Parallax View

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is currently reissuing a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. Author Robert C. Cumbow is a member of the Parallax View collective and his essays are being published simultaneously on Parallax View. The essay below was first published on [...]

“We’re in the middle of a midst of a myth and I don’t know what myth it is.”
- Henri (Mathieu Amalric)
In the opening of Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte De Noel (A Christmas Tale), a wily and knotty and unendingly inventive drama of family dysfunction stirred up over a Christmas gathering, the story of the long-ago [...]

When I first interviewed Kevin Smith a few years ago, during his press tour for Jersey Girl, I apparently caught him on a bad day. He was tired, distracted, stretched out on a hotel couch and chain smoking with an oblivious reflex. You don’t really expect a connection when you interview a filmmaker or a [...]

The release of The Films of Budd Boetticher finally brings five essential films by the director to DVD. Along with Paramount’s release of Seven Men From Now a few years ago, his career-defining “Ranown Cycle,” the six westerns starring Randolph Scott that made Boetticher’s reputation, is now available on home video. It’s a triumph, but [...]

Burt Kennedy has a long resume as a director, with such credits to his name as The Rounders, Welcome to Hard Times and Support Your Local Gunfighter.  But he started his film career as a screenwriter under contract to John Wayne and made his reputation with four brilliant westerns that Budd Boetticher directed and Randolph [...]

“They can lick you (which they can’t) or they can fire you, and once you know that you’re not afraid of anybody.” - Budd Boetticher on producers, 1988 interview
Budd Boetticher stumbled into the movies in the fluky way so many of the two-fisted directors of the silent days landed in the director’s chair, but with [...]

My first contact with Budd Boetticher was in 1987. I was a graduate student in film studies at the University of Oregon and I thought I was getting his agent’s phone number from the DGA. I found out very quickly that it was his home number when he answered personally. He was an affable [...]

The following essay, adapted from a review published in Queen Anne News (Seattle), appears in the new anthology from the National Society of Film Critics, The B List, edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson (Da Capo Press).
The making of Seven Men from Now was a modest enterprise. John Wayne’s old Batjac production company had [...]

When Oscar “Budd” Boetticher, the last of the old Hollywood two-fisted directors, died on November 27, 2001, his passing was barely noted. This old-fashioned studio pro with an independent streak, a colorful history (including a turn as a bullfighter in Mexico), and a career of some 35 features, had been largely forgotten by all but [...]