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What's your favorite film by Budd Boetticher?

One Mysterious Night
0 (0%)
Escape in the Fog
0 (0%)
Behind Locked Doors
0 (0%)
Bullfighter and the Lady
0 (0%)
The Cimarron Kid
0 (0%)
Red Ball Express
0 (0%)
Horizons West
0 (0%)
City Beneath the Sea
0 (0%)
Seminole
0 (0%)
The Man from the Alamo
0 (0%)
The Killer Is Loose
1 (4.2%)
Seven Men from Now
3 (12.5%)
The Tall T
5 (20.8%)
Decision at Sundown
1 (4.2%)
Buchanan Rides Alone
0 (0%)
Westbound
0 (0%)
Ride Lonesome
2 (8.3%)
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
0 (0%)
Comanche Station
0 (0%)
other
0 (0%)
haven't seen any
12 (50%)
don't like any
0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 24

Author Topic: Boetticher, Budd  (Read 2292 times)

1SO

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Re: Boetticher, Budd
« Reply #10 on: January 02, 2013, 01:44:04 AM »
1. The Killer is Loose
2. Comanche Station
3. The Man From the Alamo
4. Seven Men From Now
5. Buchanan Rides Alone

6. Escape in the Fog
7. Westbound
8. One Mysterious Night
9. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
10. Seminole
11. Ride Lonesome
12. Behind Locked Doors
13. The Tall T
14. The Missing Juror

15. Decision at Sundown
« Last Edit: August 29, 2020, 12:40:57 AM by 1SO »

1SO

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Re: Boetticher, Budd - Director's Best
« Reply #11 on: July 26, 2013, 02:29:35 AM »
Double Feature


Ride Lonesome
* *

Interesting plot. I liked how the real villain stays in the back and is slowly revealed to be somebody really awesome. The finale is well-done and I love the look of the tree. The rest of the film is everything I haven't liked about Boetticher. Weak filmmaking, both with the actors and the technical direction. A pretty good script done badly. What's the point of having layers when you can't get the basics to work?


Comanche Station
* * *

A more simple idea, and for the first time I appreciated both the main adventure story and the commentary. Here the focus is trust and people who see other people as a commodity. When a kidnapped woman can be rescued for a blanket of goods, it's easy to immoral men to see her as nothing more than paper money with curves. I always had problems with Randolph Scott's goodie-goodie with a dark side because if he's so full of hate and revenge, why is he so nice about it? It's like this horrible past had no effect on him. Just a story to tell. Here, he's hardened but not burdened with a tragic backstory, making his righteousness more plausible. Too much padding for such a short film. (We don't need to see the journey in real time.) Some great Indian spear throws, (or should I say landings.) A great final scene.

Totoro

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Re: Boetticher, Budd - Director's Best
« Reply #12 on: August 31, 2013, 02:34:34 AM »
Ride Lonesome (B)

Ehhhh... My professor ranks him up with Ford and Hawks. Yeah, no.

Devil

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Re: Boetticher, Budd - Director's Best
« Reply #13 on: September 02, 2013, 02:24:16 PM »
The Tall T
Comanche Station


Have only seen the two but enjoyed both a fair bit, look forward to checking out more. Particularly his work with Randolph Scott
~You never say, "I'm gonna fight you, Steve." You just smile and act natural, and then you sucker-punch him~

roujin

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Re: Boetticher, Budd - Director's Best
« Reply #14 on: August 12, 2014, 01:38:13 PM »
1. The Tall T (1957)
2. Comanche Station (1960)
3. Ride Lonesome (1959)
4. Seven Men From Now (1956)
5. Decision at Sundown (1957)
6. Buchanan Rides Alone (1958)

1SO

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Re: Boetticher, Budd - Director's Best
« Reply #15 on: January 01, 2015, 11:58:47 PM »
RE-WATCH MARATHON


Seven Men From Now (1956)
"They'll kill you, won't they?"
"They'll try."


REASON FOR RE-WATCH: This was my first Boetticher film, back in June 2010. At under 80 minutes, I expected a lean and mean revenge thriller, but the characters spend a lot of time talking and consuming coffee.


My biggest re-watch success to date, and I now get the comparisons to Anthony Mann. The script is really a work of beauty, delivering backstory in an offhanded manner or disguised as a threat. This is established in the sweet opening conversation where agendas are subtly revealed. There's a lot of that, small surprises in the dialogue and a couple of big twists that shake up and blur who's good and who's bad. Turns out everyone's a little dirty, yet this isn't a cynical film. That dirt is sometimes part of living a hard life in the west.

RATING: * * *, takes a leap from 29 to 14 on my Best of 1956 list.

Apologies to fans of Boetticher. This is a gem and I will certainly be watching it again down the road. His rankings are almost an even split now between colors.

1SO

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Re: Boetticher, Budd
« Reply #16 on: August 29, 2020, 12:47:25 AM »
Updated Ranking

One Mysterious Night (1944)
★ ★ ½
I watched a few of the other Boston Blackie films that come before this one. They’re like a TV series with each film lasting around an hour. Chester Morris is excellent as the former jewel thief pulled into a web of crime. I wish there was a little more mystery as to who the bad guys are, but it’s more like that 80s film F/X where we’re brought into a secret world full of little tricks and cons. None of it is realistic and by this entry the comedy is overly ‘cute’ for a crime thriller. Boetticher’s direction is no better or worse than anyone else who worked on the series.


Escape in the Fog (1945)
★ ★ ½
Typical of the era, this B-movie throws in as much as it can for an hour’s entertainment. Nazi spies and a fragile woman who has a vision of witnessing a murder. It’s nice to see Nina Foch again so soon after re-watching My Name is Julia Ross. A few sequences are staged with more detail than expected from Boetticher, but the script insures this can’t be more than a way to pass some time.


Seminole (1953)
★ ★ ½
One of the (too) many Universal ‘B’ westerns whose best quality is its brief running time. Anthony Quinn gives his usual 100% as the Indian chief raised in a white man’s world, but he’s not in the film nearly enough. Rock Hudson gets too much time as an army officer who’s sympathetic to the Indians. It’s rare to see a western on the side of the Indians and Boetticher captures the swampiness and loud animal sounds particular to the Florida everglades. Despite that, and an early role for Lee Marvin, this is a knockoff bootleg of Fort Apache.


The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)
★ ★ ½
The date is 1960, but this looks like a Warner Bros. gangster film from the 1930s, which kept me off balance. The more modern melodrama and bloodless violence came off as unusually strong. The lead actor is no Cagney and Boetticher is not Raoul Walsh, but there's a small amount of interest in this throwback gangster experiment.