A Time for Dying

Some of today’s disc companies — I sometimes call them disc boutiques — are deep into the collector mindset and are investing in product that they know will appeal to a Niche audience. Sometimes the better word would be ‘splinter,’ a fragment of a Niche, which is itself a part of a Sidebar, that cruises in close formation with the (boo, hiss) Mainstream. This is of course life’s blood for movie fans like myself. In the corners of our cobwebby heads we keep movie-on-disc lists of secret desires. The fun of home video for us is that new discoveries keep popping up. We’re the direct beneficiaries of companies like Arrow, [Imprint], The Film Detective, Flicker Alley et al, that just keep the wonderment titles coming.

All that is by way of introduction for the truly obscure A Time for Dying, a western that was never really released, and that for a long time nobody this side of a certain ‘film genre studies’ book had ever heard of. But it was directed by Budd Boetticher and produced by Audie Murphy, so curiosity for it is bound to persist.

Anyone seeing A Time for Dying without its main titles would never guess that it was the work of the revered director Budd Boetticher; they’d have more difficulty believing it was filmed by the great Lucien Ballard. Neither the direction nor the cinematography show any particular distinction.

A genuine mystery for serious students of the western genre.

The Why and How of the show are probably more interesting than the movie itself. Young Cass Bunning (Richard Lapp) says he wants to be a farmer, but he’s also proud of his skill with a gun. On his way to his father’s farm somewhere near Silver City, Cass runs into the intimidating punk outlaw Billy Pimple (Bob Random), who reports that a new girl is coming to Mamie’s cat house. Cass indeed finds the whole town waiting to ‘sample’ the new girl, Nellie Winters (Anne Randall), who had no idea what she was getting into.

Cass whisks Nellie away on his horse, and they move on to the next town — which turns out to be Vinegaroon, where Judge Roy Bean (Victor Jory) holds ‘creative’ court. The mad Judge sentences a young man to die just for riding into town. Just because Nellie and Cass are together and unmarried, Bean charges them with indecent conduct. He then forcibly marries them, for a $5 fee. On the way to his father’s farm again, the newly-married pair encounters the one and only Jesse James (Audie Murphy). Jesse’s men kidnap Nellie to serve as cover for a bank robbery in Silver City. Cass foils the heist and is honored by the townfolk. But the jealous Billy Pimple shows up, and challenges Cass to a duel in the street.

A Time for Dying has decent color and handsome locations around Tucson, Arizona. Incidental players are amateurish but the professional support is decent, with Beatrice Kay (Underworld U.S.A.), Peter Brocco (Our Man Flint) and Bert Mustin (The Killers ’64) registering as familiar faces. But the two leads seem inexperienced and/or undirected. The demanding roles need consistent playing, and the script is dialogue-heavy. As much as Richard Lapp and Anne Randall make an effort, they just seem to be reacting on a shot-to-shot basis.

Some folks online claim that the Cass Bunning we see in the first scenes is a different actor than one seen later in the movie. Looking at close-up frame grabs, the two faces have the same moles in the same places. Compare the close-up portrait above with the gunslinging pose below. Cass’s face gets slightly fatter and his skin darker and his hair looks a little different. Could this be evidence of two shoots spread out over time?

We wonder if writer Budd Boetticher purposely gave the characters ‘descriptive’ names. Cass Bunning is introduced saving a symbolic bunny rabbit from a symbolic rattlesnake. Nellie Winter is chaste and cool. Billy Pimple has a terrible complexion. His wanted poster doesn’t give a real name, just ‘Billy Pimple.’ Boetticher doesn’t glamorize this delinquent character. How strange, I’d never heard of Bob Random before last week, and this is his second film that’s come up for review.

→  The show can boast two standout ‘guest’ appearances. The bombastic, over-the-top Victor Jory makes a fine Judge Roy Bean. The gross, drunken and uncouth monster is civic corruption personified; after Bean terrorizes Cass and Nellie he tries to be cordial. The strangely passive young couple don’t seem to mind getting married under duress. When Bean learns that Cass’s daddy once saw Lily Langtry, he warms up immediately.

↓  Then there’s the producer Audie Murphy’s weird little scene as Jesse James. The outlaw offers to let Cass join his gang, and also warns him about having ‘wet hands’ when tense — a bad thing for a gunfighter. Murphy is at ease and natural. He comes off well even though he’s barely on screen for a minute. Some commentators praise Audie’s acting as Jesse James, but I vote for his funny, believable character in John Huston’s race-conscious western The Unforgiven.

A Time for Dying got a very spotty release in 1969, barely showing up here and seeing more bookings in Europe. Its official USA release didn’t come until 1982, when it was reviewed by Roger Ebert. The critic clearly didn’t want to slam the film but it held his attention so poorly that he got the storyline wrong.

