TALL MAN RIDING

Just stayed up late to watch a movie that wasn't even that good. But I'd never seen it before and it starred Randolph Scott. And no matter how corny, or Confederacy apologist, or easily dismissed a movie might be, if it's got Randolph Scott in it I can't resist.

Scott was kind of the anti-John Wayne. The usually gentlemanly cowboy who usually lived by some higher code, unfortunately too often the mythical honorable Southern rebel who had been fighting for the mythically honorable lost cause.

But he was also rumored to have been having an affair with Cary Grant when they lived together in Hollywood and was outed as "gay" after his death, though I don't know how anyone can prove anything like that without having been there themselves.

When I was a kid none of that was known or even suspected in my world. All I knew was I loved the way Randolph talked, moved, rode a horse, drew his gun, fought and mostly smiled at the women. He had a charismatic charm that never made him as big a star with the adults as he was with young boys and girls. And his most artistically and commercially successful flicks included bigger stars with him.

But even in those terrible tributes to the glory of the old South, I still love to watch him on screens of any size. And though I'll be tired in the morning for staying up late to catch a throwaway old Western with him and Dorothy Malone, who had her own B movie charismatic charm, and then to write this, I feel deeply satisfied. Like the old Saturday movie matinees used to leave me feeling. Thanks Mister Randolph Scott for that.