Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher worked in multiple genres–the gangster picture, the film noir thriller, the war movie–but his reputation rides high in the saddle on the back of his westerns. This is appropriate, for Boetticher’s pared-down picturemaking style is close to the just-the-necessities ethos of the western. Working sometimes with 13-day shoots, he turned out unhurried films reflecting a serene confidence in what went where and why. His best westerns are films that travel light, conserve their energy and their resources, don’t waste a word or gesture or a set-up. They aren’t great because of evident ambition or mythic dimension, but because of their ability to distill, condense, encapsulate.

Boetticher’s filmmaking cut to the bare essentials, and perhaps this is how he viewed his own life, though from the outside one sees merrily squandered opportunities. When he died in 2001 at age 85, he had been only sporadically employed as a director of fiction features in the years after 1960, when he interrupted his career to head to Mexico to pursue a passion project that swallowed up much of the (1957) in New York, Hackford recalled shooting at the old man’s ranch in Chatsworth, giving a graphic description of Boetticher, after staying on horseback at length to facilitate reshoots, dismounting and dropping trow to display his bleeding hemorrhoids and exploded anus, a souvenir of a rectal goring received in the bullfighting ring.