Seven Men From Now (1956, Budd Boetticher) (Patreon)

80/100

Second viewing, last seen 22 years ago. I've kinda kneecapped myself a bit here, having already written some 1200 words on Seven Men's coffee-klatsch centerpiece, which may be my single favorite scene in any Western. Those tense few minutes are the movie in miniature, fashioning a sort of verbal Mexican standoff from three disparate modes of frontier masculinity (virtuous, dastardly, ineffectual), with Annie caught in the middle. (One might have preferred her to demonstrate a bit more agency, or at least outrage, but I've long since accepted that aspect of the era.) Marvin makes the ideal foil for Scott, sneering up a storm and mocking Stride's ramrod-straight decency; their cold-war dynamic gains power from the way that Masters expertly plucks at something we'd already grasped, viz. how much Stride would love to toss aside his convictions and lunge at Annie, who's married to a man he clearly considers unworthy of her. Always more interesting when the hero's struggling with himself rather than merely fending off the villain, and it's especially gratifying when that inner struggle gets conveyed primarily via longing looks and shrewd mise-en-scène (e.g. having Stride sleep beneath the wagon, with Annie directly above, their bodies separated by thin planks of wood). Which is not to say that Burt Kennedy's screenplay doesn't excel at beautifully terse dialogue. "What happened up there?" Stride asks Masters at the climax. "Payte Bodeen," replies Masters. "I killed him." Simple question: "Why?" Equally simple answer: "Why not?" 

What I'd completely forgotten—having recalled Seven Men as an offbeat chamber-piece Western for ye gods more than two decades now (I'm never gonna get used to years beginning with a 2 qualifying as "long ago"; it'll haunt me until death)—is that Boetticher also orchestrates a superb old-fashioned shoot-out at one point. I rarely look at behind-the-scenes supplements these days but would kill for extensive footage of Budd exploring that rocky outcrop to find the perfect crevices and angles, plus any discussions in which Scott had to be persuaded to spend much of the sequence not just hiding but lying prone, waiting for the right opportunity. Also worth noting, in terms of visual panache, that Boetticher shot this film in late 1955, before The Searchers had been released (though it came out a few months afterward); he independently came up with the shot of Scott framed in the wagon's rear opening as it trundles away, which despite not being The End functions quite similarly to Ford's classic final image of Ethan Edwards. Speaking of which, The actual End is what diminishes my ardor a bit (I'd expected a rating closer to 86 or 87): We get Annie's husband redeeming himself with a suicidal act of courage, then an epilogue that seemingly declines to let noble badass Stride conveniently fill that void in her life...only to have her implicitly reject his rejection in the last few seconds, encouraging us to imagine that they'll get together soon. It'd probably bother me less were it not for the fakeout, though I always unwillingly identify with the designated "wrong man" in this scenario. There's no Baxter like a dead Baxter. 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Both IMdb and Letterboxd have it as 7 Men From Now, with the numeral. That's just marketing, though. It's the word Seven onscreen.