24 February 2015 (Series 30:5) Budd Boettticher, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW (1956, 78 minutes)

Directed by Budd Boetticher Written by Burt Kennedy (original story and screenplay) Produced by Andrew V. McLaglen, Robert E. Morrison, and John Wayne Music by Henry Vars Cinematography by William H. Clothier Film Editing by Everett Sutherland Randolph Scott ... Ben Stride Gail Russell ... Annie Greer Lee Marvin ... Bill Masters Walter Reed ... John Greer John Larch ... Payte Bodeen Don 'Red' Barry ... Clete Fred Graham ... Henchman John Beradino ... Clint John Phillips ... Jed Chuck Roberson ... Mason Stuart Whitman ... Cavalry Lt. Collins Pamela Duncan ... Señorita Nellie Steve Mitchell ... Fowler Cliff Lyons ... Henchman Fred Sherman ... The Prospector Budd Boetticher (director) (b. Oscar Boetticher Jr., July 29, 1916 in Chicago, Illinois—d. November 29, 2001 (age 85) in Ramona, California) directed 45 films and television shows, including 1985 My Kingdom For..., 1972 Arruza, 1969 A Time for Dying, 1960 Comanche Station, 1960 The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, 1959 Ride Lonesome, 1959 Westbound, 1957 Decision at Sundown, 1957 The Tall T, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1955 The Magnificent Matador, 1954 “Public Defender” (TV Series, 6 episodes), 1953 East of Sumatra, 1953 Wings of the Hawk, 1953 The Man from the Alamo, 1952 Horizons West, 1952 Red Ball Express, 1952 The Cimarron Kid, 1951 Bullfighter and the Lady, 1950 The Three Musketeers, 1950 Killer Shark, 1949 The Wolf Hunters, 1948 Behind Locked

Doors, 1945 Escape in the Fog, 1945 A Guy, a Gal and a Pal, 1944 The Missing Juror, and 1944 One Mysterious Night. William H. Clothier (cinematographer) (b. February 21, 1903 in Decatur, Illinois—d. January 7, 1996 (age 92) in Los Angeles, California) was the cinematographer for 60 films and television shows, some of which are 1973 The Train Robbers, 1971 Big Jake, 1970 Rio Lobo, 1970 Chisum, 1970 The Cheyenne Social Club, 1969 The Undefeated, 1967 The War Wagon, 1967 The Way West, 1965 Shenandoah, 1964 Cheyenne Autumn, 1964 A Distant Trumpet, 1963 McLintock!, 1963 Donovan's Reef, 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962 Merrill's Marauders, 1961 The Comancheros, 1961 The Deadly Companions, 1960 The Alamo, 1959 The Horse Soldiers, 1958 China Doll, 1958 Lafayette Escadrille, 1956 Man in the Vault, 1956 Gun the Man Down, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1956 Good-bye, My Lady, 1955 Gang Busters, 1955 The Sea Chase, 1954 Track of the Cat, 1952 Confidence Girl, 1950 Once a Thief, 1948 Sofia, 1948 Fort 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 Camera and Electrical Department on 31 film and television projects.

Randolph Scott ... 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 Ride the High Country, 1960 Comanche Station, 1959 Ride Lonesome, 1958 Buchanan Rides Alone, 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 'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders, 1943 Corvette K-225, 1943 The Desperadoes, 1942 The Spoilers, 1942 To the Shores of Tripoli, 1941 Belle Starr, 1941 Western Union, 1940 When the Daltons Rode, 1940 My Favorite Wife, 1940 Virginia City, 1939 Frontier Marshal, 1939 Jesse James, 1938 The Texans, 1938 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1937 High, Wide, and Handsome, 1936 Go West Young Man, 1936 The Last of the Mohicans, 1935 She, 1935 Roberta, 1935 Home on the Range, 1934 Wagon Wheels, 1934 The Last Round-Up, 1933 Cocktail Hour, 1933 Murders in the Zoo, 1932 Wild Horse Mesa, 1932 Sky Bride, 1929 Dynamite, 1929 The Virginian, 1929 The Black Watch, 1929 The Far Call, and 1928 Sharp Shooters. Gail Russell ... Annie Greer (b. Elizabeth L. Russell, September 21, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois—d. August 27, 1961 (age 36) in Los Angeles, California) appeared in 28 films and TV shows, including 1961 The Silent Call, 1958 No Place to Land, 1957 The Tattered Dress, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1951 Air Cadet, 1950 The Lawless, 1950 Captain China, 1949 The Great Dan Patch, 1949 El Paso, 1949 Song of India, 1948 Wake of the Red Witch, 1948 Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1947 Variety Girl, 1947 Calcutta, 1947 Angel and the Badman, 1946 The Bachelor's Daughters, 1946 Our Hearts Were Growing Up, 1945 Duffy's Tavern, 1945 Salty O'Rourke, 1944 Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, 1944 The Uninvited, 1944 Lady in the Dark, and 1943 Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour. Lee Marvin ... Bill Masters (b. February 19, 1924 in New York City, New York—d. August 29, 1987 (age 63) in Tucson, Arizona) won the 1966 Academy Award for Best Actor in a

