Budd Boetticher Films | Budd Boetticher Filmography | Budd Boetticher Biography | Budd Boetticher Career | Budd Boetticher Awards

Budd Boetticher will be remembered as a director of westerns, although his bullfight films have their fervent admirers, as does his Scarface-variant, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. Since Boetticher's westerns are so variable in quality, it is tempting to overcredit Burt Kennedy, the scriptwriter for all of the finest. But Kennedy's own efforts as director (Return of the Seven, Hannie Caulder, The War Wagon, etc.) are tediously paced dramas or failed comedies. Clearly the Boetticher/Kennedy team clicked to make westerns significantly superior to what either could create on their own. Indeed, The Tall T, Seven Men from Now, and (on a slightly lower level) Ride Lonesome look now like the finest work in the genre during the 1950s, less pretentious and more tightly controlled than even those of Anthony Mann or John Ford.

Jim Kitses's still-essential Horizons West rightly locates Boetticher's significant westerns in the ?Ranown? cycle (a production company name taken from producer Harry Joe Brown and his partner Randolph Scott). But the non-Kennedy entries in the cycle have, despite Scott's key presence, only passing interest. One might have attributed the black comedy in the series to Kennedy without the burlesque Buchanan Rides Alone, which wanders into an episodic narrative opposite to the taut, unified action of the others; Decision at Sundown is notable only for its remarkably bitter finale and a morally pointless showdown, as if it were a cynic's answer to High Noon.

The Tall T's narrative is typical of the best Boetticher/Kennedy: it moves from a humanizing comedy so rare in the genre into a harsh and convincing savagery. Boetticher's villains are relentlessly cruel, yet morally shaded. In The Tall T, he toys with the redeemable qualities of Richard Boone, while deftly characterizing the other two (Henry Silva asks, "I've never shot me a woman, have I Frank?"). Equally memorable are Lee Marvin (in Seven Men from Now) and Lee Van Cleef (Ride Lonesome).

Randolph Scott is the third essential collaborator in the cycle. He is generally presented by Boetticher as a loner not by principle or habit but by an obscure terror in his past (often a wife murdered). Thus, he's not an asexual cowpoke so much as one who, temporarily at least, is beyond fears and yearnings. There's a Pinteresque sexual confrontation in Seven Men from Now among Scott, a pioneer couple, and an insinuating Lee Marvin when the four are confined in a wagon. And, indeed, the typical Boetticher landscape?smooth, rounded, and yet impassible boulders?match Scott's deceptively complex character as much as the majestic Monument Valley towers match Wayne in Ford's westerns, or the harsh cliffs match James Stewart in Mann's.

Clearly the westerns of the sixties and seventies owe more to Boetticher than Ford. Even such very minor works as Horizons West, The Wings of the Hawk, and The Man from the Alamo have the tensions of spaghetti westerns (without the iciness), as well as the Peckinpah fantasy of American expertise combining with Mexican peasant vitality. If Peckinpah and Leone are the masters of the post-"classic" western, then it's worth noting how The Wings of the Hawk anticipates The Wild Bunch, and how Once Upon a Time in the West opens like Seven Men from Now and closes like Ride Lonesome. Boetticher's films are the final great achievement of the traditional Western, before the explosion of the genre.?SCOTT SIMMON