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Home , Abilene Town, A Time for Dying, Belle of the Yukon, Buchanan Rides Alone, Budd Boetticher, Burt Kennedy

24 February 2015 (Series 30:5) Budd Boettticher, (1956, 78 minutes)

Directed by Written by (original story and ) Produced by Andrew V. McLaglen, Robert E. Morrison, and Music by Henry Vars Cinematography by William H. Clothier Film Editing by Everett Sutherland

Randolph Scott ... Ben Stride ... Annie Greer ... Bill Masters Walter Reed ... John Greer John Larch ... Payte Bodeen Don 'Red' Barry ... Clete Fred Graham ... Henchman John Beradino ... Clint John Phillips ... Jed ... Mason ... Cavalry Lt. Collins Pamela Duncan ... Señorita Nellie Doors, 1945 Escape in the Fog, 1945 A Guy, a Gal and a Pal, Steve Mitchell ... Fowler 1944 , and 1944 . Cliff Lyons ... Henchman

Fred Sherman ... The Prospector William H. Clothier (cinematographer) (b. February 21, 1903

in Decatur, —d. January 7, 1996 (age 92) in ,

California) was the cinematographer for 60 films and television Budd Boetticher (director) (b. Oscar Boetticher Jr., July 29, shows, some of which are 1973 , 1971 Big 1916 in , Illinois—d. November 29, 2001 (age 85) in Jake, 1970 Rio Lobo, 1970 , 1970 The Cheyenne Social Ramona, ) directed 45 films and television shows, Club, 1969 The Undefeated, 1967 , 1967 The including 1985 My Kingdom For..., 1972 Arruza, 1969 A Time Way West, 1965 Shenandoah, 1964 , 1964 A for Dying, 1960 , 1960 The Rise and Fall of Distant Trumpet, 1963 McLintock!, 1963 Donovan's Reef, 1962 Legs Diamond, 1959 , 1959 Westbound, 1957 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962 Merrill's Marauders, , 1957 , 1956 Seven Men from 1961 The Comancheros, 1961 The Deadly Companions, 1960 Now, 1955 The Magnificent Matador, 1954 “Public Defender” The Alamo, 1959 The Horse Soldiers, 1958 China Doll, 1958 (TV Series, 6 episodes), 1953 , 1953 Wings of Lafayette Escadrille, 1956 , 1956 Gun the Man the Hawk, 1953 , 1952 , Down, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1956 Good-bye, My Lady, 1952 Red Ball Express, 1952 , 1951 1955 Gang Busters, 1955 The Sea Chase, 1954 Track of the Cat, Bullfighter and the Lady, 1950 The Three Musketeers, 1950 1952 Confidence Girl, 1950 Once a Thief, 1948 Sofia, 1948 Fort , 1949 The Wolf Hunters, 1948 Behind Locked Apache, 1944 The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress,

Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—2

and 1935 El ciento trece. He also worked as a member of the Leading Role for Cat Ballou (1965). He appeared in 107 films Camera and Electrical Department on 31 film and television and television shows, among them 1986 The Delta Force, 1985 projects. “The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission” (TV Movie), 1984 Dog Day, 1983 Gorky Park, 1980 The Big Red One, 1979 Avalanche Express, 1976 The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, 1974 Klansman, 1973 The Iceman Cometh, 1973 Emperor of the North, 1972 Prime Cut, 1970 Monte Walsh, 1969 Paint Your Wagon, 1968 Hell in the Pacific, 1967 Point Blank, 1967 The Dirty Dozen, 1966 The Professionals, 1965 Ship of Fools, 1965 Cat Ballou, 1964 The Killers, 1963 Donovan's Reef, 1961-1962 “The Untouchables” (TV Series), 1962 “The Virginian” (TV Series), 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962 “” (TV Series), 1961 The Comancheros, 1954-1961 “” (TV Series, 7 episodes), 1957-1960 “M Squad” (TV Series, 117 episodes), 1954-1959 “Schlitz ... Ben Stride (b. George Randolph Scott, January 23, 1898 in Orange County, Virginia—d. March 2, 1987 (age 89) in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California) appeared in 105 films, among them 1962 , 1960 Comanche Station, 1959 Ride Lonesome, 1958 , 1957 Decision at Sundown, 1957 Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend, 1957 The Tall T, 1956 7th Cavalry, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1955 Tall Man Riding, 1955 Ten Wanted Men, 1954 The Bounty Hunter, 1953 Thunder Over the Plains, 1953 The Man Behind the Gun, 1952 Carson City, 1951 Man in the Saddle, 1951 Fort Worth, 1951 Santa Fe, 1950 Colt .45, 1950 The Nevadan, 1949 The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1949 Canadian Pacific, 1948 Return of the Bad Men, 1948 Albuquerque, 1947 Gunfighters, 1946 Abilene Town, 1944 Belle of the Yukon, 1943 Playhouse” (TV Series), 1958 The Missouri Traveler, 1957 'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders, 1943 Raintree County, 1957 “Studio 57” (TV Series), 1956 The Rack, Corvette K-225, 1943 , 1942 The Spoilers, 1942 1956 Attack, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1955 I Died a To the Shores of Tripoli, 1941 Belle Starr, 1941 Union, Thousand Times, 1955 Pete Kelly's Blues, 1955 Not as a 1940 When the Daltons Rode, 1940 My Favorite Wife, 1940 Stranger, 1955 Violent Saturday, 1955 Bad Day at Black Rock, Virginia City, 1939 Frontier Marshal, 1939 , 1938 1954 The Caine Mutiny, 1953 The Wild One, 1953 The Big Heat, The Texans, 1938 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1937 High, 1953 Down Among the Sheltering Palms, 1953 Seminole, 1952 Wide, and Handsome, 1936 Go West Young Man, 1936 The Last Eight Iron Men, 1952 Hangman's Knot, 1952 We're Not of the Mohicans, 1935 She, 1935 Roberta, 1935 Home on the Married!, 1952 Hong Kong, 1951 You're in the Navy Now, 1950 Range, 1934 Wagon Wheels, 1934 The Last Round-Up, 1933 “The Big Story” (TV Series), and 1950 “Escape” (TV Series). Cocktail Hour, 1933 Murders in the Zoo, 1932 Wild Horse Mesa, 1932 Sky Bride, 1929 Dynamite, 1929 The Virginian, 1929 The Walter Reed ... John Greer (b. Walter Reed Smith, February Black Watch, 1929 The Far Call, and 1928 Sharp Shooters. 10, 1916 in Bainbridge Island, Washington—d. August 20, 2001 (age 85) in Santa Cruz, California) appeared in 206 films and Gail Russell ... Annie Greer (b. Elizabeth L. Russell, September television shows, some of which are 1972 “The Streets of San 21, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois—d. August 27, 1961 (age 36) in Francisco” (TV Series), 1969-1971 “Ironside” (TV Series), 1970 Los Angeles, California) appeared in 28 films and TV shows, Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1969 , 1968 Panic in the including 1961 The Silent Call, 1958 No Place to Land, 1957 City, 1967 “Batman” (TV Series), 1966 The Oscar, 1965 The The Tattered Dress, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1951 Air Cadet, Money Trap, 1965 Mirage, 1960-1964 “Lassie” (TV Series), 1950 , 1950 , 1949 The Great Dan 1959-1964 “Wagon Train” (TV Series, 6 episodes), 1964 Where Patch, 1949 El Paso, 1949 Song of India, 1948 Wake of the Red Love Has Gone, 1964 Cheyenne Autumn, 1964 “Mister Ed” (TV Witch, 1948 Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1947 , Series), 1964 The Carpetbaggers, 1962 How the West Was Won, 1947 Calcutta, 1947 Angel and the Badman, 1946 The 1962 “Bonanza” (TV Series), 1962 “Bronco” (TV Series), 1961 Bachelor's Daughters, 1946 Our Hearts Were Growing Up, 1945 “Sea Hunt” (TV Series), 1961 “Dennis the Menace” (TV Series), Duffy's Tavern, 1945 Salty O'Rourke, 1944 Our Hearts Were 1960 “Twilight Zone” (TV Series), 1960 “The Untouchables” Young and Gay, 1944 The Uninvited, 1944 Lady in the Dark, and (TV Series), 1958-1960 “Perry Mason” (TV Series), 1960 1943 Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour. , 1960 13 Fighting Men, 1959 “How to Marry a Millionaire” (TV Series), 1959 The Horse Soldiers, 1958 Lee Marvin ... Bill Masters (b. February 19, 1924 in “Mike Hammer” (TV Series), 1958 “Adventures of ” City, New York—d. August 29, 1987 (age 63) in Tucson, (TV Series), 1957 “M Squad” (TV Series), 1957 “Zane Grey ) won the 1966 Academy Award for Best Actor in a Theater” (TV Series), 1957 The Helen Morgan Story, 1957 Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—3

