point Blank, Maverick's skill with poker is featured, specifically, his ability to detect gambling fraud. However, while both Point Blank and War of the Silver Kings open with poker scenes, and then convert to general, non-poker tales, According to Hoyle concentrates on gambling throughout. Perhaps this is a reason I like it less than the other two episodes: gambling just doesn't seem to be that substantial or interesting a subject.
Like War of the Silver Kings, According to Hoyle has a second half, in which Maverick cleans up a crook-run town. His approach also recalls War of the Silver Kings. (SPOILERS) He opens a business that rivals the villain's, one that is more honest, and he distributes literature to advertise it and its honesty. He leads a full scale revolt, something that goes farther than War of the Silver Kings. This finale has political overtones.
The plot events in the second half of are shorter and simpler than those in War of the Silver Kings. They also do not show Maverick rising to prominence, as he did in the earlier show.
The character of Big Mike returns from War of the Silver Kings, once again as Maverick's friend. However, the film takes their friendship as a given, and male bonding is not featured in any substantial way in the plot of According to Hoyle.
This crooked boss is indeed another Boetticher villain with an entourage.
Similarly, Boetticher uses great ingenuity with his interiors, photographing them from every possible angle and direction. The bar is used in repeated contexts. First it is the location of the killing. Later, the awful trial is staged there.
Strange Shaped Spaces. Scott appears, riding through a narrow canyon or passage in the rocks. Later, at the station, he rests at night between the stagecoach wheel, and the passenger coach: an odd shaped, narrow space.
The heroine is introduced in the doorway of the station. The small doorway is just big enough to contain her.
Elevated camera angles, to show geometric layouts. The opening overhead shot of the canyon is a classic example.
Pans. Boetticher pans vertically in the ravine to follow Scott, then moves up and to the right, to reveal the bad guy. This is an outstandingly complex shot.
There are soon many other pans and occasional tracks to follow Boetticher's characters through the landscape. These are usually left-to-right or right-to-left, in the Boetticher tradition.
Leather clothes. The hero wears a buckskin shirt. He also wears a leather gun belt that is an exact match for the buckskin shirt, in terms of color. It is a fancy outfit, one whose bright color calls attention to it. The shirt looks like it is a bit hard and time consuming to put on or take off, like the stiffly buttoned-up leather jacket worn by the hero of One Mysterious Night.
Wind keeps blowing, ruffling the fringe on Scott's shirt. This calls further attention to the outfit.
Color coordinated clothes. The hero wears a reddish-brown shirt and gun belt: a color harmony. He is immediately contrasted to James Best's bad guy, who wears a green top. Soon, they are joined by two more men. Parnell Roberts' green shirt links him to Best: a color coordination between the two men's costumes, like the paired black outfits worn by the heroine and Adam West in Stopover. And Parnell's sidekick (James Coburn) is in a red shirt, that echoes Scott, although much less dressily.
Red and green color contrasts are found in Fritz Lang's color films, such as Rancho Notorious (1952) and The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959).
Handcuffs. Bounty hunter Scott is soon handcuffing crook Best. Best enjoys it, laughing, and urging Scott to put on the cuffs. It is a game the two men enjoy playing.
Crooks going straight. Parnell Roberts and his sidekick are crooks trying to reform, go straight, and get fixed with the law, hoping to win an amnesty. They recall Boston Blackie and his sidekick in One Mysterious Night, also reformed crooks turned detectives. Roberts is glib, comic and charming, also like Blackie. Scott has the role of "authority figure of the law" to them, a bit like the police Inspector in One Mysterious Night. Like the Inspector, he gives them a hard time through the film, then supports them at the end, where it counts. There are hints that Scott's seemingly harsh and demanding treatment of reforming crook Roberts is a game the two men are playing, just like the Inspector and Blackie - and one that both men are enjoying. Roberts seems to really like and admire Scott.
Thirsty men. Best offers Scott coffee, not altogether sincerely (it's a trap). Soon, the heroine is offering Scott coffee, for real.
Long poles. This is more gruesome in Ride Lonesome than elsewhere in Boetticher: the long spear is sticking out of the stagecoach driver's chest.
Later, a second spear will be thrust into the ground, as the start of the negotiation.
A burial - and a prayer that does not quite happen. Roberts and sidekick have to bury the victims of the stagecoach attack. They say it's a shame that no prayers are said over the internment. Boetticher has prayer scenes elsewhere: this is one that does not quite happen. The dialogue has comic overtones, common in Boetticher's communal prayer scenes.
Working class characters. Everyone in Ride Lonesome seems to be working for a living. They are all explicitly people without money - no big shots.
The villain's entourage. Villain James Best has four men in his entourage, hidden in the hills.
Action staged with tiny figures in long shot, embedded in a landscape. We see Best's four entourage members emerging one by one, in long shots. They are small figures in the rocky landscape.
In The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), there is a restaurant with many curved arches. These low, wide arches are constantly kept in the background of the shots, adding to the composition. Other shots show the circular corrida itself. The arches seem parabolic; the angled shots of the corrida form an ellipse on the screen. This fondness for conic sections is a structural motif of the film.
