Viewer alert: Two by Budd Boetticher

For your Friday viewing pleasure, Turner Classic Movies has programmed a terrific double bill of classic Westerns starring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher: The Tall T (8 pm EST) and Ride Lonesome (9:30 pm).

In Tall T (1957), ramrod-turned-rancher Pat Brennan (Scott) and copper mine heiress Doretta Mims (Maureen O'Sullivan) are held captive by a sly stagecoach bandit (Richard Boone) and his thick-witted cohorts, while Doretta's cowardly husband seeks a ransom from his wife's wealthy father. A nice touch: The bandit refrains from killing Brennan primarily because he's desperate for intelligent conversation. But their budding friendship is soured by the bandit's determination to start a new, more respectable life with the ransom money.

Ride Lonesome (1959) -- arguably the best of the Scott-Boetticher collaborations -- finds bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Scott) bringing a captured outlaw (James Best) across Indian territory. Two semi-reformed bandits (a pre-Bonanza Pernell Roberts, whose cocky preening suggests a Wild West version of WWE's The Rock, and a callow James Coburn) want to wrest control of Brigade's captive in order to claim an amnesty offered for their past crimes. But Brigade isn't interested in amnesty, or even a reward. Rather, he wants to lure the outlaw's older brother (Lee Van Cleef) into a forced feeding of just desserts.

Martin Scoresse, an ardent admirer of Boetticher's work, talks about The Tall T here, and Ride Lonesome here.

Viewer alert: 'Comanche Station'

The final collaboration of Western icon Randolph Scott and maverick moviemaker Budd Boetticher is a rousingly two-fisted Western drama with an affectingly melancholy aftertaste. Jefferson Cody (Scott), obsessed with finding the wife who was kidnapped by Comanches more than a decade earlier, barters with Indians for the release of another white woman (Nancy Gates), the wife of a man who has posted a huge reward for her dead-or-alive return. Hearty outlaw Ben Lane (Claude Akins) tries to muscle in on the transition, but Cody won't be dissuaded from competing his chivalrous task. He remains true to himself, even though his noble gesture brings him no nearer a closure. Indeed, the ending suggests he will never stop searching. Which, of course, makes him the quintessential Budd Boetticher hero.

Comanche Station can be viewed at 5:05 and 11:30 p.m. EDT Sunday, June 3, on Encore Westerns.

Gunfights in the DVD corral

Looks like Hollywood studios are continuing to dig deep in the vaults for Westerns worth releasing in restored DVD editions. Coming May 8 to a video store near you: Volumes 1 and 2 of Classic Western Round-Up, a couple of four-title collections from Universal.

Volume 1 includes King Vidor's The Texas Rangers (1936), with Fred MacMurray, Jack Oakie and -- no kidding! -- Gabby Hayes; Jacques Tourneur's Canyon Passage (1946) , with Dana Andrews, Brian Donlevy, Susan Hayward and Ward Bond (as a character named, believe it or not, Honey Bragg); Ray Enright's Kansas Raiders (1950), with Audie Murphy as Jesse James, Tony Curtis as Kit Dalton, James Best as Cole Younger and Brian Donlevy as William Qunatrill; and Raoul Walsh's The Lawless Breed (1953), with Rock Hudson (as John Wesley Hardin) co-starring with John McIntire, Hugh O'Brian, Dennis Weaver and Lee Van Cleef.

But wait, there's more: Volume 2 includes James P. Hogan's The Texans (1938), with Randolph Scott, Walter Brennan, Robert Cummings and Joan Bennett; John Farrow's California (1946), with Ray Milland, Barbara Stanwyck and Anthony Quinn; Budd Boetticher's The Cimarron Kid (1952), with Audie Murphy, James Best, Leif Erickson and Hugh O'Brian; and another Budd Boetticher classic, The Man from the Alamo (1953), with Glenn Ford, Julie Adams, Chill Wills -- and, hey, Hugh O'Brian again.

Now if only the folks at Columbia would finally get around to releasing DVDs of the great Westerns that Boetticher filmed with Randolph Scott between 1956 and '60!