“Have Gun - Will Travel” (TV Series), 1957 “The Adventures of report his findings to the producer—the mistakes his director ” (TV Series), 1957 “” (TV Series, 8 makes, whether he’s getting behind schedule. I was no good; I episodes), 1957 Last of the Badmen, 1956 “Sergeant Preston of always took his side.” (This quotation and many others in this the Yukon” (TV Series), 1956 Emergency Hospital, 1956 Seven note are from an interview conducted by Bernard Tavernier for Men from Now, 1955-1956 “Buffalo Bill, Jr.” (TV Series, 7 Cahiers du Cinéma July 1964 and quoted in Jim Kitses’ BFI episodes), 1955 The Last Command, 1955 , dossier Budd Boetticher: The Western, in a translation by Susan 1955 Hell's Island, 1953-1955 “The Lone Ranger” (TV Series), Bennett.) 1954 The High and the Mighty, 1954 Dangerous Mission, 1953 In 1944 Boetticher directed his own first movies as War Paint, 1953 The Man from the Alamo, 1953 Sangaree, 1952 Oscar Boetticher Jr.—One Mysterious Night, The Missing Juror, Thunderbirds, 1952 Horizons West, 1952 Red Ball Express, 1952 and . One reviewer wrote of the first of these, a Bronco Buster, 1951 Command, 1951 Government thriller, that it “wasn’t released; it escaped”—a Agents vs Phantom Legion, 1950 Tripoli, 1950 Flying Disc Man comment that Boetticher says he “will die remembering.” The from Mars, 1950 The Eagle and the Hawk, 1950 Young Man with other two were apparently not much better, nor were the seven B a Horn, 1948 Return of the Bad Men, 1943 Bombardier, 1942 features Boetticher made between 1945 and 1950. Most of them Mexican Spitfire's Elephant, 1942 The Mayor of 44th Street, and were cut-rate thrillers, but one was a Western, Black Midnight 1929 Redskin. (1949), starring Roddy McDowell and Damian O’Flynn in a story about a rivalry between a ranch foreman and a crooked saloon owner. During this period Boetticher also directed a number of propaganda films for the armed forces and one of these, The Fleet That Came to Stay, achieved commercial distribution. According to Boetticher, “the less said about [these early movies]…the better….I was really working in the dark. I had no idea where I was going….but I couldn’t show people what a mess I was in. I simply didn’t know what I was doing. Those films only took eight, ten, twelve days, and there isn’t a bit of directing in them. None of them is any good, but I did meet a lot of interesting people who have since become famous in , like Burt Kennedy, my favorite scriptwriter.” Boetticher’s first significant film—and the first credited to “Budd” rather than Oscar Boetticher—was The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). The director wrote the script himself (and BUDD BOETTICHER From World Film Directors Vol I. received an Oscar nomination for it). Drawing on Boetticher’s Editor John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company, NY, own experiences, it tells the story of a young American, Chuck 1987 Regan (), who is drawn to bullfighting and is taken under the wing of a great Mexican matador (Gilbert Roland). “Budd Boetticher (Oscar Boetticher Jr.) American director, Immature and arrogant, the boy insists on fighting before he is producer, and scenarist, was born in Chicago and studied at Ohio sufficiently experienced, and his mentor saves his life at the cost State University, where he was a star boxer and football player. of his own. At the climax Regan has to return to the ring and After one violent football season he was sent to Mexico to prvoe himself in the face of a hostile crowd who hold him convalesce from his injuries. Like , whose responsible for the death of their idol. love of action and adventure and stoic notion of manliness he Herbert J. Yates, head of and shares, Boetticher fell in love with the art and mystique of producer of the movie, was away in Europe when Botticher bullfighting. He studied under the matador Lorenzo Garza and copleted the shooting. One day he plucked up his courage and himself fought in Mexico as a professional matador. showed the footage to who was working in the same In 1941, on account of this experience, Boetticher was studios.Boetticher says he lost twenty pounds waiting for Ford’s invitd to serve as technical adviser on the bullfight sequences in reaction, but when it came it was enthusiastic. Ford took charge Reuben Mamoulian’s remake of Blood and Sand, starring of almost all the editing of The Bullfighter and the Lady,” Tyrone Power. Fascinated by the movie world, he stayed on in Boetticher says. “I had one or two disappointments, because he Hollywood, working for a time as messenger-boy at ;s cut passages I liked, especially bits with the horses….but just the studios. In 1942 or 2943 he was taken on as assistant director of fact of having been helped by John Ford did me a lot of good.” William A. Seiter’s Destroyer (1943), and he served in the same Moderately well received by the critics and “a great success on capacity in George Stevens’ (1943), its second run,” The Bullfighter and the Lady brought Boetticher ’s The Desperados (1943) and Cover Girl (1944), a contract with Universal-International. There he made eleven and William Berkey’s Girl in the Case (The Silver Key, 1944). films, most of them hurried, low-budget affairs, but not without Boetticher says that he “gave up that job quite soon, interest. because it really had nothing to do with directing. In the USA an Boetticher’s first picture for Universal was an Audie assistant is more on the production, not the direction side. Murphy Western, The Cimarron Kid (1951), which opens with Usually it’s a young man whose job is to spy on the director and the Kid leaving jail and ends with his arrest on new charges—a Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—4