Leading Role for Cat Ballou (1965). He appeared in 107 films and television shows, among them 1986 The Delta Force, 1985 “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 “Bonanza” (TV Series), 1961 The Comancheros, 1954-1961 “General Electric Theater” (TV Series, 7 episodes), 1957-1960 “M Squad” (TV Series, 117 episodes), 1954-1959 “Schlitz

Playhouse” (TV Series), 1958 The Missouri Traveler, 1957 Raintree County, 1957 “Studio 57” (TV Series), 1956 The Rack, 1956 Attack, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1955 I Died a Thousand Times, 1955 Pete Kelly's Blues, 1955 Not as a Stranger, 1955 Violent Saturday, 1955 Bad Day at Black Rock, 1954 The Caine Mutiny, 1953 The Wild One, 1953 The Big Heat, 1953 Down Among the Sheltering Palms, 1953 Seminole, 1952 Eight Iron Men, 1952 Hangman's Knot, 1952 We're Not Married!, 1952 Hong Kong, 1951 You're in the Navy Now, 1950 “The Big Story” (TV Series), and 1950 “Escape” (TV Series). Walter Reed ... John Greer (b. Walter Reed Smith, February 10, 1916 in Bainbridge Island, Washington—d. August 20, 2001 (age 85) in Santa Cruz, California) appeared in 206 films and television shows, some of which are 1972 “The Streets of San Francisco” (TV Series), 1969-1971 “Ironside” (TV Series), 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1969 A Time for Dying, 1968 Panic in the City, 1967 “Batman” (TV Series), 1966 The Oscar, 1965 The Money Trap, 1965 Mirage, 1960-1964 “Lassie” (TV Series), 1959-1964 “Wagon Train” (TV Series, 6 episodes), 1964 Where Love Has Gone, 1964 Cheyenne Autumn, 1964 “Mister Ed” (TV Series), 1964 The Carpetbaggers, 1962 How the West Was Won, 1962 “Bonanza” (TV Series), 1962 “Bronco” (TV Series), 1961 “Sea Hunt” (TV Series), 1961 “Dennis the Menace” (TV Series), 1960 “Twilight Zone” (TV Series), 1960 “The Untouchables” (TV Series), 1958-1960 “Perry Mason” (TV Series), 1960 Sergeant Rutledge, 1960 13 Fighting Men, 1959 “How to Marry a Millionaire” (TV Series), 1959 The Horse Soldiers, 1958 “Mike Hammer” (TV Series), 1958 “Adventures of Superman” (TV Series), 1957 “M Squad” (TV Series), 1957 “Zane Grey 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 Rin Tin Tin” (TV Series), 1957 “Gunsmoke” (TV Series, 8 episodes), 1957 Last of the Badmen, 1956 “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” (TV Series), 1956 Emergency Hospital, 1956 Seven Men from Now, 1955-1956 “Buffalo Bill, Jr.” (TV Series, 7 episodes), 1955 The Last Command, 1955 The Far Horizons, 1955 Hell's Island, 1953-1955 “The Lone Ranger” (TV Series), 1954 The High and the Mighty, 1954 Dangerous Mission, 1953 War Paint, 1953 The Man from the Alamo, 1953 Sangaree, 1952 Thunderbirds, 1952 Horizons West, 1952 Red Ball Express, 1952 Bronco Buster, 1951 Submarine Command, 1951 Government Agents vs Phantom Legion, 1950 Tripoli, 1950 Flying Disc Man from Mars, 1950 The Eagle and the Hawk, 1950 Young Man with a Horn, 1948 Return of the Bad Men, 1943 Bombardier, 1942 Mexican Spitfire's Elephant, 1942 The Mayor of 44th Street, and 1929 Redskin.

