Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Stride Lonesome

The 'rents and I settled in the other night to take a look at Seven Men From Now (1956), a must-see Western now available on DVD from Paramount Home Video.  It was the first in a series of seven B-westerns directed by the legendary Budd Boetticher and starring the ramrod-straight Randolph Scott.  Because the movie was produced by John Wayne's Batjac productions, it had been out of the public eye for some time (along with a pair of Wayne films, Island in the Sky [1953] and The High and the Mighty [1954]); Wayne's heirs refused to release the movie until the studio ponied up the scratch to properly restore the movies, and we should all be grateful that they decided to play hardball because Seven Men is one dan-dan-dandy oater.

Scott plays Ben Stride, a man on a quest to track down seven men who robbed the Wells Fargo office in the town where he once was employed as sheriff.  After being voted out, he couldn't find suitable work and Mrs. Stride ended up having to be the breadwinner by clerking in the office; unfortunately, she was killed during the course of the robbery.  Stride's trail of vengeance leads him to a tenderfoot couple whose wife (Gail Russell) reminds him a great deal of the former missus; he also forms an uneasy alliance with an essobee named Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) and Masters' sidekick Clete (Donald "Red" Barry), who are itching to intercept the $20,000 in gold which with the thieves made off.

The westerns that Scott made with director Boetticher (which were also often scripted by future director Burt Kennedy) introduced moviegoers to a new side of the B-western star, in that Scott's persona was very similar to that of Jimmy Stewart's in the westerns he headlined during the 1950s under the direction of Anthony Mann.  In fact, Boetticher and Scott's best-known oater, The Tall T (1957), is practically identical to that of the celebrated cult classic Man of the West (1958, which admittedly does not feature Stewart but rather Gary Cooper).  In Seven Men, the viewer is never really certain if he should side with Scott's obsessed Stride; sure, he gives a helping hand to John Greer and his fetching wife, but there's sort of an uneasiness among the trio (Scott doesn't think too highly of Russell's better half, played by Walter Reed).  Fortunately, Marvin's character enters the scene and establishes that he's the "rat bastard" of the piece; he even dispatches his loyal sidekick with a hail of bullets when it's apparent that Clete has outlived his purpose.

Film historian Danny Peary, in his collectable compendium Guide For the Film Fanatic, has high praise for Seven Men but also states that the film "is not on par with the others that were scripted by Burt Kennedy."  While I've often found that Peary's and my tastes are very similar, in this particular case I think he's all wet; Seven Men is, along with Tall T, the cream of the Boetticher-Scott-Kennedy crop. with fine performances from the leads (it's clearly one of Marvin's finest hours on-screen), taut scripting and breathtaking cinematography.  I wasn't surprised by the twist in the story (I saw it coming, and was delighted when I was proved right) but I did like the way how the "romance" was handled, avoiding the usual Western cliches).  Plus, there's this classic exchange between Scott and two of the men he's tracked down, which would not be out of place in Kennedy's celebrated Western spoof Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969):

FIRST MAN: It's a mighty wet night for a man to be out...

STRIDE (sipping coffee): Sure is...

SECOND MAN: You must have rode a long way...

STRIDE: I walked...

SECOND MAN: Ain'tcha got no horse?

STRIDE: Did have... (long sip of coffee) Chiricahua jumped me...about 10 mile back...

SECOND MAN: They stole him?

STRIDE: They ate him...

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 9:39:31 PM - comment []