circular structure that recurs in many of Boetticher’s films. , was followed by his second bullfighter movie, Boetticher considerably rewrote Louis Stevens’ script (and The Magnificent Matador (1955). Scripted by the director, it is a history) in portraying a raid by the James and Dalton brothers, melodrama in which Quinn plays a famous matador who explaining that “I’m not faithful to history if it might spoil the abandons his career in an attempt to prevent his illegitimate son film.” After Bronco Buster (1952) came one of Boetticher’s few from taking up the same dangerous trade. The critics found it a war films: “ I prefer my films to be based on heroes who want to highly uneven work, and preferred The Killer is Loose (1955), a do what they are doing, despite the danger and the risk of taut thriller in which Joseph Cotton is oddly cast as an underpaid death….In war nobody wants to die and I hate making films cop and Rhonda Fleming as his wife, threatened by a about people who are forced to do such-and-such a thing.” psychopathic killer (Wendell Corey). For this reason Boetticher is much happier with Between 1955 and 1960 Boetticher also did a certain Westerns, like Horizon West (1952), whose remarkable cast amount of work for television—the pilot show for Maverick, four included , Julia Adams, , John episodes of of The Dick Powell Show, the sixty-minute Count of McIntyre, Raymond Burr, and Dennis Weaver. Boetticher Monte Christo and one episode of Hong Kong. More important, himself says of this otherwise undistinguished movie: “there working for John Wayne’s Batjac company, he made a Randolph were some very good actors…who began their career in that Scott Western called Seven Men From Now (1956), scripted by film, which is a fact I’m quite proud of….That’s why my only Burt Kennedy. Scott plays Ben Stride, who is ruthlessly hunting vivid memory of that film, except Julia Adams, who was really down the seven men who murdered his wife in a raid on a Wells radiant and beautiful and who I was madly in love with. She had Fargo station. In the desert Stride encounters an Eastern couple, just got divorced at that time and we went off together. That's all the Greers (Gail Russell and Walter Reed), and two outlaws (Lee I can say about that film.” Marvin and Donald Barry). It is with the brutal but almost One of the worst of Boetticher’s Universal movies was irresistibly amusing and engaging Marvin character that the City Beneath the Sea (1963)—he himself calls it “a joke,” but hero’s final confrontation must come, while a growing makes it clear that it might have been even more dire if he and involvement with Annie Greer is responsible for softening his his cast had not rewritten the appalling script “as we went along.” initial implacable coldness. A least, Boetticher says, he had the consolation of working with A commercial success, Seven Men From Now also his friends Robert Ryan and Anthony Quinn, and a certain brought Boetticher his first serious recognition, especially in amount of fun with special effects—he shot the “underwater” , where André Bazin gave it a long review in Cahiers du sequences by having Ryan and Quinn walk (in slow motion) on Cinéma (August-September 1957). Bazin (as translated by Susan foam rubber, and superimposed the water and the fish. At this Bennett in Jim Kitses’ BFI dossier), called it “possibly the best time Boetticher was churning out movies at a killing pace: “I’d Western that I have seen since the war” and “very superior to finish a film on Thursday or Friday and then begin on another the Shane.” He went on: “The first thing to be admired about Seven next Tuesday or Wednesday. I had the weekend to read the Men From Now is the script, which effects a tour de force of script.” constantly surprising us, despite its rigorously classical plot…. Seminole (1958), also made with Quinn (as well as Even more than the inventiveness which thought up the exciting Rock Hudson, Barbara Hale, and Lee Marvin), was also very twists in the plot, I admire the humor with which they are harshly reviewed, but Boetticher defends the film. He had treated….But the remarkable thing is that the humore does not studied the Seminole, finding that they had never surrendered in get in the way of the film’s emotional impact….It is only when their war with the United States and “gave the West Point boys a the director loves the characters and the situation that he invents good thrashing….That was what I wanted to show.” There was a to such a degree, that he is able to stand back and look at them somewhat better press for The Man From the Alamo (1953), a with a humorous eye….That kind of irony does not diminish the relatively ambitious and expensive picture starring characters, but it allows their naiveté and the director’s and Julia Adams in a story about a man who escaped from the intelligence to coexist without tension. For it is the most besieged fortress to go to the rescue of his family, and was intelligent Western I know, while being at the same time the least branded a coward. In fact, as Peter Wollen points out,”—he intellectual, the most subtle and the least aestheticizing, the risked his life and his repute—for a precise personal goal rather simplest and finest example of the form….Boetticher has made than stay, under the pressure of mass feeling, to fight for a remarkable use of the landscape, and the varying textures of the collective cause. He is a typical Boetticher hero.” soil and rocks. I think the photogenic qualities of horses have Julia Adams starred again, opposite , in never been made better use of….Lastly, there is Randolph Scott, (1953), in which Heflin plays an American whose face bears an unmistakable resemblance to William Hart, mining engineer who becomes involved in a Mexican revolution. even down to the sublimely inexpressive blue eyes.” The movie was shot in 3-D (against Boetticher’s wishes) and Recognizing in this unexpected success a chance to suffers from “having that 3-D camera dead in front of the actors revive his declining career, Randolph Scott embarked on a series all the time.” Some reviewers praised it as an anti-dictatorship of Westerns directed by Boetticher, starring himself, and tract, but Boetticher says that “in this film, as in all my other produced by his business partner for Scott- work, I’m much more interested in my characters than the ideas Brown Productions, later Ranown. These Westerns (including they stand up for….It’s the ways in which people defend their Seven Men From Now) have come to be known, for the sake of beliefs which interest me, not the beliefs themselves.” convenience, as the Ranown cycle. Four of them were written by End of Sumatra (1953), “a very bad film” which Burt Kennedy with Boetticher’s collaboration. (Boetticher has Boetticher made only because it provided a part for his friend explained that his usual approach to any movie is “to read the Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—5

