A Time For Dying (1969)

Young and not terribly bright Cass Bunning (Richard Lapp) has set out from the family farm to become a gunslinger - a bounty hunter, to be more precise. Making his way across the country, he encounters a psycho gun kid with the unfortunate name of Billy Pimple (Robert Random), saves young Nellie (Anne Randall) from being enslaved in the sex trade, is pressed into marriage with Nellie by Judge Roy Bean (Victor Jory), has a short encounter with Jesse James (Audie Murphy), and learns a bit about the shortness of life, among other things.

In many ways, A Time for Dying is an objectively bad movie; some of these ways are also what make it a fascinating, potentially great movie.

In any case, this is the final narrative film directed by the great Budd Boetticher, as well as the final on-screen appearance by Audie Murphy. As rumour says, the project was an attempt at alleviating some of Murphy’s mob gambling debts, but legal trouble kept it off most screens until the early 80s, when this kind of film must have baffled any audience encountering it, Boetticher was breeding horses, and Murphy dead for a decade.

Which does seem curiously fitting for a film so cheap, there are genuinely moments on screen when the sets don’t survive encounters with horses because they are so shoddy. It is shot in garish colours by the great Lucien Ballard, and often replaces action with a lot of gabbing and supposedly funny business in the way that usually suggests a lack of budget to put even more basic things on screen.

Where most of Boetticher’s other films – and most certainly his Westerns – where pared down to their essentials, tight and tense even when they objectively weren’t actually always more action packed than this one is, A Time for Dying’s eighty minutes feel much longer. There’s a meandering one damn thing after another quality to the narrative, and an appearance of randomness to much that we witness.

But then, the meandering makes all kinds of sense when you think about it: Cass is no Randolph Scott character, but a kid who hasn’t got an actual plan, nor even the brains to know that he hasn’t one, and so he drifts through the film, encountering an Old West that’s like a bitter funhouse mirror of even the ones encountered in the revisionist westerns. All the jokes that don’t land, the hokey, over the top acting, are a thin veneer painted over a place where might always makes right, where the only law we will encounter is an insane alcoholic (perhaps making this, ironically, the most realistic portrayal of Roy Bean), and where brutality rules all.

The broad acting (Lapp is objectively terrible, possibly perfect), the shoddiness of the sets, the unfunny humour and the brutally bright colours all help drag this version of the West in the direction of the grotesque, until everything culminates in a downer ending Sergio Corbucci must have been jealous of.

The only moment of actual humanity and considered acting on screen is the short, one-scene appearance of Murphy, a haunting moment that seems to be the centre of gravity of the whole affair, as ramshackle as the rest of it appears/is, as if the film were struggling to say something really important, but can never grasp it tightly enough to articulate it.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of A Time for Dying as a whole, but it’s certainly not a boring film for a director to go out on, and something I’ll probably have to revisit from time to time, if only to find out if this is horrible or brilliant or both at the same time.

In short: City Beneath the Sea (1953)

Two salvage divers – straight arrow Brad Carlton (Robert Ryan) and his friend and partner, the morally more flexible Tony Bartlett (Anthony Quinn) – travel to Jamaica for a rather delicate operation. They are tasked to salvage one million dollars in gold bouillon from a sunken ship. At first, they find nothing at the coordinates provided them by the local contact (Karel Stepanek) of their employer.

Instead of going home again, both men decide to stay on Jamaica and romance some ladies in that horrifying 50s style you don’t have to be particularly woke to raise all available eyebrows at. Brad takes time getting to know boat captain Terry McBride (Mala Powers), while Tony sets his eyes on a night club singer working under the nom de plume of Venita (Suzan Ball). Eventually, their dithering and many a scene of “romance” will lead our protagonists on the trail of the gold again. Turns out, that local contact is involved in a rather huge insurance fraud.

But what, one might ask, about the titular “City Beneath the Sea”? Well, our heroes use the awkward looking ruin to locate the gold, that’s all.

It is not only the title of Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea that emphasises the wrong things – unfortunately, what is sold as an adventure movie in the classic style really isn’t much of that. The search for the gold takes a back seat for most of the movie. Instead we have to endure Ryan’s and Quinn’s characters acting like traditional male chauvinists for what feels like hours, some unfunny comedy, a musical number and other distractions in a film that seems to have no interest at all in its purported plot. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the distractions were actually interesting and fun, or would make use of Boetticher’s considerable talent for complex characterisation and explorations of human relationships. Alas, even with the considerable charm of Ryan and Quinn, the distractions never feel like anything but dithering, or desperate attempts at getting the film to feature length. From time to time there’s an interesting detail – like the way Tony very emphatically greets the black Dijon (house favourite Woody Strode) as a peer after having been introduced to him as their contact’s “boy” – but this is not a film where those details add up to very much, as much as I’d like them to.

