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.