best script I can find” and then decide on the cast. “Then after to escape punishment. And, indeed, as Kitses points out, “the that I get together with the author and we rewrite the script to suit basic deception in the films in the Ranown cycle, the key to their the actors.” Kennedy has said that the Ranown scripts were as dramatic structure, is that the Randolph Scott figure is the hero much Boetticher’s as his, though only Kennedy is credited.) only in the technical sense; it is, of course, the villain who is our Robin Wood, writing in Richard Roud’s Cinema, true hero….We understand him in a way we cannot the hero— suggests that the Ranown films “can best be explained in terms and the films stand finally as celebrations of this character who of one of those happy collaborations that occur occasionally in attempts to create action in a way that Scott cannot.” the Hollywood cinema—Kelly/Donen is the most obvious The next two pictures in the cycle were scripted by example—in which the best is brought out of talents noticeably Charles Lang Jr. rather than Kennedy. Decision at Sundown less distinguished in isolation….The films take the most (1957) is another revenge Western and a bitter one. It begins with traditional genre elements—the hero/villain conflict, the revenge Bart Allison (Scott) riding with his friend Sam (Noah Beeery Jr.) motif, the gang, the Indians—on which Botticher and Kennedy into a corrupt and frightened town ruled by the man (John perform subtle and idiosyncratic variations. The tone is always Carroll) he holds responsible for his wife’s suicide; it ends with unassuming, and the genre is always respected: we never feel a him riding out alone, unavenged and aware that his wife had self-conscious straining after ‘significance,’ or any sense that the been less sinned against than sinning. Buchanan Rides Alone is artists feel superior to their raw material and are bent on set in and around another corrupt community but is much lighter transforming it….our delight arises from our simultaneous in tone. Arrested together with a young Mexican (Manuel Rojas) recognition of the convention and the variation.” who has killed in defense of his sister’s honor, Buchanan teams Jim Kitses, to whose work on Boetticher Robin Wood up with him, and rids the town of the dreadful Agry family in a pays tribute, finds in the tremendous shoot-out, control Ranown films “the deepest of the town then passing to commitment to a highly another of Boetticher’s romantic individualism: life is charming rogues, Abe Carbo seen as a solitary quest for (Craig Stevens). Boetticher meaning, an odyssey; action as himself found this “:a very a definition and expression of amusing, very mathematical the self which is its own Western,” and Kitses points out reward; compromise of that the Agrys are “humours in personal integrity as the medieval sense, farcical indefensible….In general, the expressions of ignorance and Boetticher hero as created by greed.” Scott can be said to possess (or In Ride Lonesome to be moving towards) a great serenity, the knowledge that we (1959), written by Kennedy, Scott is again a numbed engine of are fundamentally alone, that nothing lasts, that what matters in revenge—former sheriff Ben Brigade, searching for a man the face of all this is ‘living the way a man should.’” He is often named Frank () who hanged Brigade’s wife. a man who has lost everything except his stoic sense of honor, Brigade captures Frank’s brother Billy John and travels slowly and “this makes the figure oddly anachronistic, a man who back to town, using Billy John as bait for Frank. Along the way, continues to assert values out of an image of himself that has its he is joined by two outlaws ( and ) roots in the past.” and by Carrie Lane (Karen Steele), whose husband has been Our second view of this figure (if Ben Stride is taken as killed by Indians. Frank duly shows up and is killed by Brigade, the first) comes in The Tall T (1957) in the character of Pat who then rides away, leaving Carrie and the likable, redeemable Brennan. He is introduced in terms of broad comedy—he bets he Pernell Roberts character to attempt a life together. Some critics can ride a bull to a standstill and winds up in a watering trough. tried to attach a religious significance to Brigade’s burning of the Having forfeited his horse, Brennan hitches a ride on the stage crosslike tree on which his wife has died, but Boetticher says that driven by his old friend Rintoon (Arthur Hunnicutt) and carrying the tree was “a symbol for the things…[Brigade] hated” and that a boy and the newly married Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Hara) “at the same time this gesture was an attempt to destroy his own and her husband. The mood darkens abruptly when the stage is past; he didn’t want people to be hanged anymore.” held up by Usher () and his companions (Henry Jim Kitses writes that “the meaning in a Boetticher Silva and Skip Homeier). Rintoon, the boy, and the cowardly movie resides less in the bright moments of good humor, its dark Willard Mims are murdered. Brennan and Doretta are held for moments of violence, than in the continuum, a sensual ransom. Brennan sets out to undermine the outlaws’ trust in one movement, a perpetual interplay of light and shade, success and another. decline, life and death….Thus Ride Lonesome moves through Usher is the most attractive of the Boetticher villains three days and three nights, the companby pushing on over whose prototype was the Marvin character (Masters) in Seven dangerous open vistas of arid country each morning and Men From Now. Brutalized as he is, Usher is a character of great afternoon to cluster in the dappled dark of an evening camp. If charm, wit and intelligence, and as his admiration for Brennan’s dusk is often a kind, contemplative time for talk of the future, iron rectitude deepens into something very close to love, we danger rides in bright and early at sun-up to temper hope and recognize his dissatisfaction with himself, his impulse toward throttle dreams.” redemption, although we also recognize that his sins are too great Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—6

