329. Santee

329. Santee (1973)
Director: Gary Nelson
Writer: Brand Bell
From: Cult Cinema

A bounty hunter takes in the son of one of his targets and raises him as his own.

Holy crow, Glenn Ford! I’ve seen some big names in some of these movies, but none quite as big as that. How did a Glenn Ford movie end up on one of these cheapie sets?

Oh. Well. That would do it.

We open on Jody, a young man waiting in a small town for word from his father. Meanwhile, his father and his small gang are riding toward the town. After six minutes, they finally meet and the opening credits begin.

Just to reiterate, the first six minutes of the movie are a guy’s dad picks him up. Now you have the movie in miniature as every part of it moves with that same lack of alacrity.

The titular Santee is Glenn Ford, a bounty hunter on the trail of the father and his gang for unspecified crimes. Santee kills all of them except Jody who, having promised to kill Santee, follows him neither secretly nor at any special distance. Eventually Santee heads back to his ranch, the Three Arrows Ranch, and hires Jody as a ranch hand. The only rule is no one talks about Santee’s bounty hunter work at the ranch and Jody agrees to those terms, although he's still promising to kill Santee.

Over the next eight months (eight months!), Jody learns that Santee used to be the local sheriff until the Banner Gang came to town, shot him up, and killed his son. That’s why the Three Arrows Ranch only has two arrows on its brand. During those months, Jody loses his taste for revenge. He tells Santee as much and asks to be trained as a bounty hunter. Santee agrees since he and his wife see Jody as a sort of surrogate son.

The current sheriff, on the cusp of handing the badge over to another man and retiring (uh oh, we got a Sheriff Dead Meat) comes to the ranch with news that the Banner Gang is coming through town on their way to the border. Santee decides to leave it be and promises his wife he won’t go out bounty hunting again. Of course, two scenes later after the Banner Gang has shot up the town and killed the sheriff, Jody and Santee leave to kill the gang.

We end up with a shootout in a brothel where only Jody, Santee, and the gang leader are left. All three shoot at the same time and we freeze frame on a triple-split-screen of each of them firing. At night, a carriage comes to the Three Arrows Ranch (whose symbol now has three arrows!) carrying a coffin. Who’s in the coffin and who’s driving the carriage? The movie drags out the reveal until we see Santee sitting on the carriage. The coffin contains Jody. THE END

The movie just drags everything out. This plot of a young man seeking revenge against someone who wasn’t quite in the wrong and ending up, depending on your interpretation, either with Stockholm Syndrome or with a better understanding of the moral order of the world they lived in would have worked as a novel. You have time to let this nuanced change happen. I mean, this movie hand waves eight months away and just tells us that Jody has let go of his revenge fantasy. There’s so little going on in this movie that you’d be forgiven for thinking he gave up on vengeance the moment he got to the ranch.

The movie’s not actively bad—it looks nice enough and the acting is all right—there’s just nothing going on. You get no sense of tension or even an idea of what the plot is going to be. Who, precisely, is the protagonist and what, exactly, is their goal? If you don’t have that sense of who the focal character is and what they want, then your movie doesn’t have an engine, doesn’t have a motive force, and we’re left with people just dressing up like cowboys and hanging out on a ranch. It’s just a whole lot of nothing. I wouldn't tell anyone to skip it, but I can't imagine anyone making the effort to find it.