A Time for Dying

Victor Jory as Judge Roy Bean

Budd Boetticher's A Time for Dying is a remarkable Western whose qualities may be submerged to the casual viewer by the film's truncated structure, callow leads, and bare bones production values; even the horses look threadbare. A scant 73 minutes, the production crew utilized the Apacheland Movie Ranch in Arizona, the setting for numerous films and television shows in the 1960s, which gives the flick a prefabricated look. 

Yet, Boetticher's pans and tracking shots knit together the film gracefully. Both the script (by Boetticher) and Lucien Ballard's glowing cinematography highlight the artificiality of A Time for Dying. Compare Ballard's work here with his work on such contemporaneous films as The Wild Bunch and Will Penny, where he opts for a more realistic palette. Ballard had already worked with Boetticher numerous times and would again on his bullfighting documentary Arruza in 1972. So, I don't think it was pure chance that Ballard heightens the Deluxe color to match the mythic tone of a tale that includes appearances by characters named Judge Roy Bean and Jesse James.

Boetticher's screenplay is both a self-conscious adios to a genre and a comment on the turmoil of America in the 60s. The film's ending, which shocked both Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert when the it was finally released in 1982, is a despondent response to the unrest and assassinations that plagued America. The moral certitude which Randolph Scott represented in Boetticher's earlier Westerns is very much absent. The only viable occupation for women seems to be prostitution. 

Boetticher leavens the bleak mood with comic asides. Peter Brocco and Burt Mustin, veterans of over five hundred films and television shows between them, offer sardonic quips on the action from the sidelines. Victor Jory, who worked with Boetticher on The Man from the Alamo in 1953, seizes upon the role with gusto whether dispensing advice to young lovers or sentencing a horse thief to hang. Not only is Jory superior to a miscast Paul Newman, who mumbles and burps Coors in John Huston's very peculiar 1972 film, as Bean, but also to the wonderful Walter Brennan who played the Judge in William Wyler's The Westerner in 1940. The two romantic leads are so-so, but Robert Random, as a psychotic outlaw, betrays some charisma. Orson Welles seemed to think so and cast him as the second male lead in The Other Side of the Wind, which didn't get released till 2018 and helped Ransom's career not a whit. Random's character is named "Billy Pimple", one of several pot shots Boetticher aims at the then current youth movement.

Audie Murphy 

Audie Murphy, in his final film, plays Jesse James. As someone who has suffered through many wooden Murphy performances, I was pleased by his relaxed and assured turn here. Murphy and Boetticher had formed a production company to produce the film and revive their dormant careers, but the Western as they knew it was dying. The film had a few showings in Texas in 1969 to attract investors so post-production work could be completed. Murphy was still trying to raise funds when he died in a plane crash in 1971. It is significant that the last film featuring the greatest American military hero of the twentieth century should be a heartfelt repudiation of violence. Like John Wayne and Don Siegel in The Shootist (which gets a visual shout-out in Scorsese's The Irishman), Murphy and Boetticher knew that the jejune era of America's myth of frontier justice had passed.