Kitses goes on to describe a brief but resonant image everyone loses. Life defeats charm, innocence is blasted. The from the film—a water vase that hangs from the roof of a world is finally a sad and funny place, life is a tough, amusing swinging station, swaying gently as the group rides out in single game which never can be won but must be played.” file and we follow each character across the frame: the image has The message is much the same in The Rise and Fall of a narrative function “but the composition and lighting are so Legs Diamond (1960), another ironic morality play, set this time delicate that they finally are a pleasure in themselves. The in New York during Prohibition. The character played by Ray tension between static black border and bright rhythmic play Danton only faintly resembles the historical Jack “Legs” within is so fine that ultimately the image has the quality, the Diamond—he is any small-time hoodlum with a blind itch for essence of Boetticher, of an animated still-life. At moments like power and no idea what to do with it. His charm, style, and these Boetticher achieves a formal rigor and philosophical ruthlessness take him to the top so rapidly that he comes to nuance that recalls the believe himself invulnerable; he most unlikely of parallels, comes down even faster because his the Japanese master old-style individualism is overtaken Yasujiro Ozu. by the new “corporate capitalism of Westbound (1959) the underworld boardroom” and is not part of the Ranown because, having discarded friends, cycle, though it stars family, and lovers on the way up, he Randolph Scott. It is a finally has to face the Syndicate routine, big-budget quite alone. Western made for Warner For Boetticher himself, the Brothers, of no particular message of the movie is that “you interest. Comanche Station, can stay alive as long as someone scripted by Kennedy and loves you.” Nobody loves Legs the last in the Ranown Diamond in the end, not even his cycle, followed in 1960. Here the perennially widowed Randolph dim, boozy, despised wife-mistress Alice (Karen Steele). Scott plays Jefferson Cody, whose wife was stolen by Indians ten Boetticher thinks Alice his only “successful study of a woman,” years earlier. Hearing of a white woman offered for ransom by apart from those in his two early bullfighting pictures—generally the Comanches he goes to trade for her. It is not his wife—it in his films the heroine is only important for what she has never is—but another man’s, and Cody sets out to reunite her “caused to happen” to the hero. The director has described how with her husband. The husband is blind and has offered a reward he and his cameraman set out to make a film in for her return. The money attracts other adventurers (Claude the style of the 1920s, outraging the front office by slightly Akins, Skip Homeier, Richard Rush) and the dangers multiply. preexposing the filmstock, dispensing with such modern camera Speaking of the Ranown movies, Boetticher has said movements as dolly shots and most traveling shots, and going that most of them were made on a twelve-day shooting schedule, “back to the old flat lighting.” but “I did try, each time to make a better film than the one At first dismissed by most reviewers as just another before, a deeper film.” Kitses writes that in Ride Lonesome and gangster B-movie, Legs Diamond rose rapidly in critical esteem Comanche Station “the construction and pace are tightly as its pace, economy and style began to be recognized. Anan controlled, the action unwinding with a spell-binding formal Yates noted how the cold brutality of Leg’s world is conveyed rigour, the film finally resembling pure ritual. Seizing on the “by means of harsh lighting and stiff geometrical patterns in the cyclical pattern of the journey Western, the alternation of drama décor, by a constant use of sharp contrasts between black and and lyricism, tension and release, intimacy and space, Boetticher white.” Andew Sarris called it “a minor classic in the perverse gradually refines it to arrive at the remarkable balance of an Scarface tradition,” and wondered “where directors like ambiguous world poised between tragedy and pastoral comedy.” Boetticher find the energy and the imagination to do such fine And Ian Cameron said of Comanche Station that Boetticher work, when native critics are so fantastically indifferent.” observes landscapes and the people moving about in them with a In 1960, when critical recognition and financial security sensitivity rivaling Renoir’s in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe….The seemed at last assured, Boetticher left Hollywood in his Rolls first shot of the film shows Scott riding along the top of a ridge in Royce, accompanied by his latest wife (Debra Paget), and went silhouette, and ends with a camera movement as the rider to Mexico to complete his documentary about his friend Carlos disappears behind an outcrop of rock and emerges below the Arruza, the greatest Mexican matador of recent times. Botticher level of the camera—a linked movement of actor and camera had been shooting footage for this movie for years, in the which is genuinely beautiful….And the picture of man as part of intervals between other projects, and expected to complete it in a nature persists and strengthens throughout the film until at the few months. In fact it cost him eight years, his marriage, end when the hero returns to his search he is back in the everything he owned, and almost his sanity and his life—an landscape in which we discovered him at he beginning of the ordeal beyond anything imagined by Burt Kennedy for any of film and is almost absorbed into it.” Boetticher’s stoical heroes. “Boetticher’s West is quite simply the world,” Kitses In his book When in Disgrace (1969), Boetticher gives a writes, “a philosophical ground over which his pilgrims move to fictionalized account of those years in Mexico, during which he be confronted with existential choices wholly abstracted from was financially ruined, divorced, jailed, committed to an insane social contexts….The moral of Boetticher’s films is….[that] asylum, and nearly killed, first by hunger, then by a long disease. Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—7

