7 Men from Now (1956)

Film: 7 Men from Now (1956)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed

Director: Budd Boetticher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in the kickoff to this month, we're going to be doing something unusual this month for Randolph Scott's career.  While normally we would watch a movie to match the era that we're discussing, with Randolph Scott, we're actually going to focus our viewings on a specific era, with three of the seven films that he made with Budd Boetticher, generally considered to be the most important films of his career.  We are going to discuss that partnership more in-depth in the third week of this month, but today, we'll kick off and discuss Scott's career from its beginning.  Scott got his start doing stage work at the Pasadena Playhouse, which led to a long-term star contract with Paramount.  Tall & handsome, he was made for the movies, and westerns quickly became his calling.  The earliest part of Scott's career was actually focusing on the novels of Zane Grey, who in the early 1900's was one of the bestselling novelists, and along with Louis L'Amour, was one of the most important western novelists of the 20th Century.  At the time, Scott made ten Zane Grey adaptations in short order for Paramount, and while these didn't get him into A-List stardom (he'll hit that next weekend), they did make him a notable in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) We're now going to shift over to 7 Men from Now, which was the first film that Boetticher & Scott made together, and they only did so because John Wayne was busy.  The movie is about Ben Stride (Scott), the former sheriff of a western town called Silver Springs, who comes across a young couple named John & Anne Greer (Reed & Russell) who are stuck in the mud.  After he pulls them out, they insist he join them along the trail, as they head to a town called Flora Vista, which we soon learn is where a group of men are holed up after a Wells Fargo robbery.  It turns out that these men killed Ben Stride's wife, where she worked as a clerk to make money after Stride refused to become a deputy after he lost the sheriff's election.  Along the way, the three meet up with Bill Masters (Marvin), an old nemesis of Stride's from Silver Springs, who has his eye set on both the Wells Fargo box and Anne Greer.  As the film progresses, in a surprisingly good twist for a western of this era (I didn't see it coming), John Greer turns out to be an unknowing accomplice of the "7 men" having the Wells Fargo box in his wagon the whole time.  This sets up a showdown, one from which only Stride & Anne are left standing.

The movie, as I mentioned, was originally intended for John Wayne (who was busy making The Searchers), and as a result Wayne recommended Scott, his costar from The Spoilers which we talked about last month.  Wayne is a much better actor than Scott, who even in his best films rarely equalled his more magnetic costars, and this is true in 7 Men from Now, where Lee Marvin knocks Scott off of the screen every time he enters as a dastardly, lusty villain.  But what makes Boetticher's film work with Scott is that he really employs that stoicism.  If you have an actor who isn't expressive, make that part of the script, and here Scott plays this dignified relic of the west, someone who is already part of the myth, who doesn't need to prove himself because everyone else stands back in awe.  As a result, the two-dimensional approach Scott frequently made to his films becomes an asset to the picture itself.  We'll cover two more Boetticher collaborations between the two, and I'm curious if this will continue into those movies.

The film, though it's made on-the-cheap, has some great technical aspects as well.  William Clothier, who would eventually get a pair of Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography in the 1960's for some of the late-era westerns, uses a variety of inventive camera angles to make the film look like it's more expensive than it is, such creative care you wouldn't normally expect from a low-grade 1950's western.  And Henry Vars' music is wonderful.  I have a soft spot for the western dirge's that frequently opened movies like this in the 1950's, and the title song is appropriately solemn and over-the-top, but the music throughout really rings well.  Combine that with Marvin's excellent work as the villain, and you've got a strong picture, one that audiences at the time didn't really subscribe toward, but I'm glad critics eventually rescued.