Deja View

Seven Men from Now (1956)

DIRECTOR: Budd Boetticher
WRITER: Burt Kennedy
PRODUCTION COMPANY: John Wayne's Batjac Productions
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Randolph Scott, Lee Marvin, Gail Russell, Walter Reed, John Larch, Don "Red" Barry
GENRE: Western
MISCELLANY: color; 78m; on DVD

Budd Boetticher penetrated his landscapes. When in "Seven Men from Now" a gunfight erupts in a rocky canyon, the characters seem to seep, consumed, into the labyrinth surrounding them. Their bodies contort and writhe and pour their way into the nooks and crannies of the canyon. They do this in a cinematically deceptive way too, with the action ever so gently sped up, like an old John Wayne Lone Star picture, making every movement that much sharper and mutated in its exactitude.

Warnercolor makes for a meat and potatoes pallet of extinct flesh tones or rustic grandparents' carpet colors that blend softly in wide shots and bleed together as a wagon train creaks its way across an impossible to fathom, now made fictional by imaginary color process, landscape.

Where Randolph Scott ends, Lee Marvin begins. Lee Marvin is one step ahead of the acting curve in terms of modernity and Brando relations and brilliantly helps to complicate the western villain forever after. Though this is not to say that Scott comes across in any way as old-fashioned. Scott's style is perfect in its stoicism; a quiet hero is the best kind of hero, especially, somehow, while surrounded by the vast expanses of the West.

In the early to mid-nineteen fifties, Boetticher, along with a few other filmmakers, most notably Anthony Mann, helped to broaden the vocabulary of the western and create what would be known as the psychological western. A genre that already had its staunch archetypes firmly in place now began to get complicated; a product of the new creators having recently witnessed, firsthand, the horrors and complexities of World War II.

Randolph Scott made seven pictures with Boetticher, five of which were written by Burt Kennedy. It is said that "Seven Men from Now" was regarded by each of them as their best work together.

— Carl