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Introduced by John Flaus Ben Stride (Scott) is hunting down the men who killed his wife during a robbery. He encounters two outlaws (chillingly played by Marvin and Larch) in the desert. The bandits are intent on getting their hands on a gold shipment being secretly carried by a couple from back east (Reed and Russell). For many years thought to be lost, Seven Men from Now only recently has been rediscovered and restored to its former Techni-color glory by the UCLA Film Archive. Although a Batjac production, this was the first of the six collaborations now known as the Ranown cycle named after the Scott-Brown production company. (The other two films not included in this retrospective, are Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone.) The subsequent five were Ranown productions. Burt Kennedy worked with Boetticher on five of the six scripts (one uncredited). Kennedy's script for Seven Men lay on the shelf at Batjac (John Wayne's production company) until Robert Mitchum offered him $110,000 for it. Suddenly Wayne liked it, so the story goes, and passed it on to Boetticher, who found the script 'brilliant' and readily agreed to Wayne's condition that Scott, then near the end of his acting career, play the lead. Both Boetticher and Kennedy (the latter has acknowledged Boetticher as co-author) obviously derived pleasure from playing with recurrent elements; Seven Men and the other three films to be screened this year at BIFF are essentially the same story. Each employs a journey structure that Andrew Sarris has aptly described as 'partly allegorical odysseys and partly floating poker games in which every character takes turns at bluffing about his hand until the final showdown'. In Seven Men, Ride Lonesome and Coman-che Station Scott is driven by his past; here his coldness is partly guilt which makes him more ruthless. In the two later films the possibility of starting over again, represented by Gail Russell in Seven Men and by Maureen O'Sullivan in The Tall T, is either absent or available only to others.
CAST
Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed, John Larch, Donald Barry
ABOUT BUDD BOETTICHER
Budd Boetticher was born in Chicago, 1916. He started his filmmaking career working at Fox as a technical adviser during the 1930s. He made his mark with a series of films in the late 1950s, these include, Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, Comanche Station and Ride Lonesome. Out of his 32 films, he mainly concentrated on the Western genre.
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