Budd Boetticher's seven modest Westerns starring Randolph Scott, released between 1956 and 1960, are rivaled in unpretentious moral complexity only by Anthony Mann's better known series with James Stewart. Ride Lonesome (1959), like the other three finest of the Boetticher series, is written by Burt Kennedy and feels like an unrushed short story, crafted on a scale where choices are not the grand historical ones about America's future but personal decisions of conscience. As Ride Lonesome opens, bounty hunter Randolph Scott easily captures a whiny young outlaw whose shifting value-as bait for more outlaws, as reward dollars, as amnesty for those who bring him in-differs for each of Scott's uninvited traveling companions. James Coburn, in his first film, is engagingly gawky, while Lee Van Cleef is already snakelike. Even by Boetticher's taut standards, Ride Lonesome is cut down to essentials-seven characters lost among primordial boulders (a characteristic Boetticher landscape, filmed near Lone Pine, California). In a genre where the gunfight ending is nearly invariable, this film builds to surprises. Scott Simmon