When one thinks of great director/actor combinations in western film history, the first that comes to mind is John Ford and John Wayne. However, there are other great combinations that don't get as much attention. One of these is that of Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott. The duo would make seven films together, of which their first would be the wonderful and too often overlooked Seven Men from Now.
In this movie ex-sheriff Ben Stride (Randolph Scott) is hunting down and killing the seven men responsible for a Wells Fargo robbery that resulted in the death of his wife. On his mission he travels with young husband and wife couple John and Annie Greer (Walter Reed, Gail Russell) and runs across a criminal he had previously put behind bars named Bill Masters (Lee Marvin).
This deceptively simple storyline hides a real emotional and moral complexity. This is not a simple western where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black. While Ban Stride is very clearly the hero, he is not that we envy or would aspire to be. His is cold and stoic, letting nobody truly in, not even the audience. Though he is on the side of right, he is doing so with a heart full of pain and revenge. Watching though we know that even if he completes his mission, it will relieve him of nothing. Randolph Scott is absolutely perfect in this role, capturing the heart and pain of this character so well in a very minimalist performance. On the contrast, Lee Marvin as the villain is fun to watch being truly dynamic and compelling. In fact, his character even gets the best comedic moments in the film. The young married is also very compelling, as their relationship is not the typical romantic western leads, especially as their relationship to each other is more complex than that. For a movie that really focuses on just these four characters each of them is extremely well defined and complex. The basic storyline serves as a catalyst for studying these four characters and it does this masterfully.
This movie also greatly benefits from some absolutely beautiful location shooting at Lone Pine California. About Lone Pine Boetticher would later state, "If you're going to make a western, you can't make a bad shot in Lone Pine. It's the greatest western location in the world. You had the mountains, the volcanic rocks, and across the road you had sand dunes and rivers. I [could] do my whole picture there.... In Seven Men from Now, I wanted one of my villains to get shot as he tries to escape through a crack in the rocks. And when he's dead, he just hangs there - he never falls to the ground. I found the crack and then I built the rest of the scene around [it] and it really worked."
This film's writer was Burt Kennedy, a screenwriter and actor, who had been working for John Wayne's production company, Batjac. Kennedy later remembered, "they just put me in a room with a title, a legal pad and a pencil, and six weeks later I had written Seven Men from Now." At first the script received little attention. However, Robert Mitchum found it and offered Kennedy $150,000. When John Wayne heard about this, he reread the script and loved it. On the last day of shooting the movie, The Killer Is Loose (1956), Budd Boetticher received a message from John Wayne. Since John had given the director a chance and produced Budd's movie Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), Budd felt he owed it to The Duke to meet him. John handed the director the script for Seven Men from Now and told Budd to read it. Budd came back in an hour and told, Wayne that he loved it. Wayne explained that Boetticher couldn't have read it in only an hour. Boetticher explained "I read 35 pages. That's all I had to read to know that it's great. I'd like to meet this Kennedy fellow." Wayne stated, "So shake hands with him," and motioned to the man standing next to him. That began a major partnership and the two would go on to work on many films in the future. The casting of Lee Marvin was Burt Kennedy's idea. Budd Boetticher later wrote, "Burt and I agreed that western heavies over the years had been portrayed as much too heavy. They rode black horses and wore black hats. You never saw anything good about any of them. Well, we set out to make our villains extremely attractive. Sure they were going to get killed - eventually - by our hero, but we wanted our audience to really love 'em while they were still kickin'."
John Wayne was hoping to play the main role but was busy filming the John Ford classic, The Searchers (1956). Boetticher remembered, "Wayne said, 'Let's use Randy Scott. He's through.' Well, the Duke's desire to throw poor Mr. Scott a crumb was the basis for five of the finest films I've ever made." Budd would add, "I thought the Scott character, before the pictures we made with him, was a pretty stuffy guy."
Boetticher and Scott's future collaborations would be The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), Westbound (1959) and Comanche Station (1960).
-Michael J. Ruhland
Resources Used
Leonard Maltin's Best 151 Movies You've Never Seen by Leonard Maltin
https://www.tcm.com/articles/111462/seven-men-from-now
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