Decision at Sundown (1957)

decision-at-sundownAnother Budd Boetticher film starring Randolph Scott, another story about a troubled loner in the Old West. It’s Boetticher and Scott’s third low-budget western together and the big difference here is that Randolph Scott, on a mission to avenge his wife’s death, isn’t quite playing with a full deck. He’s not much of a hero. He’s not even much of an anti-hero. He’s actually a hurt and confused wreck, the saddest man in the saloon. The villain (John Carroll) is a slimy philanderer who once shacked up with Scott’s wife, but we gradually learn that the situation is a little more complex than that. It’s an unusual story with another great Randolph Scott performance, but it’s also easily one of the lesser Scott-Boetticher films. The whole movie is only an hour and seventeen minutes long, but the pace still meanders here and there. It’s the first Scott-Boetticher film that wasn’t written by Burt Kennedy. Charles Lang wrote this one.