Carlos Arruza died in a freak automobile accident and so did Boetticher’s interest in Spanish/Mexican culture most of Boetticher’s film crew, but the director, living on three expresses itself throughout his films, not least in the way women tamales a day, turned down fat offers from Hollywood and are seen. His values grow out of the cultural tradition in which completed the picture, sustained by his absolute faith in what he the male code of hour is a driving force and from which Don was trying to do and his belief in “living the way s man should.” Juan was born. As he said of himself: ‘I was the worst macho in In Arruza, Boetticher explained later, “I had my own private the world but I hate the word.’ His films are directed with the genius for eight years, who did what I wanted, stood where I puritanism of the hellraiser; a cleavage, a torn blouse, a discreet asked him to, walked out in the sun to be in the light, and fought wash in a river and a rare kiss are the nearest one gets to explicit the bulls to the best of his ability”—“wouldn’t it have been a sex. On the surface, women may appear to have a central wonderful thing if the director of The Agony and the Ecstasy had importance: they are dreamed about, desired, even fought Michelangelo instead of ?” over…but they are never seen for themselves. They are really Aruzza (1968) begins with the matador in retirement and just tokens in what are always struggles between men. traces his two comebacks—first as a rejoneador (fighting on Another key Hispanic influence is the bullfight, an horseback) and in a triumphant last appearance in Plaza Mexico a activity whose meaning is also defined, like the Western, by few months before his pointless death. The film had a mixed shared rituals and codes of behaviour. As a young man reception, some critics praising it as an exemplary and moving Boetticher was also a boxer and athlete. In all these activities, documentary, others finding it boring, or “nauseating” in its professionalism is essential to a sense of self-worth. Any visible cruelty. Boetticher himself has no doubt that it is his masterpiece, hint of cowardice is unacceptable, everything must be a pure film, in which he “did not compromise on any shot”—“if accomplished with dignity and grace. These are the virile people don’t like it, they’re attitudes and moral values which wrong.” pass seamlessly and effectively Returning to from the closed world of Budd’s Hollywood, Boetticher sporting arena to the closed world began a new business of his Westerns…. association with his friend In 1957, having just seen . It produced Seven Men From Now, the great only one film before French critic André Bazin wrote Murphy was killed in a the first and still possibly the best plane crash in 1971. A Time piece about Budd Boetticher and, forDying (1969), scripted by as he had the first word, it is Boetticher, photographed by perhaps appropriate for him to Lucien Ballard, and have the last: ‘The fundamental produced by Murphy, follows the brief career of an aspiring problem of the contemporary Western springs without doubt young gunfighter (Richard Lapp) in Arizona, and his love affair from the dilemma of intelligence and innocence… [In Seven Men with the girl he rescues from a brothel (Anne Randell). Audie From Now] there are no symbols, no philosophical implications, Murphy appears as Jesse James and Victor Jory as the monstrous not a shadow of psychology, nothing but ultra conventional old clown Judge Rot Bean. Boetticher called the movie “a characters engaged in exceedingly familiar acts, but placed in Western about all the unmarked graves, about all the kids who their setting in an extraordinarily ingenious way. With a use of had everything but just didn’t win.” Kitses has pointed out that detail which renders every scene interesting…even more than the “the film describes a perfect circle for all its principals” and inventiveness which thought up the twists in the plot, I admire Robin Wood writes of the “black futility” of the hero’s the humour with which everything is treated…the irony does not meaningless death, “a bitter nihilism which might be found diminish the characters, but it allows their naivety and the appropriate to a last word.” In fact, Boetticher has so far made no director’s intelligence to co-exist without tension. For it is indeed more films. His script, Two Mules for Sister Sara, was directed the most intelligent Western I know while being the least by . intellectual, the most subtle and the least aestheticising.’ Like John Ford, Boetticher is said to be “a man of the It is very perceptive, an exemplary piece of film writing. outdoor life most at ease in good male company”; he has What Bazin said about Seven Men From Now applies to the other nevertheless been married four times. He has something of a three films that followed it. Bazin also understood how, in a reputation for being “violent andquarrelsome,” but his friend genre of filmmaking that is as full of conventional stereotypes Burt Kennedy would “simply say that he was alive.” The and narrative devices as the Western, freshness and originality Ranown cycle is said to have provided the model for Sam often come from imaginative reworking and respect for the Pekinpah’s Ride the High Country, and Georges Sadoul has familiar. He also understood, in a way that some of his fellow called Boetticher “with Peckinpah…the best modern director of writers did not, that authorship is a collective enterprise. Westerns.” Boetticher’s Ranown cycle owes a great deal of its success to the fact that it was one of hose rare moments when the right group of “A Time and a Place Budd Boetticher and the Western” people managed to come together at the right time and place. The Mike Dibb in The Book of Westerns. Edited by Ian Cameron ground rules were set but, exploiting rather than resisting the and Douglas Pye. Continuum, NY 1996. limitations, Budd and Co. found an unusual degree of harmony and freedom. And in Lone Pine’s they found the Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—8

