They have a constant and bleak preoccupation with life and
death, sun and shade, and encompass treachery, cruelty, courage and bluff with
barely a trace of sentimentality or portentousness.
--David Thomson
Thomson here is talking about Budd Boetticher’s Westerns
with Randolph Scott, but it could also apply to the dozen or so B movies he
made before he hooked up with Randolph Scott in 1956 to make the bleak Westerns
for which Boetticher is best known. I
recently saw Boetticher’s Killer Shark, made for Poverty Row studio Monogram in
1950, and many of his later themes are there to a considerable extent: the importance of families, the sense of
adventure and danger in nature, class conflict. Roddy McDowell plays a college kid who hasn’t
seen his father in years and comes to help him one summer with shark fishing in
Mexico (a favorite location of Boetticher’s, who spent many years there later
filming a documentary about bullfighter
Carlos Arruza). McDowell’ father is laid
up after a shark attack and Roddy has to go out on his own with a pick-up crew
of cutthroats and managing, with the help of his father’s friends, to save his
father’s fishing boat, after which he goes back to college with the clear implication
he will return eventually to his father’s business and the girl and the country
he has come to love
Boetticher spent his career making B movies of high
quality. Other directors started out
with A films and moved slowly down to B films.
E.A. Dupont, for instance, was a considerable success in Germany with
Variete (1925) and other films of the silent period, but never had much success
after he came to America in 1930 and so became a talent agent from 1939-1951. Then he returned to filmmaking and made the extraordinary The Scarf in
1950; its use of downbeat rural and urban landscapes reminds one of another beautiful
work by an émigré, Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), which also finds a strange beauty
in the American landscape and cityscape of deserts and bars (cinematography by
Austrian Franz Planer, who did a number of films noir). Dupont captures not only the visual quality
of the outsider American landscape, he also wrote the script that captures the
verbal quality, from “I’ll beat the bejesus out of you” to “I’ll turn this
moonshine parlor into a mashed potato.” The
suitable scruffy John Ireland, James Barton and Mercedes McCambridge play the
outsiders, each in their own way on the run from society.
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