Boetticher characters often have entourages. These are bands of men who follow him around and support him. They are usually seated all around the character during our first meeting with him. They are in a subordinate position, either seated at his feet, or below him at the head of the table. Boetticher carefully composes the men in the entourage. They form a detailed geometric pattern. Their gestures and body postures exude arrogance. They are only tough because they are part of this team however: it is clear that without their leader they would be pretty two bit. It is only villains and second leads who have entourages - never the hero. And never rich, respectable characters. It is men who specialize in machismo who have the entourage. The men in the entourage also wear the same sort of clothes as the hero. It is not a uniform - the clothes are all varied - but they clearly all follow the same dress code.
Protagonists in Boetticher are often motivated by a hatred of routine work. This is often symbolized by farming, which probably requires the toughest effort of any profession. Robert Ryan in Horizons West (1953) and Michael Dante in Westbound both come to mind. Both end up dead, as does the gangster in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). These are all characters who want a more adventurous life, but who reach too far.
Boetticher's characters are often tempted by women who are married to rich, somewhat older men. Sometimes these are former loves of the heroes. These women often look like the most expensive possessions of their wealthy husbands, all dolled up in elaborate clothes to match their husbands' fancy houses.
Much bigger than Boetticher's usual spaces are two fenced-in regions. One is at Comanche Station. The other is the front yard of the heroine's home, at the end. Both of the spaces are used to block off people, with people standing inside or outside of the fence also being separated in terms of the plot. Both regions look like pathetic attempts by humans to build something, in a huge, indifferent desert landscape.
There is a comedy scene in which Dobey reads the stage coach schedule, with great difficulty. He is both pathetic in his lack of skill, and admirable in his persistence and determination to read. Boetticher will return to this subject, with the admiration he has for the schoolteacher in Stopover. This was the era just after Sputnik, when Americans became deeply concerned with improving educational levels. Both of these films reflect that milieu.
In the film's second shot, he moves under a gigantic, jutting portico on a city street, a cubical area jutting out at an odd angle. Soon, he is pushing his brother into a strange region behind a newsstand, out of the way of a robbers' shoot-out. Later, he will use a roof to commit a robbery. The strange trapezoidal skylight through which Legs descends is featured. And he will retrieve the jewels from his girlfriend's purse while in a curtained kitchenette. We also see Legs inside a grilled cage in the prison visiting room.
When he is waiting by the elevator at Rothstein's, he takes up a polygonally shaped angle of the room, different from the other henchmen. (Shades of Fritz Lang, who loved polygonal regions.) And soon Legs is inside the elevator, another space that is always shown from outside, making it look both more complex, and emphasizing its spatial, box like properties as a whole.
When going to kill henchman Moran on the fire escape, Boetticher gives an overhead view of the alley. The alley turns at a polygonal corner. The whole alley image forms an irregularly shaped, giant box. This is one of the most striking images in the film.
When attacking Jesse White, Legs emerges unexpectedly out of the dumb waiter, another unusual containing space. When Legs is shot and recuperating in bed, we see the cavity of the Murphy bed behind him - Legs is essentially in a different space from everyone else in the room - and an unusual one.
Young Mark says Grace before the meal. Like the funeral prayers in Buchanan Rides Alone, this comments in a revealing, and slightly comic way, on the characters and the story.
People in Stopover are always drinking: coffee, liquor, water, medicine. Boetticher characters are really thirsty. One recalls the coffee always being served by women in Seven Men From Now, and the saloons in Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone.
However, there are big differences. There are no demons inside these characters, and no one who is essentially a gangster. This leads to a complete different resolution from any of the Ranown cycle of Westerns.
The casting of Adam West also subverts Boetticher traditions: maybe in a good way, and certainly in ways understood by the director. West is a man who oddly embodies class. He was ideally cast both as the heroic Batman and his secret identity, millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne. West has a gentlemanly, intellectual way of speaking, that serves his character here well. While tall, handsome smoothies like West tend to be corrupt gangster types in Boetticher - Robert Ryan in Horizons West, Craig Stevens in Buchanan Rides Alone, Legs Diamond - the noble West suggests something very different. West also reverses imagery and outcomes associated with Michael Dante in Westbound. And his back-story has links to some Randolph Scott characters in the Ranown films. Since much of the film is about the mystery of West's character, I will not say anything more or spoil the plot.
The heroine is also in black clothes, something unusual for a Western, and which serves to link her to West. Such coordinated outfits in Boetticher are typically worn by an outlaw and his henchmen: all-male groups. Here, both West and the heroine are social outsiders. Are they bad people? That is part of the mystery of the show.
The whiteness of the snow that is everywhere is also striking. Boetticher gets a great deal of mileage out of it in his images.
Even though this film is in black and white, not color, Boetticher puts emphasis on colors that viewers can see, like the intense black of the costumes, and white of the snow.
Mark sleeps behind a hanging blanket, through whose open bottom he can see the heroine disrobing (just her feet - this is a family show!). His half of the bedroom behind the blanket is a tight space in which he is placed.
West and Melford wind up standing on top of the stagecoach at the end. This recalls the way Legs Diamond is up near the skylight. A slanting barn roof is above them, creating another strange shaped space.
The overhead angles in front of the ranch emphasize the box-like nature of the porch: we see its roof and pillars that support it. The steep angle also makes the stagecoach look like a box. The overhead angle recalls the similar high angle on the box-like alley in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.