Randolph Scott stars in director Budd Boetticher's 1956 western.
Free for you to view on You Tube: Seven Men from Now, the first of several notable collaborations between Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher.
Originally conceived as a vehicle for John Wayne, this gritty western drama — written by genre specialist Burt Kennedy (Support Your Local Sheriff! ) — is an exciting tale of revenge and redemption. Ben Stride (Scott) is a man on a mission, furiously determined to track down the seven outlaws who killed an innocent clerk — Stride’s wife — while robbing a Wells Fargo freight station.
Lee Marvin steals every scene that isn’t nailed down as a former nemesis who’s surprisingly helpful to Stride — but only up to a point. As Jeremy Arnold writes on the Turner Classic Movies website: “Casting Lee Marvin was Burt Kennedy's idea. As Boetticher later wrote in his memoir, ‘Burt and I agreed that western heavies over the years had been portrayed as much too heavy. They rode black horses and wore black hats. You never saw anything good about any of them. Well, we set out to make our villains extremely attractive. Sure they were going to get killed — eventually — by our hero, but we wanted our audience to really love 'em while they were still kickin’.”
