Theatrical Release: 1971-09-22 DVD Release: 2019-01-03 Torrent Release: 14-12-2012 by user
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Movie Genre:
Western
Runtime:
72 min.
Parental Rating:
M
Awards:
N/A
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DESCRIPTION
Not really a good movie but it was Murphy's last one.Note the colour had already turned pinkish when first shown back in 1982.Use your players tools to adjust.
Audie Murphy's career was in a bad state and he had not made a film in 1968, the first year that happened since he started starring in films. Boetticher, who directed Murphy on The Cimarron Kid, was going through a similar slump. The two men formed their own company, Fipco, to make films. This was to be the first of several.
A Time for Dying was to originally star Peter Fonda as the kid. Shooting took place near Tucson in April and May 1969. Money was tight and by the time filming was completed the movie was several minutes shorter than scripted. Murphy spent the next year and a half trying to raise additional funds for completion and post-production.
Murphy was killed in a plane crash before the film surfaced.
Owing to legal problems, the film did not screen in New York until 1982.
'TIME FOR DYING,' VINTAGE '69
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: June 2, 1982
APPARENTLY because of legal problems arising from the death of its producer, Audie Murphy, shortly after the film's completion, Budd Boetticher's ''A Time for Dying,'' made back in 1969, is only now having its New York theatrical premiere.
This small-budget western, at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, may well be a classic of sorts. It also provides an intriguing introduction to the career of a living director - Mr. Boetticher is 66 years old - whose work, though hailed by a small group of critics, is still relatively unknown even among those people who take films seriously.
Mr. Boetticher's films, especially ''The Bullfighter and the Lady'' and his series of westerns starring Randolph Scott, including ''Seven Men From Now'' and ''Decision at Sundown,'' are probably best known among surviving members of B-picture audiences of the 1950's, though his name might not be remembered by them.
Like those films, ''A Time for Dying'' works small and very curious variations on classic traditions. Though it runs a brisk 73 minutes, it has a rare shapeliness to it. Yet it's also so oddly, unexpectedly paced that when it ends you feel as if you're still in the middle of it.
The hero of Mr. Boetticher's ironic screenplay is a young farm boy named Cass Bunning (Richard Lapp), who has been taught by his father to be the fastest gun in the West, a talent that Cass isn't quite sure how he can put to use.
The film's initial image is the key to everything that follows: a close-up of a rattlesnake, its tail rattling ominously, poised and ready to strike at a small, terrified rabbit. Out of the sagebrush rides young Cass who, with one shot, blows the head off the snake.
Amost immediately Cass himself is accosted by another mounted gunman, no older than Cass, who makes fun of Cass for having interfered with nature. ''Another snake will get him sooner or later,'' says the stranger. ''Weak little critters should be protected,'' says the naive Cass, or something else equally right-thinking.
The other gunman, who turns out to be a fellow nicknamed Billy Pimple, is just as fast with a gun as Cass, but he rides off without issuing any challenges, leaving only a sneer.
Cass travels through this arid, timeless wilderness much in the manner of a frontier Candide, never being surprised by his adventures and meeting everything that comes with what turns out to be a crazy, misplaced optimism. At one point he saves a young Eastern girl, Nellie (Anne Randall), from a fate worse than death. Nellie, having answered a newspaper ad for a job as a waitress, has arrived in a tiny Western town unaware that Mamie's place, where she's supposed to work, is the territory's most famous whorehouse.
Later Cass and Nellie find themselves in Vinegaroon, Tex., run by the legendary Judge Roy Bean, whom Victor Jory - now dead - plays as a toothless, drunken Mad Hatter, a man who dispenses capital punishment as easily as he demands a $1 fine. Fortunately the judge takes a liking to Cass and Nellie. To attone for their crime of ''indecent cohabitation,'' of which they are innocent, he sentences them to be married on the spot and, just for the fun of it, throws them a riotous wedding reception.
Escaping the judge's fond protection, Cass and Nellie ride off again, Cass to leave his bride at his father's farm while he sets out to become a bounty hunter. ''Guns is all I know,'' he says.
They never do reach the farm. Instead, they wind up pretty much where they started, in a climactic sequence so purposely bleak that it's almost sentimental in reverse.
Although the color print being shown at the Public has turned pinkish with time, Lucien Ballard's photography is a nearly perfect expression of Mr. Boetticher's narrative methods -straight-on, unfancy but vivid. Mr. Jory's performance is one of the richest and wildest in his long career, and it's good seeing Mr. Murphy turn up in a cameo role as Jesse James.
However, the film contains two large holes where the performances of Mr. Lapp and Miss Randall should be. Mr. Lapp, a handsome young man, seems to be doing an imitation of Mr. Murphy, but with none of Mr. Murphy's unaffected, natural ease. Instead he seems to be acting very sincerely and with immense difficulty. Miss Randall behaves as if she were an ingenue in an old Republic western.
It's to Mr. Boetticher's credit that, in spite of these large failings, ''A Time for Dying'' is a fascinating film, a fit subject for further research.
A Gunman's Story
A TIME FOR DYING, (1969) directed and written by Budd Boetticher; photography by Lucien Ballard; music by Harry Betts; film editor, Harry Knapp; produced by Audie Murphy; released by Corinth Films. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street. Running time: 73 minutes. This film is not rated.