perfect setting in which to invent and improvise their short series The western film genre often portrays the conquest of of four memorable chamber Westerns. the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization, or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the From Filmsite.org: original inhabitants of the frontier. Specific settings include Westerns are the major defining genre of the American film lonely isolated forts, ranch houses, the isolated homestead, the industry, a nostalgic eulogy to the early days of the expansive, saloon, the jail, the livery stable, the small-town main street, or untamed American frontier (the borderline between civilization small frontier towns that are forming at the edges of civilization. and the wilderness). They are They may even include Native one of the oldest, most American sites or villages. Other enduring and flexible genres iconic elements in Westerns and one of the most include the hanging tree, stetsons characteristically American and spurs, saddles, lassos and Colt genres in their mythic .45's, bandannas and buckskins, origins. canteens, stagecoaches, gamblers, [The popularity of long-horned cattle and cattle westerns has waxed and drives, prostitutes (or madams) waned over the years. Their with a heart of gold, and more. most prolific era was in the Very often, the cowboy has a 1930s to the , and most favored horse (or 'faithful steed'), recently in the 90s, there was for example, Roy Rogers' Trigger, a resurgence of the genre. They appear to be making an Gene Autry's Champion, William Boyd's (Hopalong Cassidy) invigorating comeback (both on the TV screen and in theatres). Topper, the Lone Ranger's Silver and Tonto's Scout. Modern movie remakes, such as 3:10 To Yuma (2007) and the Western films have also been called the horse opera, the Coen Brothers' True Grit (2010) have also paid homage to their oater (quickly-made, short western films which became as mid-20th century predecessors.] commonplace as oats for horses), or the cowboy picture. The This indigenous American art form focuses on the western film genre has portrayed much about America's past, frontier West that existed in North America. Westerns are often glorifying the past-fading values and aspirations of the mythical set on the American frontier during the last part of the 19th by-gone age of the West. Over time, westerns have been re- century (1865-1900) following the Civil War, in a geographically defined, re-invented and expanded, dismissed, re-discovered, and western (trans-Mississippi) setting with romantic, sweeping spoofed. In the late 60s and early 70s (and in subsequent years), frontier landscapes or rugged rural terrain. However, Westerns 'revisionistic' Westerns that questioned the themes and elements may extend back to the time of America's colonial period or of traditional/classic westerns appeared (such as 's forward to the mid-20th century, or as far geographically as (1969), Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970), Mexico. A number of westerns use the Civil War, the Battle of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and later Clint the Alamo (1836) or the Mexican Revolution (1910) as a Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992)). backdrop.

The online PDF files of these handouts have color images

Coming up in the Spring 2015 Buffalo Film Seminars March 3 Roger Vadim, Barbarella, 1968 Mar 10 Bob Fosse, All That Jazz, 1979 Mar 24 George Miller, Mad Max, 1979 Mar 31 Karel Reisz, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1981 Apr 7 Gregory Nava, El Norte, 1983 Apr 14 Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects, 1995 Apr 21 Bela Tarr, Werkmeister Harmonies, 2000 Apr 28 Sylvain Chomet, The Triplets of Belleville, 2003 May 5 Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men, 2007

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: [email protected] …email Bruce Jackson [email protected] ...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] ....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News