With Ride Lonesome (1959), we finish the Bud Boetticher/Randolph Scott westerns. We weren't sure if we had already seen it, but Netflix sent it (a surprise from the Wait section), so we watched it.
It starts, as so many of these do, with Scott riding between some big rocks - a familiar location, in Lone Pine, I think. He captures the outlaw James Best, but his gang gets away. Best tells his gang to tell his brother Frank.
Scott and Best arrive at a stage coach stop and find the station man gone, leaving his worried wife Karen Steele to hold down the fort. And so she must do, when Pernell Roberts and his sidekick James Coburn show up, and it looks like they plan to rob the stage. But when the stagecoach arrives, it's filled with dead men - the Apaches got them.
When they Indians arrive, Scott and Steele go out to negotiate. The chief wants to trade the woman for a horse - and it turns out the horse belonged to Steele's husband.
So now we have a pair of badmen, a tribe of hostile Apaches, and a widow, and Scott still has to take Best in for the bounty. By the way, the bad men have heard that the town of Santa Cruz is offering amnesty for all past crimes for anyone who brings Best in, and they want to be the ones to collect.
Also, we know that Best's brother Frank is coming, and he's the real bad-ass. Best is just the kid brother.
It all ends up by a hanging tree in a dry wash. Spoiler? OK, SPOILER - Frank, Lee van Cleef, killed Scott's wife, and he plans to use Best as bait to flush out van Cleef.
If you recognize any of the elements to this, like the stagecoach station (Comanche Station), or the hanging tree (Buchanan Rides Alone), the bad guy's dumb sidekick (Tall T), some of the locations, and so forth, I don't think you are imagining it. It makes a good capper to the series.
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