Even the adventure scenes that are in the movie aren’t terribly great – the focus on slow, slow, oh so very slow diving sequences doesn’t play to Boetticher’s strengths as a director at all, what with it mostly showing our heroes bobbing up and down in their – now old-timey – diving gear.

All of which leaves City Beneath the Sea as a film only of minor interest even for Boetticher (or Ryan, or Quinn, etc) completists.

In short: The Red Ball Express (1952)

World War II, during the Allied invasion. Patton’s tank division is pushing forward so quickly, he’s regularly outrunning his supply lines. To keep things rolling towards Paris, the US military creates a mobile truck supply line through France, colloquially called the Red Ball Express by the grunts.

The units are thrown together, racially integrated (I believe that would have been the term then), and not necessarily manned with soldiers missed by their old comrades. The Red Ball Express unit the film is concerned with is lead by Lt. Chick Campbell (Jeff Chandler), who seems to be that curious war movie Lieutenant, a highly competent man who cares for his soldiers. The unit sergeant, Red Kallek (Alex Nicol) doesn’t see his commanding officer that way, though, for he knows him from civilian life and makes him responsible for the death of his brother.

Another problem, apart from the Wehrmacht, mine fields, and lots of mud, are the at times strained race relations, exemplified via the trials and travails of one Private Robertson (Sidney Poitier).

Shockingly enough for a movie made in 1952 by a white man (the great Budd Boetticher), Red Ball Express has more than one black character in a speaking role; even more shockingly, the film itself doesn’t treat its black characters any differently than it does the white ones, hell, they’re not even the odious comic relief. It’s shocking in the best possible way to see a film demonstrating that old promise of America of equality by simply, without grand gestures, actually treating people equally. The way the film resolves Robertson’s problems will obviously not be completely to the taste of the 2020s, but there’s a calm fairmindedness about the film’s serious moments that I’m not going to criticize from a distance of seven decades.

This treatment of social issues fits well with Boetticher’s direction style, a tendency to create verisimilitude through a calm look at all kinds of interactions, and through an eye for details that in this case helps fit the actual documentary footage the film uses to portray more than ten trucks or so into the rest of the movie. Boetticher always seems genuinely interested in the way people relate to each other, in the same way he is interested in the practical issues of driving trucks through a warzone. The humour and the romantic elements haven’t aged quite as well as the rest of the film, but since the narrative is very episodic, it simply makes sense to include episodes of levity, too.

And even though The Red Ball Express is so episodic, and therefore not following typical dramatic structure in every point (insert US war movie Ozu comparison here, if you like), there is room and budget for a couple of fine action sequences, particularly a fight against some German hold-outs early on, and a race through a burning French town right at the end.

In short: Escape in the Fog (1945)

The final stretch of World War II. Having been honourably discharged from her duties as a nurse after suffering from what we’d today call PTSD, Eileen Carr (Nina Foch) spends time recuperating at an inn near San Francisco. She has a nightmare taking place on a fog-shrouded bridge where three men get out of a taxi, two of them attacking the last one. Things become rather curious when the (most impressive) scream she then lets off in her sleep brings other inhabitants of the inn to her room, among them Barry Malcolm (William Wright) who looks exactly like the man getting attacked. She hasn’t seen Barry before, mind you. Though now that they have encountered each other, they fall in love very quickly – it being wartime and a 62 minute film.

Alas, the whirlwind romance has to take a bit of a backseat, for Barry’s a spy and propaganda expert, and he’s being ordered to bring some very important papers to Hong Kong. Which would be dangerous enough, but his boss’s OPSEC is terrible, so there are a trio of German agents after the documents Barry carries, and whose actions quickly lead to the scene Eileen has dreamed about. Fortunately, Eileen’s a rather quick-witted new girlfriend to have for a spy.

Usually, the films like this one the great Budd Boetticher (then still working under the moniker of Oscar Boetticher, Jr.) made very early in his career for Columbia aren’t treated as major parts of his filmography, and the director himself apparently never was terribly proud of them either. However, as far as little (late) war time programmers with a hint of noir and a whiff of the fantastic go, Escape in the Fog isn’t half bad.

Even this early in his career, Boetticher was a sure hand with pacing, so unlike with other films made for the b slot in a matinee, Escape’s 62 minutes zip along with great economy and already demonstrate the director’s interest for veracity in genre movies. So the handful of scenes that root the film in war time reality, namely some historically interesting business about how taxis work in a war time economy (plus the taxi’s driven by a young Shelley Winters), or the matter of fact way the protagonists discuss their PTSD early on, really already make this feel like a Boetticher film and also do quite a bit to sell the more preposterous parts of the script.

Even though it is slight, the characterisation is actually rather well done, too, bringing enough detail to the characters to keep up audience interest in their travails; that Foch is also particularly charming and a bit gutsy in this one certainly doesn’t hurt the film either.


All in all, Escape in the Fog is still a surprisingly fast and fun little movie more than seventy years after it was made, certainly an achievement for a something made quickly for a short cinematic run without any thought for posterity or longevity.