BUDD BOETTICHER From World Film Directors Vol I. Editor John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company, NY, 1987 “Budd Boetticher (Oscar Boetticher Jr.) American director, producer, and scenarist, was born in Chicago and studied at Ohio State University, where he was a star boxer and football player. After one violent football season he was sent to Mexico to convalesce from his injuries. Like Ernest Hemingway, whose love of action and adventure and stoic notion of manliness he shares, Boetticher fell in love with the art and mystique of bullfighting. He studied under the matador Lorenzo Garza and himself fought in Mexico as a professional matador. In 1941, on account of this experience, Boetticher was invitd to serve as technical adviser on the bullfight sequences in Reuben Mamoulian’s remake of Blood and Sand, starring Tyrone Power. Fascinated by the movie world, he stayed on in Hollywood, working for a time as messenger-boy at Hal Roach;s studios. In 1942 or 2943 he was taken on as assistant director of William A. Seiter’s Destroyer (1943), and he served in the same capacity in George Stevens’ The More the Merrier (1943), Charles Vidor’s The Desperados (1943) and Cover Girl (1944), and William Berkey’s Girl in the Case (The Silver Key, 1944). Boetticher says that he “gave up that job quite soon, because it really had nothing to do with directing. In the USA an assistant is more on the production, not the direction side. Usually it’s a young man whose job is to spy on the director and

report his findings to the producer—the mistakes his director makes, whether he’s getting behind schedule. I was no good; I always took his side.” (This quotation and many others in this note are from an interview conducted by Bernard Tavernier for Cahiers du Cinéma July 1964 and quoted in Jim Kitses’ BFI dossier Budd Boetticher: The Western, in a translation by Susan Bennett.) In 1944 Boetticher directed his own first movies as Oscar Boetticher Jr.—One Mysterious Night, The Missing Juror, and Youth on Trial. One reviewer wrote of the first of these, a Chester Morris thriller, that it “wasn’t released; it escaped”—a comment that Boetticher says he “will die remembering.” The other two were apparently not much better, nor were the seven B features Boetticher made between 1945 and 1950. Most of them were cut-rate thrillers, but one was a Western, Black Midnight (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 United States 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 Hollywood, 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 received an Oscar nomination for it). Drawing on Boetticher’s own experiences, it tells the story of a young American, Chuck Regan (Robert Stack), who is drawn to bullfighting and is taken under the wing of a great Mexican matador (Gilbert Roland). Immature and arrogant, the boy insists on fighting before he is sufficiently experienced, and his mentor saves his life at the cost of his own. At the climax Regan has to return to the ring and prvoe himself in the face of a hostile crowd who hold him responsible for the death of their idol. Herbert J. Yates, head of Republic Pictures and producer of the movie, was away in Europe when Botticher copleted the shooting. One day he plucked up his courage and showed the footage to John Ford who was working in the same studios.Boetticher says he lost twenty pounds waiting for Ford’s reaction, but when it came it was enthusiastic. Ford took charge of almost all the editing of The Bullfighter and the Lady,” Boetticher says. “I had one or two disappointments, because he cut passages I liked, especially bits with the horses….but just the fact of having been helped by John Ford did me a lot of good.” Moderately well received by the critics and “a great success on its second run,” The Bullfighter and the Lady brought Boetticher a contract with Universal-International. There he made eleven films, most of them hurried, low-budget affairs, but not without interest. Boetticher’s first picture for Universal was an Audie Murphy Western, The Cimarron Kid (1951), which opens with 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. Boetticher considerably rewrote Louis Stevens’ script (and history) in portraying a raid by the James and Dalton brothers, explaining that “I’m not faithful to history if it might spoil the film.” After Bronco Buster (1952) came one of Boetticher’s few war films: “ I prefer my films to be based on heroes who want to do what they are doing, despite the danger and the risk of death….In war nobody wants to die and I hate making films about people who are forced to do such-and-such a thing.” For this reason Boetticher is much happier with Westerns, like Horizon West (1952), whose remarkable cast included Robert Ryan, Julia Adams, Rock Hudson, John McIntyre, Raymond Burr, and Dennis Weaver. Boetticher himself says of this otherwise undistinguished movie: “there were some very good actors…who began their career in that film, which is a fact I’m quite proud of….That’s why my only vivid memory of that film, except Julia Adams, who was really radiant and beautiful and who I was madly in love with. She had just got divorced at that time and we went off together. That's all I can say about that film.” One of the worst of Boetticher’s Universal movies was City Beneath the Sea (1963)—he himself calls it “a joke,” but makes it clear that it might have been even more dire if he and his cast had not rewritten the appalling script “as we went along.” A least, Boetticher says, he had the consolation of working with his friends Robert Ryan and Anthony Quinn, and a certain amount of fun with special effects—he shot the “underwater” sequences by having Ryan and Quinn walk (in slow motion) on foam rubber, and superimposed the water and the fish. At this time Boetticher was churning out movies at a killing pace: “I’d finish a film on Thursday or Friday and then begin on another the next Tuesday or Wednesday. I had the weekend to read the script.” Seminole (1958), also made with Quinn (as well as Rock Hudson, Barbara Hale, and Lee Marvin), was also very harshly reviewed, but Boetticher defends the film. He had studied the Seminole, finding that they had never surrendered in their war with the United States and “gave the West Point boys a good thrashing….That was what I wanted to show.” There was a somewhat better press for The Man From the Alamo (1953), a relatively ambitious and expensive picture starring Glenn Ford and Julia Adams in a story about a man who escaped from the besieged fortress to go to the rescue of his family, and was branded a coward. In fact, as Peter Wollen points out,”—he risked his life and his repute—for a precise personal goal rather than stay, under the pressure of mass feeling, to fight for a collective cause. He is a typical Boetticher hero.” Julia Adams starred again, opposite Van Heflin, in Wings of the Hawk (1953), in which Heflin plays an American mining engineer who becomes involved in a Mexican revolution. The movie was shot in 3-D (against Boetticher’s wishes) and suffers from “having that 3-D camera dead in front of the actors all the time.” Some reviewers praised it as an anti-dictatorship tract, but Boetticher says that “in this film, as in all my other work, I’m much more interested in my characters than the ideas they stand up for….It’s the ways in which people defend their beliefs which interest me, not the beliefs themselves.” End of Sumatra (1953), “a very bad film” which Boetticher made only because it provided a part for his friend