The real mystery is in the making of the movie.

It’s possible that the film was shot and finished even earlier, because scholar Jim Kitses used it to end his chapter on Budd Boetticher in his important genre study Horizons West, published in 1969 by the Indiana Press. Perhaps Kitses was granted a screening of a film when it was still looking for a distributor?  Kitses praises Boetticher’s screenplay but the only connection he can make to the director’s earlier works is comparing the film’s corrupt towns to the Agry clan in Buchanan Rides Alone. Kitses couldn’t know that this would be Boetticher’s last film.

Budd Boetticher’s impressive career hit its peak in 1951 with the superb Bullfighter and the Lady, a personal project and one of the best films about the mingling of U.S. and Latin American cultures. Budd directed Universal program pictures and some decent westerns, plus a couple of superior crime pictures, The Killer is Loose and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. He made his name and lasting reputation with five Randolph Scott movies, all masterpieces in miniature filmed on a modest scale. The five form an oasis of old-fashioned values in a genre quickly leaving moral niceties behind.

Jim Kitses also profiled two of Boetticher’s contemporaries. Anthony Mann had his own run of westerns with James Stewart, but left the discipline for bigger films, expensive epics. Sam Peckinpah more or less picked up their baton and proceeded with his own eclectic take on the genre. His marvelous Ride the High Country gave Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea a fine farewell vehicle, giving them a fine exit as the traditional era faded into the sunset. . . replaced by Sergio Leone.

Exactly how A Time for Dying got made is unclear. Audie Murphy’s acting career had ground to a halt. Budd Boetticher had spent several years filming a bullfighting documentary about his matador friend Carlos Arruza, an effort that ended in disaster when Arruza was killed in a car accident. Budd had released his last feature  Comanche Station back in 1961, and had been out of the industry ‘swim’ for almost a decade. Was his plan to become a screenwriter?  He’d recently sold the screenplay Two Mules for Sister Sara, which also stresses cynical survival in a hostile landscape. Both films introduce the leading female character with a potential gang-rape scene. I suppose everybody pitching westerns at this time was looking for ways to emphasize violence and cruelty, the main qualities that established Hollywood saw in the Italo westerns currently dominating the box office.

Boetticher’s script works a twist on genre expectations. The fates handed Cass and Nellie are almost absurdly downbeat, but little emotional connection is made. Boetticher likely didn’t have the time needed to coax bettter performances from this inexperienced pair. Because we don’t care enough what happens to them, the nihilistic  finale seems anticlimactic.

The film’s style and appearance?  A Time for Dying has a real TV movie look, and in fact, the framing on the included open-matte transfer doesn’t look at all bad. Lucien Ballard is noted for turning every show he films into fine art, but this has a ‘get an image and move on’ approach. Ballard lights almost everything flat. The final nighttime shoot-out is at least given a dramatic sidelight.  To his credit, Ballard films no scenes day-for night.

Ms. Randall always looks like she came straight from the makeup and hairdresser’s wagon, no matter what the situation. Nellie walks all day, spends a night in bed with her clothes on, sweats through Roy Bean’s creepy trial, and then has bucket of water poured over her head — and still looks fresh for scenes that follow. We know the movie isn’t working when Nellie loses all her belongings and luggage and is marooned in the desert with a strange man. No problem! She’s still perfectly content to trade small talk with Cass, like they were walking home from Junior High.

Did Boetticher and Murphy think their film had commercial possibilities?   They had an experienced production manager and assistant director, which is enough for some movies. The shooting schedule was said to be 18 days, but a good low budget crew could have knocked this 72-minute show out in just six or seven. What kept Boetticher and Ballard from bringing it up to their level? Difficulties with scheduling, money problems, Audie Murphy himself?  The result looks like they just got it in the can so they could get it over with and go home.

For the dedicated genre fan I can heartily recommend Audie Murphy’s interesting scene, and especially Victor Jory’s no-limits performance as Judge Roy Bean … the guy’s so far gone, he slobbers as he talks. Jory would have made an incredibly good John Brown. The abolitionist-terrorist needs to be just plain nuts, but also sufficiently charismatic to gather a flock of crazed zealots. That’s perfect for Jory.

And I did like one or two scenes with Richard Lapp and Ann Randall. He’s too often directed to just be a good yokel, and she seems encouraged to react to everything with cute faces. But the two actors connect in one scene really well. Nellie gets nailed on the leg by a piece of cactus, and Cass takes care of the problem with compassion. It’s well-done all around. For a minute there, we like them — they seem like real people.