DVD of the Week
#17 - Seven Men From Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956)Budd Boetticher's B-Western masterpiece could have been a very different film.
It was originally slated to star John Wayne. Dropping out of the project due to scheduling commitments (some
oater about a guy searching for his niece), executive producer Wayne had a casting suggestion for the director he'd nicknamed 'Narcissus'. "Let's use Randolph Scott," he said. "He's through."
Scott, a Western regular previously renowned for his woodenness, was on the skids. Within four years, though, his status as one of the genre's greats would be assured, thanks to the seven low-budget chamber Westerns he made with Boetticher - the Ranown cycle.
Seven Men From Now - the first of the bunch - begins with a thunderclap and a double-shooting and ends in a desert arena framed by jagged rocks, as an ex-sheriff - supported by a makeshift crutch - faces off against a man who's done him no wrong, and who once saved his life.
Scott plays Ben Stride, former sheriff of Silver Springs. After losing an election, he was too proud to play deputy, so his wife found work - in a Wells Fargo office.
When seven men took $20,000 in a raid, she took a bullet. Crippled by guilt, widower Stride struck out for vengeance. "That killin'," one of the men says to him in the opening scene. "Did they ever catch up to the fellows that done it?" "Two of them," he growls. Bang bang.
Riding inexorably towards his destiny, on the trail of five more bad men, Stride hooks up with a newly married couple (Walter Reed and Gail Russell) and a man from his past: Lee Marvin's knowing, swaggering sharpshooter, who's sniffing around after the stolen cash.
Boetticher, the greatest director no-one's ever heard of, lets the plot unfold slowly and methodically across
Seven Men's 80 minutes.
The film - shot in sumptuous Technicolor - is littered with bursts of violence and threats of violence, dreams of infidelity and moments of sheer, breathtaking wonder. The whole thing is underscored by a heap of guilt, misery and innuendo.
These themes come to the fore in a tranquil, stunningly-realised scene in which Russell and Scott hang up washing amidst the snow-capped mountains, to the sound of Lee Marvin's smutty murmurings.
Burt Kennedy's script is a triumph of spare poetry, infused with the mixture of lyricism, nostalgia and earthiness that all Westerns aspire to, but so few possess.
A couple of lines give the kind of insight into each character that it usually takes an hour to put across. "Do you think I love my husband any less because of the way he is?" Russell asks Scott of her ineffectual spouse. "Yes," he replies.
The whole cast is fine - and Scott gives perhaps the best performance of his career - but Marvin annihilates all-comers in the acting stakes. Did he ever offer a more intriguing, compelling, downright hilarious characterisation?
He has no less than three sensational monologues, the greatest of which - in a secluded outpost - gives us the backstory in spellbinding fashion.
The Ranown films, Boetticher said later, had "taken Randolph Scott and shoved him up John Wayne's.." well, reputation.
Seven Men From Now, his favourite of the brood, is a complete triumph, a barely-heralded genre classic that's both morally complex and dizzyingly entertaining.
Seven Men From Now is available on Region 2 (UK-compatible) DVD, for about £5.DVD of the Week archive:
#1 - Let's Get Lost (Bruce Weber, 1988)
#2 - Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)
#3 - The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
#4 - The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)
#5 - The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
#6 - Written and Directed by Preston Sturges (Preston Sturges, 1940-44)
#7 – The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)#8 - Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)#9 - Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)#10 - No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorsese, 2005)#11 - Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)#12 – A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)#13 - Lady on a Train (Charles David, 1945)#14 - Just Like Heaven (Mark Waters, 2005)#15 - The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1934)#16 - The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)