Anthony Quinn, was followed by his second bullfighter movie, The Magnificent Matador (1955). Scripted by the director, it is a melodrama in which Quinn plays a famous matador who abandons his career in an attempt to prevent his illegitimate son from taking up the same dangerous trade. The critics found it a highly uneven work, and preferred The Killer is Loose (1955), a taut thriller in which Joseph Cotton is oddly cast as an underpaid cop and Rhonda Fleming as his wife, threatened by a psychopathic killer (Wendell Corey). Between 1955 and 1960 Boetticher also did a certain amount of work for television—the pilot show for Maverick, four episodes of of The Dick Powell Show, the sixty-minute Count of Monte Christo and one episode of Hong Kong. More important, working for John Wayne’s Batjac company, he made a Randolph Scott Western called Seven Men From Now (1956), scripted by Burt Kennedy. Scott plays Ben Stride, who is ruthlessly hunting down the seven men who murdered his wife in a raid on a Wells Fargo station. In the desert Stride encounters an Eastern couple, the Greers (Gail Russell and Walter Reed), and two outlaws (Lee Marvin and Donald Barry). It is with the brutal but almost irresistibly amusing and engaging Marvin character that the hero’s final confrontation must come, while a growing involvement with Annie Greer is responsible for softening his initial implacable coldness.

