Happy Birthday, Budd Boetticher! Born today in 1916 as Oscar "Budd" Boetticher Jr., this American film director is most famous for a series of low-budget Westerns he made in the late 1950s starring American film actor Randolph Scott.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Boetticher was a maverick filmmaker, shooting classic B-westerns but never making it on to the A list of Hollywood directors.
Nonetheless, his love of filmmaking was matched only by his love of action, notably as a matador and horseman.
Boetticher worked in multiple genres – the gangster picture, the film noir thriller, the war film – but his reputation rides high in the saddle on the back of his westerns.
This was appropriate, for Boetticher’s pared-down picture making style is close to the just-the-necessities ethos of the western.
Working sometimes with thirteen-day shoots, he turned out unhurried films reflecting a serene confidence in what went where and why.
Among his credits, Boetticher is best known for producing and directing the 1959 American CinemaScope Eastman Color Western/drama film 'Ride Lonesome'.
The film follows bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott), who on his way to California with his prisoner, Billy John (James Best). However, he is unaware that Brigade is really after his brother, Frank (Lee Van Cleef).
The pair later stop at a frontier post and find themselves defending the poorly guarded settlement from a Native American assault.
When the widow Mrs. Lane (Karen Steele) decides to accompany them to Santa Cruz, Brigade enlists the aid of two outlaws who may have a hidden agenda of their own.
'Ride Lonesome' is one of Boetticher's so-called "Ranown cycle" of westerns, made with Scott, executive producer Harry Joe Brown and screenwriter Burt Kennedy.
This began with Boetticher's 1956 American WarnerColor Western/action film 'Seven Men from Now'. Of Kennedy, Boetticher called him "the best Western writer ever."
His best westerns are films that travel light, conserve their energy and their resources, don’t waste a word or gesture or a set-up.
They aren’t great because of evident ambition or mythic dimension, but because of their ability to distill, condense, encapsulate.
Few auteur directors are more revered and beloved. Boetticher was a brilliant, distinguished American director, particularly of low-slung, slyly subversive Westerns, whose simple, bleak style disguised a complex artistic temperament.
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