New Prints!"Some things a man can't ride around." - The Tall TIn a recent interview with Jonathan Dennis for the New Zealand Film Festival, when asked about his famous "cycle of B westerns," Budd Boetticher had this to say: "Don't ever say B, Jonathan. Let me tell you these are not westerns. These are inexpensive...very good motion pictures..." Last March it was our pleasure to have Boetticher as our guest, at age 84 playing to a full house with anecdotes and revelations about his long career in Hollywood and, before that, as a bullfighter. We are thrilled that Sony Pictures has recently made new prints of six Boetticher films, five of them in the famous Ranown Cycle of, well, westerns. Starring the laconic, ironic, middle-aged Randolph Scott, they are noted for fine cinematography and a kind of literary rigour that makes them more modern than classic. We are also pleased to present a film noir/thriller rediscovered here in 1979. The noir and the westerns are linked by the extraordinary economy of means, taut storytelling technique, and unpretentious approach to moral complexity that were Boetticher's stock-in-trade. Jim Kitses (Horizons West) has written eloquently of Boetticher: "The construction and pace are tightly controlled, the action unwinding with spellbinding formal rigour, the films finally resembling pure ritual. Seizing on the cyclical pattern of the journey western, the alternation of drama and lyricism, tension and release, intimacy and space, Boetticher gradually refines it to arrive at the remarkable balance of an ambiguous world poised between tragedy and pastoral comedy."We wish to thank Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Grover Crisp and Michael Friend for their preservation work.Sunday December 9, 2001