A commercial success, Seven Men From Now also brought Boetticher his first serious recognition, especially in France, where André Bazin gave it a long review in Cahiers du Cinéma (August-September 1957). Bazin (as translated by Susan Bennett in Jim Kitses’ BFI dossier), called it “possibly the best Western that I have seen since the war” and “very superior to Shane.” He went on: “The first thing to be admired about Seven Men From Now is the script, which effects a tour de force of constantly surprising us, despite its rigorously classical plot…. Even more than the inventiveness which thought up the exciting twists in the plot, I admire the humor with which they are treated….But the remarkable thing is that the humore does not get in the way of the film’s emotional impact….It is only when the director loves the characters and the situation that he invents to such a degree, that he is able to stand back and look at them with a humorous eye….That kind of irony does not diminish the characters, but it allows their naiveté and the director’s intelligence to coexist without tension. For it is the most intelligent Western I know, while being at the same time the least intellectual, the most subtle and the least aestheticizing, the simplest and finest example of the form….Boetticher has made remarkable use of the landscape, and the varying textures of the soil and rocks. I think the photogenic qualities of horses have never been made better use of….Lastly, there is Randolph Scott, whose face bears an unmistakable resemblance to William Hart, even down to the sublimely inexpressive blue eyes.” Recognizing in this unexpected success a chance to revive his declining career, Randolph Scott embarked on a series of Westerns directed by Boetticher, starring himself, and produced by his business partner Harry Joe Brown for Scott-Brown Productions, later Ranown. These Westerns (including Seven Men From Now) have come to be known, for the sake of convenience, as the Ranown cycle. Four of them were written by Burt Kennedy with Boetticher’s collaboration. (Boetticher has 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 that I get together with the author and we rewrite the script to suit the actors.” Kennedy has said that the Ranown scripts were as much Boetticher’s as his, though only Kennedy is credited.) Robin Wood, writing in Richard Roud’s Cinema, suggests that the Ranown films “can best be explained in terms of one of those happy collaborations that occur occasionally in the Hollywood cinema—Kelly/Donen is the most obvious example—in which the best is brought out of talents noticeably less distinguished in isolation….The films take the most traditional genre elements—the hero/villain conflict, the revenge motif, the gang, the Indians—on which Botticher and Kennedy perform subtle and idiosyncratic variations. The tone is always unassuming, and the genre is always respected: we never feel a self-conscious straining after ‘significance,’ or any sense that the artists feel superior to their raw material and are bent on transforming it….our delight arises from our simultaneous recognition of the convention and the variation.” Jim Kitses, to whose work on Boetticher Robin Wood pays tribute, finds in the Ranown films “the deepest commitment to a highly romantic individualism: life is seen as a solitary quest for meaning, an odyssey; action as a definition and expression of the self which is its own reward; compromise of personal integrity as indefensible….In general, the Boetticher hero as created by Scott can be said to possess (or to be moving towards) a great serenity, the knowledge that we are fundamentally alone, that nothing lasts, that what matters in the face of all this is ‘living the way a man should.’” He is often a man who has lost everything except his stoic sense of honor, and “this makes the figure oddly anachronistic, a man who continues to assert values out of an image of himself that has its roots in the past.” Our second view of this figure (if Ben Stride is taken as the first) comes in The Tall T (1957) in the character of Pat Brennan. He is introduced in terms of broad comedy—he bets he can ride a bull to a standstill and winds up in a watering trough. Having forfeited his horse, Brennan hitches a ride on the stage driven by his old friend Rintoon (Arthur Hunnicutt) and carrying a boy and the newly married Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Hara) and her husband. The mood darkens abruptly when the stage is held up by Usher (Richard Boone) and his companions (Henry Silva and Skip Homeier). Rintoon, the boy, and the cowardly Willard Mims are murdered. Brennan and Doretta are held for ransom. Brennan sets out to undermine the outlaws’ trust in one another. Usher is the most attractive of the Boetticher villains whose prototype was the Marvin character (Masters) in Seven Men From Now. Brutalized as he is, Usher is a character of great charm, wit and intelligence, and as his admiration for Brennan’s iron rectitude deepens into something very close to love, we recognize his dissatisfaction with himself, his impulse toward redemption, although we also recognize that his sins are too great

to escape punishment. And, indeed, as Kitses points out, “the basic deception in the films in the Ranown cycle, the key to their dramatic structure, is that the Randolph Scott figure is the hero only in the technical sense; it is, of course, the villain who is our true hero….We understand him in a way we cannot the hero—and the films stand finally as celebrations of this character who attempts to create action in a way that Scott cannot.” The next two pictures in the cycle were scripted by Charles Lang Jr. rather than Kennedy. Decision at Sundown (1957) is another revenge Western and a bitter one. It begins with Bart Allison (Scott) riding with his friend Sam (Noah Beeery Jr.) into a corrupt and frightened town ruled by the man (John Carroll) he holds responsible for his wife’s suicide; it ends with him riding out alone, unavenged and aware that his wife had been less sinned against than sinning. Buchanan Rides Alone is set in and around another corrupt community but is much lighter in tone. Arrested together with a young Mexican (Manuel Rojas) who has killed in defense of his sister’s honor, Buchanan teams up with him, and rids the town of the dreadful Agry family in a

tremendous shoot-out, control of the town then passing to another of Boetticher’s charming rogues, Abe Carbo (Craig Stevens). Boetticher himself found this “:a very amusing, very mathematical Western,” and Kitses points out that the Agrys are “humours in the medieval sense, farcical expressions of ignorance and greed.” In Ride Lonesome

