Westbound is often ignored as a Boetticher Western because it does not have the single-minded and austere quality of the Ranown Westerns that Boetticher made around the same time, including Ride Lonesome, also made in 1959, that were written by Burt Kennedy and produced by Harry Joe Brown. But Westbound is an excellent Western even if it is outside the cycle of Boetticher's more personal films.
Westbound stars craggy Randolph Scott as a Union officer in 1864 who is assigned to run a stagecoach company in Julesberg, Colorado that will make daily shipments of gold from California to the East to help the Union Army. Julesberg is run by Southern sympathizers who will do all they can to stop Scott, including destroying stagecoaches full of innocent civilians. Scott also has to deal with his former lover, played by Virginia Mayo, who is now married to the town boss, as well as with Karen Steele, who is married to a disabled Union soldier, played by Michael Dante. The movie is beautifully photographed in Warnercolor, with its emphasis on greens and blues, by veteran cinematographer J. Pervell Marley, whose career began in the twenties and includes Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941).
When Scott has to shoot it our with the town boss's hired guns he is surprised to see the town's citizens show up to help (another rebuke of High Noon). Virginia Mayo decides to head back East while Karen Steele, whose husband has been killed by the hired guns, stays to run the stagecoach station and hopes that Scott will eventually return, as he rides off at the end.
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