Synopsis
Loner Cody trades with the Comanches to get a white girl released. He is joined on his way back to the girl’s husband by an outlaw and his sidekicks. It turns out there is a large reward for the return of the girl, and with the Indians on the warpath and the outlaw being an old enemy of Cody’s, things are set for several showdowns. Continue reading →

Synopsis
A gunman seeks revenge on the man he believes stole his wife. Continue reading →

Synopsis
Bounty hunter, Brigade, captures a young outlaw because he’s on a personal mission to find the kid’s older brother, the murderous Frank. Continue reading →

A fast-paced western with a romantic twist, this was one of the last films pairing director Budd Boetticher and popular cowboy hero Randolph Scott before Scott’s retirement. John Hayes – Scott – left the Civil War behind him when he took on the job of managing the Overland Stage Lines out of a small Colorado town. Clay Putnam has not forgotten that the Confederacy lost and he plans on robbing Hayes Overland Stage of one of its gold shipments from California to the North. He wants the gold to stay in the South to revive the Confederate cause. Meanwhile, his wife Norma -Virginia Mayo – complicates matters since she was Hayes’ old flame, and Putnam’s cronies want the gold for themselves. Continue reading →

Seven Men from Now is a 1956 Western film directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, and Lee Marvin. The film was written by Burt Kennedy and produced by John Wayne’s Batjac Productions.

Praised by the pioneering French critic Andre Bazin as “one of the most intelligent westerns I know but also the least intellectual,” this 1956 feature by the underrated Budd Boetticher stresses action over dialogue while constructing a subtle moral allegory. Randolph Scott plays an ex-sheriff trailing the seven men who murdered his wife in a robbery; along the way he picks up a bumbling couple en route to California and an outlaw (Lee Marvin, whose appealing swagger contrasts with Scott’s laconic certitude). Boetticher uses the landscape not as a metaphor for wildness but as a starkly neutral ground on which his characters play out their shifting positions, which suggests that each individual is responsible for his or her own choices. The taut opening is stunning: the protagonist strides into a tightly framed patch of ground from behind the camera, initiating his attempts to both traverse and dominate space, and the ensuing gunfire offscreen accompanies images of the horses he’ll take from the men he’s killing, a beautiful elision that emphasizes destiny over violence. This recently restored 35-millimeter print has mostly excellent color. 78 min. By Fred Camper Continue reading →