(1959), written by Kennedy, Scott is again a numbed engine of revenge—former sheriff Ben Brigade, searching for a man named Frank (Lee Van Cleef) who hanged Brigade’s wife. Brigade captures Frank’s brother Billy John and travels slowly back to town, using Billy John as bait for Frank. Along the way, he is joined by two outlaws (Pernell Roberts and James Coburn) and by Carrie Lane (Karen Steele), whose husband has been killed by Indians. Frank duly shows up and is killed by Brigade, who then rides away, leaving Carrie and the likable, redeemable Pernell Roberts character to attempt a life together. Some critics tried to attach a religious significance to Brigade’s burning of the crosslike tree on which his wife has died, but Boetticher says that the tree was “a symbol for the things…[Brigade] hated” and that “at the same time this gesture was an attempt to destroy his own past; he didn’t want people to be hanged anymore.” Jim Kitses writes that “the meaning in a Boetticher movie resides less in the bright moments of good humor, its dark moments of violence, than in the continuum, a sensual movement, a perpetual interplay of light and shade, success and decline, life and death….Thus Ride Lonesome moves through three days and three nights, the companby pushing on over dangerous open vistas of arid country each morning and afternoon to cluster in the dappled dark of an evening camp. If dusk is often a kind, contemplative time for talk of the future, danger rides in bright and early at sun-up to temper hope and throttle dreams.”

Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—6

Kitses goes on to describe a brief but resonant image from the film—a water vase that hangs from the roof of a swinging station, swaying gently as the group rides out in single file and we follow each character across the frame: the image has a narrative function “but the composition and lighting are so delicate that they finally are a pleasure in themselves. The tension between static black border and bright rhythmic play within is so fine that ultimately the image has the quality, the essence of Boetticher, of an animated still-life. At moments like these Boetticher achieves a formal rigor and philosophical nuance that recalls the most unlikely of parallels, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Westbound (1959) is not part of the Ranown cycle, though it stars Randolph Scott. It is a routine, big-budget Western made for Warner Brothers, of no particular interest. Comanche Station, scripted by Kennedy and the last in the Ranown cycle, followed in 1960. Here the perennially widowed Randolph Scott plays Jefferson Cody, whose wife was stolen by Indians ten years earlier. Hearing of a white woman offered for ransom by the Comanches he goes to trade for her. It is not his wife—it never is—but another man’s, and Cody sets out to reunite her with her husband. The husband is blind and has offered a reward for her return. The money attracts other adventurers (Claude Akins, Skip Homeier, Richard Rush) and the dangers multiply. Speaking of the Ranown movies, Boetticher has said that most of them were made on a twelve-day shooting schedule, but “I did try, each time to make a better film than the one before, a deeper film.” Kitses writes that in Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station “the construction and pace are tightly controlled, the action unwinding with a spell-binding formal rigour, the film finally resembling pure ritual. Seizing on the cyclical pattern of the journey Western, the alternation of drama and lyricism, tension and release, intimacy and space, Boetticher gradually refines it to arrive at the remarkable balance of an ambiguous world poised between tragedy and pastoral comedy.” And Ian Cameron said of Comanche Station that Boetticher observes landscapes and the people moving about in them with a sensitivity rivaling Renoir’s in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe….The first shot of the film shows Scott riding along the top of a ridge in silhouette, and ends with a camera movement as the rider disappears behind an outcrop of rock and emerges below the level of the camera—a linked movement of actor and camera which is genuinely beautiful….And the picture of man as part of nature persists and strengthens throughout the film until at the end when the hero returns to his search he is back in the landscape in which we discovered him at he beginning of the film and is almost absorbed into it.” “Boetticher’s West is quite simply the world,” Kitses writes, “a philosophical ground over which his pilgrims move to be confronted with existential choices wholly abstracted from social contexts….The moral of Boetticher’s films is….[that]

everyone loses. Life defeats charm, innocence is blasted. The world is finally a sad and funny place, life is a tough, amusing game which never can be won but must be played.” The message is much the same in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), another ironic morality play, set this time in New York during Prohibition. The character played by Ray Danton only faintly resembles the historical Jack “Legs” Diamond—he is any small-time hoodlum with a blind itch for power and no idea what to do with it. His charm, style, and ruthlessness take him to the top so rapidly that he comes to

believe himself invulnerable; he comes down even faster because his old-style individualism is overtaken by the new “corporate capitalism of the underworld boardroom” and because, having discarded friends, family, and lovers on the way up, he finally has to face the Syndicate quite alone. For Boetticher himself, the message of the movie is that “you can stay alive as long as someone loves you.” Nobody loves Legs Diamond in the end, not even his

