The Tall T

Budd Boetticher has been more neglected by home video than any other major American director. This box set, featuring five of the seven films he made with star and Western icon Randolph Scott, is a major step toward correcting that neglect. Boetticher's best Westerns are models of austerity, tight, tough dramas on an unforgiving frontier, and "The Tall T," adapted by Burt Kennedy (Boetticher's favorite screenwriter) from an Elmore Leonard story, is one of his best. The laconic Scott is a struggling rancher caught in the middle of a botched stage robbery turned kidnapping, and Maureen O'Sullivan is the aging newlywed and heiress they hold for ransom. Richard Boone is the greatest of Boetticher and Kennedy's charming villains, the quietly ruthless and charismatic commanding leader of a small gang of homicidal punks who tries to bond with prisoner Scott.

The set includes the offbeat black comedy "Buchanan Rides Alone" and the grim "Decision at Sundown" (all mastered to fit the 16-by-9 frame), along with his wide-screen classics "Ride Lonesome" and "Comanche Station," both scripted by Kennedy and set in the almost abstract nowhereland of the desert. The latter films, like "The Tall T," are lean stories about men on the dangerous, inhospitable frontier, and they stand next to the greatest works of Anthony Mann and John Ford. The five-disc set features introductions to the films, and you can't do any better than listening to Martin Scorsese discuss the series on "The Tall T." Taylor Hackford and Clint Eastwood also contribute intros; and there's commentary on three films (one each by Hackford and film historians Jeanine Basinger and Jeremy Arnold), original trailers for each film, and the excellent feature-length documentary "Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That," directed by Bruce Ricker and produced by Eastwood.