After losing his horse in a bet, former ranch foreman Pat Brennan gets a lift from a stagecoach driver who has been hired to transport Willard Wims and his new bride Doretta, the daughter of a wealthy copper magnate. When they are ambushed by a trio of outlaws out for ransom, Brennan is forced to find a way to get himself and his companions out alive. 

The Tall T was the second entry in Budd Boetticher’s now-legendary series of collaborations with Randolph Scott, in which the western reached a new level of stripped-down purity and elemental elegance, against the iconic desert backdrop of Lone Pines, California. It is perhaps the finest work of a director who, in the words of Andrew Sarris, epitomised the ‘unyielding taste and dedication that makes the American cinema so exciting and, at times, so miraculous’.. 

Join us for this screening celebrating the release of the fourth issue of the international film magazine Narrow Margin: The Western: From B–Z. From the Poverty Row programmers of the thirties to the stark low-budget masterpieces of the fifties, this issue is dedicated to westerns made at the margins, produced with limited means at the outer margins of the studio system. At once popular and peripheral, these westerns were the morass upon which American cinema was built, the crude oil that fueled an empire.

The screening will be on 35mm.

With special thanks to the Austrian Film Museum.