dim, boozy, despised wife-mistress Alice (Karen Steele). Boetticher thinks Alice his only “successful study of a woman,” apart from those in his two early bullfighting pictures—generally in his films the heroine is only important for what she has “caused to happen” to the hero. The director has described how he and his cameraman Lucien Ballard set out to make a film in the style of the 1920s, outraging the front office by slightly preexposing the filmstock, dispensing with such modern camera movements as dolly shots and most traveling shots, and going “back to the old flat lighting.” At first dismissed by most reviewers as just another gangster B-movie, Legs Diamond rose rapidly in critical esteem as its pace, economy and style began to be recognized. Anan Yates noted how the cold brutality of Leg’s world is conveyed “by means of harsh lighting and stiff geometrical patterns in the décor, by a constant use of sharp contrasts between black and white.” Andew Sarris called it “a minor classic in the perverse Scarface tradition,” and wondered “where directors like Boetticher find the energy and the imagination to do such fine work, when native critics are so fantastically indifferent.” In 1960, when critical recognition and financial security seemed at last assured, Boetticher left Hollywood in his Rolls Royce, accompanied by his latest wife (Debra Paget), and went to Mexico to complete his documentary about his friend Carlos Arruza, the greatest Mexican matador of recent times. Botticher had been shooting footage for this movie for years, in the intervals between other projects, and expected to complete it in a few months. In fact it cost him eight years, his marriage, everything he owned, and almost his sanity and his life—an ordeal beyond anything imagined by Burt Kennedy for any of Boetticher’s stoical heroes. In his book When in Disgrace (1969), Boetticher gives a fictionalized account of those years in Mexico, during which he was financially ruined, divorced, jailed, committed to an insane 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 most of Boetticher’s film crew, but the director, living on three tamales a day, turned down fat offers from Hollywood and completed the picture, sustained by his absolute faith in what he was trying to do and his belief in “living the way s man should.” In Arruza, Boetticher explained later, “I had my own private genius for eight years, who did what I wanted, stood where I asked him to, walked out in the sun to be in the light, and fought the bulls to the best of his ability”—“wouldn’t it have been a wonderful thing if the director of The Agony and the Ecstasy had Michelangelo instead of Charlton Heston?” Aruzza (1968) begins with the matador in retirement and traces his two comebacks—first as a rejoneador (fighting on horseback) and in a triumphant last appearance in Plaza Mexico a few months before his pointless death. The film had a mixed reception, some critics praising it as an exemplary and moving documentary, others finding it boring, or “nauseating” in its cruelty. Boetticher himself has no doubt that it is his masterpiece, a pure film, in which he “did not compromise on any shot”—“if people don’t like it, they’re wrong.” Returning to Hollywood, Boetticher began a new business association with his friend Audie Murphy. It produced only one film before Murphy was killed in a plane crash in 1971. A Time forDying (1969), scripted by Boetticher, photographed by Lucien Ballard, and produced by Murphy, follows the brief career of an aspiring young gunfighter (Richard Lapp) in Arizona, and his love affair with the girl he rescues from a brothel (Anne Randell). Audie Murphy appears as Jesse James and Victor Jory as the monstrous old clown Judge Rot Bean. Boetticher called the movie “a Western about all the unmarked graves, about all the kids who had everything but just didn’t win.” Kitses has pointed out that “the film describes a perfect circle for all its principals” and Robin Wood writes of the “black futility” of the hero’s meaningless death, “a bitter nihilism which might be found appropriate to a last word.” In fact, Boetticher has so far made no more films. His script, Two Mules for Sister Sara, was directed by Don Siegel. Like John Ford, Boetticher is said to be “a man of the outdoor life most at ease in good male company”; he has nevertheless been married four times. He has something of a reputation for being “violent andquarrelsome,” but his friend Burt Kennedy would “simply say that he was alive.” The Ranown cycle is said to have provided the model for Sam Pekinpah’s Ride the High Country, and Georges Sadoul has called Boetticher “with Peckinpah…the best modern director of Westerns.” “A Time and a Place Budd Boetticher and the Western” Mike Dibb in The Book of Westerns. Edited by Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye. Continuum, NY 1996.

