"All my films with Randy Scott," Boetticher has said, "have pretty much the same story, with variants. A man whose wife has been killed is searching out her murderer." Seven Men from Now was the prototype for this story. Scott lends iconic stature to his role as the lone avenger, a good man wrongly bent on revenge. His foil is the charismatic outlaw, amoral and insinuating, here played brilliantly by Lee Marvin. The script by Burt Kennedy is a model of narrative economy-a journey stripped down to its essential dramatic episodes, filmed amidst the distinctive terrain of Lone Pine, California. Boetticher would return repeatedly to Lone Pine to capture the variegated landscapes of the mythical American West. The French film critic André Bazin called Seven Men from Now "the most intelligent western I know while being at the same time the least intellectual, the most subtle and the least aestheticising, the simplest and finest example of the form."-Jesse ZigelsteinPreservation funded by The Film Foundation and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association.