7 Men From Now: A magnificent 7

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Adherents of Westerns stick together and tell themselves - and each other - that they're misunderstood, that their great love, like jazz, is one of the country's true art forms, that the genre does a better job than any other of reflecting back the enormous sea changes that our nation has gone through in the last century or so with the small, vibrant prism of the mythical "West." But how to convince others? Watch cult director Budd Boetticher's taut, lean masterpiece 7 Men from Now (1957) and you have something to get non-believers engaged, too.

Ex-bullfighter, man's-man, the Hemmingway-esque Boetticher directs a film without an ounce of fat on it, starring a cheerily taciturn Randolph Scott as the deeply-flawed hero and a seething, startlingly young Lee Marvin as the enticingly engaging baddie. The story is simple enough: A former sheriff (Scott) is haunted by the loss of his wife in a Wells Fargo robbery by one of the titular seven men and decides to hunt down each of the men responsible.

If you're not sucked in by the justifiably famed opening scene finding a lone drifter stumbling upon two men in a cave to get out of a torrential downpour, you may want to hang up your movie-watching spurs and ride off into the sunset, so to speak. The movie is then off and running with a terrifically forward-leaning narrative thrust through its 78-minute running time.

Watching them today, it's something of a revelation to see that Boetticher's films with Scott are clearly the well where Clint Eastwood got a good amount of his schtick. The star is something of an icon but without pressing the issue. Scott has an ease about him that makes viewing his work a kind of accumulated pleasure - check him out in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country to get another good look.

7 Men from Now is the first - and, unfortunately, the only available on DVD - in what is commonly known as Boetticher's "Ranown" cycle of seven films - so named after the production company run by star Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown that made most of the films. Though 7 Men is generally included in the cycle, it was actually produced by John Wayne's (there he is again!) company, Batjac Productions. The cycle includes such other greats as The Tall T (a great thriller from the pen of Elmore Leonard) and Ride Lonesome (with echoes of the also-classic 3:10 to Yuma, soon to be remade.)

The DVD also boasts a fun feature on the director and an excellent audio commentary by film scholar Jim Kitses, who wrote the seminal Horizons West, which, in no small measure helped cement Boetticher's place in the genre's pantheon.

See Also: The Man from Laramie, Unforgiven, Once upon a Time in the West.