Boetticher’s interest in Spanish/Mexican culture expresses itself throughout his films, not least in the way women are seen. His values grow out of the cultural tradition in which the male code of hour is a driving force and from which Don Juan was born. As he said of himself: ‘I was the worst macho in the world but I hate the word.’ His films are directed with the puritanism of the hellraiser; a cleavage, a torn blouse, a discreet wash in a river and a rare kiss are the nearest one gets to explicit sex. On the surface, women may appear to have a central importance: they are dreamed about, desired, even fought over…but they are never seen for themselves. They are really just tokens in what are always struggles between men. Another key Hispanic influence is the bullfight, an activity whose meaning is also defined, like the Western, by shared rituals and codes of behaviour. As a young man Boetticher was also a boxer and athlete. In all these activities, professionalism is essential to a sense of self-worth. Any visible hint of cowardice is unacceptable, everything must be accomplished with dignity and grace. These are the virile

attitudes and moral values which pass seamlessly and effectively from the closed world of Budd’s sporting arena to the closed world of his Westerns…. In 1957, having just seen Seven Men From Now, the great French critic André Bazin wrote the first and still possibly the best piece about Budd Boetticher and, as he had the first word, it is perhaps appropriate for him to have the last: ‘The fundamental

problem of the contemporary Western springs without doubt from the dilemma of intelligence and innocence… [In Seven Men From Now] there are no symbols, no philosophical implications, not a shadow of psychology, nothing but ultra conventional characters engaged in exceedingly familiar acts, but placed in their setting in an extraordinarily ingenious way. With a use of detail which renders every scene interesting…even more than the inventiveness which thought up the twists in the plot, I admire the humour with which everything is treated…the irony does not diminish the characters, but it allows their naivety and the director’s intelligence to co-exist without tension. For it is indeed the most intelligent Western I know while being the least intellectual, the most subtle and the least aestheticising.’ It is very perceptive, an exemplary piece of film writing. What Bazin said about Seven Men From Now applies to the other three films that followed it. Bazin also understood how, in a genre of filmmaking that is as full of conventional stereotypes and narrative devices as the Western, freshness and originality often come from imaginative reworking and respect for the familiar. He also understood, in a way that some of his fellow writers did not, that authorship is a collective enterprise. 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 people managed to come together at the right time and place. The ground rules were set but, exploiting rather than resisting the limitations, Budd and Co. found an unusual degree of harmony and freedom. And in Lone Pine’s Alabama Hills they found the

Boetticher—SEVEN MEN FROM NOW—8

perfect setting in which to invent and improvise their short series of four memorable chamber Westerns. From Filmsite.org: Westerns are the major defining genre of the American film industry, a nostalgic eulogy to the early days of the expansive, untamed American frontier (the borderline between civilization and the wilderness). They are one of the oldest, most enduring and flexible genres and one of the most characteristically American genres in their mythic origins.

[The popularity of westerns has waxed and waned over the years. Their most prolific era was in the 1930s to the 1960s, and most recently in the 90s, there was a resurgence of the genre. They appear to be making an invigorating comeback (both on the TV screen and in theatres). Modern movie remakes, such as 3:10 To Yuma (2007) and the Coen Brothers' True Grit (2010) have also paid homage to their mid-20th century predecessors.]

This indigenous American art form focuses on the frontier West that existed in North America. Westerns are often set on the American frontier during the last part of the 19th century (1865-1900) following the Civil War, in a geographically western (trans-Mississippi) setting with romantic, sweeping frontier landscapes or rugged rural terrain. However, Westerns may extend back to the time of America's colonial period or forward to the mid-20th century, or as far geographically as Mexico. A number of westerns use the Civil War, the Battle of the Alamo (1836) or the Mexican Revolution (1910) as a backdrop.

The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization, or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. Specific settings include lonely isolated forts, ranch houses, the isolated homestead, the saloon, the jail, the livery stable, the small-town main street, or small frontier towns that are forming at the edges of civilization.

They may even include Native American sites or villages. Other iconic elements in Westerns include the hanging tree, stetsons and spurs, saddles, lassos and Colt .45's, bandannas and buckskins, canteens, stagecoaches, gamblers, long-horned cattle and cattle drives, prostitutes (or madams) with a heart of gold, and more. Very often, the cowboy has a favored horse (or 'faithful steed'), for example, Roy Rogers' Trigger,

Gene Autry's Champion, William Boyd's (Hopalong Cassidy) Topper, the Lone Ranger's Silver and Tonto's Scout.

Western films have also been called the horse opera, the oater (quickly-made, short western films which became as commonplace as oats for horses), or the cowboy picture. The western film genre has portrayed much about America's past, glorifying the past-fading values and aspirations of the mythical by-gone age of the West. Over time, westerns have been re-defined, re-invented and expanded, dismissed, re-discovered, and spoofed. In the late 60s and early 70s (and in subsequent years), 'revisionistic' Westerns that questioned the themes and elements of traditional/classic westerns appeared (such as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970), Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and later Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992)).

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: engdc@buffalo.edu …email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu

...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com

....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