A Time for Dying movie review (1982)
Boetticher's career lost momentum in 1960. He spent the early years of the decade making a documentary about a bullfighter, but did not make another feature until "A Time for Dying," in 1969. It's said he made this film as a favor to his friend Audie Murphy, the actor and war hero.
It's likely the favor worked both ways, since Boetticher was more or less unemployable when Murphy decided to produce this film and star in it as Jesse James. Murphy died as the production was being completed, and rights to the film were tied up in litigation over his estate until quite recently. Now here it Is.
And "A Time for Dying" Is the damnedest, confoundingest Western you can imagine. For one thing, Boetticher seems to want it to took like a phony, one-dimensional formula Western, shot in the desert and in an obviously artificial' town made of flat sets and a few Interiors.
This movie has the visual texture of a Gene Autry epic, and that may have been a deliberate choice, since its cinematographer was Lucien Ballard, who from 1967 to 1970 (before and after "A Time for Dying") photographed the realistic-looking Westerns "Hour of the Gun," "Will Penny," "The Wild Bunch," "True Grit" (1969) and "The Ballad of Cable Hogue."
"A Time for Dying" opens with a kid who wants to be a gunfighter. A lot of Westerns do. But this kid (played by Richard Lapp) is the goofiest kid I've ever seen in a Western. He has a squeaky voice, a nervous smile, a funny: haircut, and he overplays his good manners into an affectation.
He rides into a town run by a drunken, hanging judge (Victor Jory as Judge Roy Bean). He discovers that a young lady (Anne Randall) is due on the evening stagecoach and does not know she's being brought to town to be a prostitute at Mamie's Place.
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