Tall in the Saddle

Tall in the Saddle is a hard-boiled western, which is a combination that works better than it has any right to.

John Wayne plays Rocklin, a ranch hand who rolls in on the stagecoach expecting honest work and finds his boss has been murdered. He starts asking questions and gets bullets for answers. There are red herrings, shadowy motives, and a femme fatale in the form of Ella Raines, a ranch owner who takes one look at Wayne and decides he’s hers.

Wayne’s character has edge. “I never feel sorry for anything that happens to a woman,” he announces early on, and you can feel the script testing the audience. It works because the film is smart enough to leave it there. The movie then lets his actions do the talking, and his actions are decent enough. It’s a neat trick.

Wayne’s acting coach, Paul Fix, co-wrote the screenplay and knew to give Wayne lines that spoke volumes with few words. When the stage manager warns Wayne that the stage driver is a “grumpy old cuss,” Wayne replies, “I like grumpy old cusses. Hope to live long enough to be one.” Later, after Wayne pistol-whips a drunken would-be assassin, a scandalized old woman shrieks that she saw him strike the poor man. “Yes, ma’am,” Wayne replies. “Just as hard as I could.”

Wayne reportedly found this story himself and struck a deal with RKO to develop it. Biographers quibble over whether he took a pay cut for creative control or collected his standard salary,¹ but his fingerprints are everywhere. The supporting cast is stacked with friends and former co-stars. Gabby Hayes plays the grumpy old cuss who becomes Wayne’s semi-sidekick, Ward Bond turns up as a shady judge, and Fix plays a crooked deputy.

The problem is Raines. She plays petulant when she needs to play dangerous. Her wide eyes evoke a teenager denied the car keys, not a grown woman scorned. Fans of The Big Sleep will recognize the type: she’s Carmen Sternwood when the part needs Vivian Rutledge. I suspect Raines had it in her, but she needed a director who would pull her back. Howard Hawks would have done it in one take. She settles down in the third act, when action replaces emoting, but by then you’ve already spent an hour wondering what Wayne sees in her besides the skin-tight jeans.

The mystery also trips at the finish line. The resolution arrives as an exposition dump—one character explaining the whole scheme after getting caught, Scooby-Doo style. It’s the oldest cheat in the genre, and it’s a shame the script that produced those sharp one-liners couldn’t find a sharper way to close the case.

Still, Tall in the Saddle entertains. Wayne elevates what should be an average picture through sheer charisma. Just a decade earlier, Wayne and Hayes were grinding out bargain-basement mystery-westerns for Monogram Pictures. The kind shot in a week on borrowed sets. Tall in the Saddle is the movie those oaters sold on their posters. It has mountain vistas, furnished sets, and a supporting cast of actual characters rather than wardrobe changes. But most of all it has a fully-formed John Wayne. And that’s enough.