A frequent commenter here, John Knight, sent me a copy of Budd Boetticher: The Western. Thanks, John! A dossier put together by Jim Kitses for the BFI back in 1969, it’s got some excellent writing on Boetticher and his work. (Two Mules For Sister Sara, which he wrote, was in production when this was published.) The highlight has to be a lengthy interview from 1963. It’s fascinating, without the focus on the Ranown cycle that would come later, and full of all sorts of wonderful stuff.* Here’s a quick sample.
Budd Boetticher: “One of the first films that I directed was a Western, The Cimarron Kid. Audie Murphy wasn’t my kind of actor, and that showed up in the film. Audie is a very complicated young man… He’s sensitive, he’s got taste, and guts. The film wasn’t great, there was one good sequence in a train.”
“I entirely rewrote the attack of the James and Dalton brothers, because it would have been impossible to film things as they had actually happened… It’s better to change things around a bit and make a good film than stick scrupulously to historical fact and make a colorless boring film, of which there are plenty.”
* From what I read in this, I’m tempted to leave the 50s and The Western for a one-off post on Boetticher’s The Rise And Fall Of Legs Diamond (1960).
Funny, I was just yesterday re-reading Kitses’ chapter on Boetticher in Horizons West.
Has anybody seen Bronco Buster?
That’s a good one to return to now and then.
Have NOT seen Bronco Buster. Here’s what Budd said about it in 1963:
“Bronco Buster was good fun. I went to New York, and I made friends with all the big Rodeo champions. We had a good time making it, but that’s the only interesting thing about the film.”