A stunning new digital restoration, accomplished by Grover Crisp of Sony Columbia, of a classic western by Budd Boetticher, subject of a retrospective at the Bologna festival (and our own Cinematheque) in 2002. “Is this the best of the Boetticher-Scott Westerns?” asked film historian Clyde Jeavons at the time, and quickly answered: “Certainly it is the wittiest, most lyrical and least pessimistic and boasts the most amiable outlaws.” Jeavons praised the recent photo-chemical restoration, but Crisp’s new digital restoration is even more vivid and pristine; one can forget the film’s faded negative, watching the brilliant Scope images conjured in this print. Terse and implacable, Ride Lonesome is a revenge drama of laconic power. A ravaged Randolph Scott, mainstay of Boetticher’s legendary “Ranown cycle” of which Ride Lonesome is a central work, captures a young outlaw as bait for his brother (an ophidian Lee Van Cleef), who once committed an unspeakable act against Scott. Joined by scheming gunmen (with a charming James Coburn practicing that million-Chiclets smile) and a busty blonde widow, Scott embarks on an odyssey that takes him across a sun-scalded Boetticher landscape to a lone hanging tree .... Scott, emblem of stoppered hatred, brings painful intensity to his role as avenger in this unmissable “small masterpiece” (Tom Milne).