Alongside Anthony Mann's Westerns, seen recently at PFA, Budd Boetticher made the genre's key postwar series. However, the best Boetticher Westerns have been nearly impossible to see for decades. Sony Pictures' widescreen color restoration (first seen here in 2001) brings back Ride Lonesome's full glory. Like Boetticher's other finest Westerns, it is written by Burt Kennedy, stars Randolph Scott, and feels like an unrushed short story. As it opens, bounty hunter 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 basics-seven characters lost among primordial boulders, the essential Boetticher landscape. In a genre where the gunfight ending is nearly invariable, this film builds to surprises.