“In Ride Lonesome the stoic Randolph Scott plays a bounty hunter whose ostensible incentive seems to be purely mercenary. En route to delivering the murderer, Scott discovers his quarry to be an attractive lure for a variety of characters, primarily other maudits with widely diverse motives. The result is a high-powered drama replete with conflict, twisted humor and idiosyncratic heroes and outlaws. Like its atomic-age film noir counterpart, the '50s western took a nasty detour towards nihilism. Themes of vengeance and bloody quest blurred lines between good and evil, populating the screen's frontier with characters filled with ambivalence. Budd Boetticher was a master of the form and his sensibility was not lost on younger iconoclasts like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.” Laura Thielen