A Snatch of Dialogue

I was watching a Randolph Scott western, The Tall T (1957), the other day, I had it on mainly as background, while I did something else, when a line of dialogue suddenly gave me a start.  'Had me a quiet woman once,' says Henry Silva's Chink,following up an observation that Mrs Mims (Maureen O'Sullivan) was 'so quiet you'd hardly know she was around'.  The same dialogue, word for word, was familiar to me from Return of the Seven (1966), where it is Warren Oates' Colbee who speaks them in relation to Petra (Elisa Montes).  In The Tall T, Chink then goes on to tell how the woman in question was down Sonora way and is amazed that Billy Jack (Skip Homeier) went there once but didn't go back, pointing out that there were 'ten head of women' for every man in Sonora.  He should know as he'd romanced half of them and would have done the other half if he hadn't pulled a muscle in his leg.  Again, in Return of the Seven, the dialogue proceeds identically, except that it is Virgilio Teixeira's Delgado who hadn't been back to Sonora.  In both films the conversation is ended by a character telling the ladies' man that he 'talks too much'.  What's fascinating is how the whole tone of the exchange differs between the two films.  In The Tall T, as spoken by the thuggish and brutal Chink, it comes over as sleazy and sinister, the boast of a sexual predator.  By contrast, in Return of the Seven, the same words are spoken by Colbee, a laid back and easy going gun fighter and come over as playful, a tall story told more as a joke than to impress anyone.  The subtleties of characterisation completely transform the dialogue from sinister bragging to good humoured male banter.

The obvious question, of course, is why the same dialogue appears in two different films, nine years apart, with, at first sight, no obvious connection.  But the connection is there: it lies in Burt Kennedy, who wrote The Tall T and directed The Return of the Seven.  The script for The Return of the Seven, though, is accredited to Larry Cohen, rather than Kennedy.  I recall, however, an interview with Cohen in which he explained that he was asked to cut a large section from the middle of his original script, in order to speed the film up and keep its running time down to around ninety minutes (the released version ran ninety five minutes).  As this piece of dialogue lifted from The Tall T comes around the middle of the released film, it is entirely possible that Kennedy inserted it himself, cannibalising his earlier script, so as to 'smooth over' the cuts in the original script.  It helps develop a couple of the supporting characters and leads into that film's Frank (Claude Akins), a taciturn and withdrawn gun fighter,explaining his tragic back story, which engages audience sympathy with him. Of course, Kennedy had a track record of re-using dialogue that he obviously liked, from film-to-film.  Randolph Scott's observation in The Tall T that 'There are some things a man can't ride around', for instance, also turns up in Ride Lonesome, Six Black Horses and Support Your Local Gunfighter, as well as The Return of the Seven.  It's always quite startling when you suddenly recognise a piece of dialogue in a film that isn't a direct remake of another film you've seen, or that hasn't itself been remade into another movie you've previously seen.  But scripts are reworked and recycled  more often than we realise, a prime example being another western, Powder River (1953), which has whole scenes lifted intact and practically word-for-word from Frontier Marshal (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946).  This being the result of the fact that Twentieth Century Fox produced all three, with the first two being derived from Stuart N Lake's biography of Wyatt Earp, which they still owned the rights to, (it is even credited as being 'based on' in Powder River), so in order to produce a cost effective vehicle for Rory Calhoun, they cobbled together a new film recycled from parts of the earlier adaptations.