A dark Western comparable in its pessimistic tone to Fred Zinnemann's classic High Noon (1952), Westbound (1959) depicts a violent power struggle in 1864 America, between the North and the South during the Civil War. It was also one of the few Hollywood films set during the Civil War which actually chose sides and treated the North as virtuous and Southerners as villainous.

Union Captain John Hayes (Randolph Scott) is ordered by his Army superiors to set up a stagecoach delivery route to transport gold from California to Union forces back East. But in the small Colorado town of Julesberg, where he supervises the gold run, Hayes encounters violent resistance from the pro-Confederate locals dominated by the town's ruthless hotel owner Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan) and his vicious gang of outlaws led by the malevolent Mace (Michael Pate).

Teaming up with a local farmer, a young Union soldier Rod Miller (Michael Dante), and his beautiful wife, Jeanie (Karen Steele), Hayes assembles the horses, coaches and lodgings to operate his Overland stage line. But soon another, smaller war has broken out between North and South, as Hayes' allies and Putnam's thugs battle for dominance. The Putnam gang stops at nothing to intercept the Overland's booty -- including murder. In one shocking scene, a stagecoach which the gang knows carries a mother and her young daughter as passengers, is nevertheless mortally attacked, symbolizing the gang's disregard for human life.

Complicating affairs is the still-smoldering relationship between Hayes and Norma Putnam (Virginia Mayo), now married to the wealthy, corrupt Clay Putnam, but beginning to question her husband's shady business.

But in Oscar "Budd" Boetticher Westerns, it is typically the violent struggles between men, not romantic imbroglios, which compose the central action of the picture. Boetticher creates an atmosphere of stifling tension from the moment Hayes arrives in the town and is publicly humiliated by the horsewhip-brandishing Mace. Even the town's women, standing at the sidelines, laugh at Hayes' shame, in an indication of how bitterly Boetticher views these Southern sympathizers. The film's atmosphere is unrelentingly grim -- even the war-maimed Rod is shown no mercy, ostracized and taunted by the town thugs and served tainted food by a local restaurant owner.

The Western is known for its pairings of actor and director, like John Wayne and John Ford, or James Stewart and Anthony Mann. And Boetticher's films boasted a similar union, of director and star Randolph Scott, who also appeared in Boetticher's Ride Lonesome, the same year.

A prototypical Western hero with his tall, lean, rugged good looks, Scott's presence helped define seven of Boetticher's classic B-Westerns made between 1956 and 1960 and produced by the independent Ranown company.

Though less known than John Wayne or James Stewart today, Scott was a perennially popular Hollywood box-office draw in Boetticher's Westerns and retired from the business one of Hollywood's wealthiest men with multimillion dollar holdings in oil wells, real estate, and securities.

Beloved by connoisseurs of the genre, Boetticher was known primarily as a director of Westerns, though he also branched out into bullfight films (Boetticher once worked as a professional matador in Mexico) and the occasional gangster picture (The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). Boetticher's tension-driven Westerns of the Fifties are nimble, tight productions, and Westbound is characteristic of the director's best work in the genre which stood at the divide between the classic era of John Ford and Anthony Mann, and the darker cycle ushered in with the more violent, pessimistic Westerns to come from Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.

Director: Bud Boetticher
Producer: Henry Blanke
Screenplay: Berne Giler, Albert S. Le Vino (story)
Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley
Production Design: Howard Campbell
Music: David Buttolph
Cast: Randolph Scott (Capt. John Hayes), Virginia Mayo (Norma Putnam), Karen Steele (Jeanie Miller), Michael Dante (Rod Miller), Andrew Duggan (Clay Putnam), Michael Pate (Mace), Wally Brown (Stubby).
C-72m.

By Felicia Feaster