Seven Men from Now

Pros: plot, photography, location, performances (especially Lee Marvin's)
Cons: one of those annoying songs that befouled most 1950s and 60s westerns

The critical acclaim of auteurists (the Cahiers du Cinéma, their American importers Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovch, Pacific Film Archives programmers) for Budd Boetticher movies puzzled me before the TCM documentary "A Man Can Do That" ...

Pros: clever script about revenge and missing gold
Cons: Randolf Scott is no Duke

A story about the basic moral corrosive force of revenge and how the western myth survives, Seven Men from Now has a clever plot and a great pay-off supporting the theme that meaningful work comes from a sense believing in oneself.A lone cowboy, ...

Pros: Boetticher, script (Burt Kennedy), Randolph Scott, Lee Marvin, color photography, locale.
Cons: The crooning "title tune" could be faulted.

An ex-sheriff (Randolph Scott) hunts the seven men who killed his wife in Seven Men From Now, the first of the "Ranown" Westerns that teamed Scott with director Budd Boetticher (The Bullfighter and the Lady). On the trail our straight-backed, tight-lipped hero encounters an Eastern couple heading west, their wagon stuck in the mud. Later, a swaggering desperado (Lee Marvin) joins the party. In one tense scene, a highlight, the desperado verbally humiliates the husband (Walter Reed) in front of his wife (Gail Russell), insinuating he's "short on spine." Shot around the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine, California—the Alabama Hills were to Boetticher what Monument Valley was to Ford—this is an austere Western, elegant, less pretentious than most and all the more admirable because of it. Will appeal to Western purists and auteurists of any stripe.