Horizons West (1952)

As an early ’50s Budd Boetticher Western, Horizons West will always be of interest in light of his later classics with Randolph Scott. It isn’t quite up to the standards of those later films—it’s quite an ambitious story that doesn’t quite come off—but it’s still well worth watching.

The Hammond brothers, Dan (Robert Ryan) and Neil (Rock Hudson), return to their Texas ranch at the end of the civil war. Neil happily returns to ranching (and largely disappears from the story for the next hour or so), while Dan gives up ranching to pursue his interest in making money. Having failed to get in with the slimy—but largely legitimate—businessmen that now run Austin Dan takes up cattle rustling and evidently make a success of it. Dan’s rise to wealth in the early parts of the film is one of it’s weaker features: it’s just too sudden to be convincing with his rise to leadership of a band of outlaws being practically instant. It also features a rouge Mexican(?) general who controls a small, essentially independent state that would seem more in place in a spaghetti western than an early ’50s American western.

The more successful aspect of this, though, is the way in which the film manages to keep Dan as a sympathetic character for an impressively long time. Partly this is done by having his main adversary being even less savoury than him, but it’s still impressive given that he’s obviously driven by self-interest rather than desperation.

Dan becomes increasing ruthless, and forms a romance with the similarly mercenary wife/widow of one the main businessmen. This love-interest role is well played by Julie Adams and gives her a more interesting character than her normal generic-western-woman roles sometimes are, although she’s only in it a little intermittently. Eventually Dan is forced into conflict with his brother Neil – the second main weaknesses of the film, since Neil is basically forgotten about for much of the runtime, so his decision to stand up to Dan seems to come out of necessity rather than from anything we know about Neil’s character.

Still, generally good, if not perfect. The version I saw was shown on TV in the UK, and looked decent enough, albeit with some places when the different colours don’t quite line up. I imagine the various DVD versions look basically the same, but have no evidence to support this guess.