A Time for Dying
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Synopsis
The final western from one of the genre’s greatest directors, Budd Boetticher (Ride Lonesome), and the last screen appearance of war hero-turned-movie star Audie Murphy (To Hell and Back), A Time for Dying is an offbeat, elegiac look at the Old West, prefiguring Don Siegel’s classic western, and John Wayne’s final picture, The Shootist.
Richard Lapp stars as a young man with fine shooting skills who crosses paths with real-life figures, such as Jesse James (played by Murphy) and Judge Roy Bean (Victor Jory), only to discover the true violence of the West.
Beset by post-production and distribution problems, A Time for Dying is overdue the recognition it deserves. This world Blu-ray debut, featuring an all-new restoration and a host of insightful extras, will finally enable the film to find its rightful audience.
Picture 7/10
Indicator presents Budd Boetticher’s final western A Time for Dying on Blu-ray, delivered here on a dual-layer disc. The film has undergone a new 2K restoration performed by Powerhouse Films and has been sourced from the 35mm original camera negative. Indicator has opted to present the film in two different aspects ratios, which can be selected from the menu: the theatrical ratio of 1.85:1 and the open-matte ratio of 1.37:1. Both are presented with 1080p/24hz high-definition encodes. The title is region free and is available in both the UK and North America.
Considering the film and its baffling history I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this presentation, figuring the materials would hold things back, yet that isn’t the case at all. The restoration work has been incredibly thorough, the image looking clean and stable. There are a handful of specs here and there, but I don’t recall anything all that severe ever popping up. The colour scheme of the film is interesting, kind of all over the place as if they were just working with what they had (pretty much a certainty) but the colours look bright and nicely saturated, if feeling to push red a bit much. Black levels are a mixed bag, looking crushed in the shadows a lot of the time.
Detail manages to impress, the image looking sharp and clean where the elements allow it: some shots can look a little out of focus. Both presentations manage to look about the same but there is one inconsistency between the two, which comes down to how each one renders the film’s grain. The open-matte version handles the finer grain structure well, delivering it in a mostly clean manner, leading to that clean film-look I like. The widescreen version, on the other hand, has a blockier, more digital look when it comes to grain management. It’s not horrible, but it’s noticeable. This is almost undoubtedly a byproduct of how the widescreen version was created for this release. Similar to what Arrow did with their dual presentations for Don Siegel’s The Killers, the film was scanned and restored open-matte, capturing the entire frame (as one would expect), and Indicator is zooming-in on that finished 2K master for the widescreen version, which in turn blows it up to fill a widescreen television. Since we’re now talking a digital image and not the organic film elements, the “grain” is represented by digital blocks or pixels in the master, so zooming-in on the image is going to enlarge those square blocks and lead to a more digitized look. In motion it does look a little weird, though I wouldn’t say it’s a dealbreaker and still looks fine enough; the screen grabs included here probably make it look worse than how it actually comes off on-screen. That said, the open-matte version is clearly the better of the two.
It's a shame how the widescreen presentation was ultimately pulled off, but I think Indicator went about it the right way. The only ways around it would have been to scan and/or restore the elements at a higher resolution or possibly re-scan the elements already framed for the ratio. But that would have meant a higher cost, which I'm sure couldn't be fully justified for the title.
Despite all of that it's still a very pleasing presentation and well beyond what I could have been expecting.
(NOTE: I was unable to capture the same frames between the two aspect ratios in the comparisons below.)
Audio 5/10
The film comes with a lossless 1.0 PCM soundtrack. It’s clean and free from any severe damage, but it’s incredibly flat, fidelity and range being just about non-existent. Music (which does not suit the film in any way) sounds okay but dialogue has no life to it.
Extras 8/10
The film is an interesting one, but, as the supplements suggest right off, its very existence is more interesting than the film itself, and unsurprisingly Indicator pushes the focus of its supplements in that direction.
First is a breezy yet informative audio commentary featuring the ever-so-dependable duo C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke. The two are honest when it comes to the technical aspects of the film, commenting on what works and a lot that doesn’t, which includes the inconsistency of the film’s tone and how it comes off overly cheery for something that is incredibly cynical and grim. I’d say they’re very fair in their comments around the film itself, but the track is most interesting when they talk about the production and this particular point in both the careers of Boetticher and star (for 5-minutes) Audie Murphy. Boetticher was going through an interesting time, running into money troubles during his production of a film around bullfighter Carlos Arruza, which got so bad he ended up going to jail in Mexico for not being able to pay his hotel bill. Murphy, who was more than likely dealing with PTSD (something that would not have been recognized at the time), had gotten himself into some, shall we say, financial trouble with the Vegas mob. These unfortunate events more than likely led to this film going into production, though whether it was in hopes of making money, or in the hopes it would bomb so everyone involved could take a tax write-off, it’s not entirely clear (there are suggestions it was never intended to be released). On top of that, actor Anne Randall is quoted throughout from a recent interview, sharing her first-hand accounts. Despite its very short running time the two have put together a solid track, and yes, the film’s production ends up being far more engaging than the film itself.
Indicator also adds on a couple of new interviews, including a 14-minute one with novelist Christopher Petit. Petit, who admits to not being particularly fond of the western genre to begin with, explains how he came to first see the film thanks to a suggestion by fellow writer Iain Sinclair. He does admit that the film is “bad from any conventional sense” but he still finds a lot to admire about it and he steps through all the elements that work for him, Petit clearly seeming to focus a lot of attention on the story. He likes how it unfolds and thinks it offers some good surprises. He even defends some of the technical aspects (the acting and the cheap set, which literally falls apart in one scene) and talks about his contribution to the Sight & Sound poll, where this film shows up. I can’t say the interview won me over on the film too much, but at the very least I did see where he was coming from and I can’t say he’s wrong. He clearly likes the film and his reasons are perfectly sound.
Kim Newman provides the next interview and closes off the disc supplements. His 20-minute discussion centers around the portrayal of the outlaw Jesse James in film and the mythology built around him, from an early silent starring the outlaw’s own son all the way through to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Audie Murphy’s walk-on in A Time for Dying gets special mention in the last portion. Newman does an admirable job covering the topic, pointing out how specific adaptations, like the 1939 film Jesse James starring Tyrone Power, would influence future adaptations, and how the focus and themes around James would change to reflect the times. It ends up being a far more intriguing subject than I would have first figured, and Newman is clearly having fun talking about it.
Indicator also includes one of their fantastic booklets, which is again limited to first pressings. This one starts off with a terrific essay on the film by Paul Duane, filling in gaps around the production left in the commentary. He further explains how its release was delayed until the eighties and, as Iain Sinclar would say, was dumped into “a category of unnoticed dump-bin films […] that made them worth looking at,” all before offering his own lengthy defense. After that is a reprint of an article on Budd Boetticher written in 1969 for the Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas, followed by a profile on Audie Murphy put together by Indicator for this release, referencing various articles and interviews. It’s lengthy and very well put together. Closing off the booklet is what is supposed to be a graph put together by the French publication Image et son in 1972, charting the “film’s oscillation between ‘tension’ and ‘relaxation’.” Sadly, the booklet is missing the collection of contemporary review samples they so often include.
It's not a lot, but Indicator fis really going to bat for the film, putting in a lot of effort to help change the negative perception of Boetticher’s final western.
Closing
It's the type of film one would expect to be doomed to some 3-DVD, 50-film western set sold for $5.99 in every Wal-Mart bargain bin across North America, but Indicator has found it in their hearts to give it a brand new lease on life through a nice looking presentation (the open-matte version being the better one) and a great little roster of supplementary material.
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