A Time for Dying (1969) Audie Murphy’s Last Stand (Review)

Here’s a curio released by Indicator Powerhouse this week, the final film of both director Bud Boetticher and star Audie Murphy, A Time for Dying was made in 1969 but didn’t actually receive a cinema release until 1982, having been tied up with litigation in the intervening thirteen years. This slight and somewhat cheap-looking film (it runs to 70 minutes and you can see it stretch to the limitations of its budget throughout) tells the story of Cass Bunning (Richard Lapp), a gauche farm boy with a remarkable talent for shooting and an ambition to be a bounty hunter and scourge of notorious outlaws like Jesse James. Arriving in Silver City to seek his fortune, he meets up with fellow newcomer Nellie (Anne Randall, a former Playboy Playmate) who has been lured to the town from the East under false pretences and is now expected to work in the brothel. Naturally, Cass comes to the rescue of this damsel in distress and the pair head for Vinegaroon, where the notorious, deranged hanging judge, Roy Bean (Victor Jury) considers charging them on the grounds of immorality, before resolving the felony by offering to marry them. Now husband and wife, Cass decides to take Nellie home to meet his father, whom she can live with whilst he chases his dream of being a gunslinging lawman. Along the way, they meet Jesse James (Audie Murphy), who offers Cass some advice, and a skittish young outlaw named Billy Pimple (Bob Random; surely the most Toast of London name ever) who has ambitions to become the next Billy the Kid.

It’s virtually impossible to talk about A Time for Dying without giving away the ending so, if you haven’t seen it and you want to remain spoiler-free, I’d advise skipping the next two paragraphs. Boetticher, seemingly keen to bridge the gap between the classic tradition of the Hollywood Western and the more revisionist approach that was becoming fashionable, delivers one of the bleakest endings imaginable. Passing through Silver City once more, Cass is called out by Billy Pimple and chooses to answer his destiny – with disastrous results. His hands, slick with sweat, mean he fluffs the draw and Billy shoots him dead. Now a widow, Nellie is comforted by the brothel Madam and her girls – and we instinctively know now that her previous escape was little more than a brief reprieve. As if to underline the desperate nature of life in the West, Boetticher chooses to end the film with another innocent girl stepping down from a stagecoach and walking blindly towards her sex-trafficked fate.

Whilst many struggle with the tone of A Time for Dying, it’s actually what I find really interesting about the movie. In his final movie, Boetticher marries everything that has gone before with the future and dismisses the nostalgia of the mythical West in one fell swoop. Most Westerns are, after all, films that explore a character’s destiny, with many impinging on that crucial moment in which a character accepts their calling and becomes the stuff of legend. Here, Boetticher – just as Fritz Lang had done in another somewhat maligned and misunderstood Western, 1952’s Rancho Notorious – uncompromisingly challenges this crucial aspect within the Western genre and throws it out for the lie that it is, favouring instead the cruel and fickle hand of fate. Seen in this context it makes everything that went before it, the sickly sweet naivety of Cass and Nellie’s romance, all the more tragic and arguably would have struck a chord with audiences who had seen similar young lives and youthful dreams cut short by the ongoing Vietnam conflict, a generation killed on the whims of old men in much the same way that he chooses to depict the sentencing from the crazed and wizened grotesque Judge Roy Bean.

If you still think that their ‘gee shucks’ cooing jars with the downbeat, cynical conclusion, it’s important to reconsider how Boetticher chose to start his film, because I think the warning signs were there for the audience from the very first frame. If you’re into your animal rights, it’s an ugly start to a movie, as Boetticher has Cass observe a hare and a rattlesnake, before drawing his gun and shooting the head of the snake clean off. As animal cruelty goes, it’s up there with Cannibal Holocaust or, more aptly, Peckinpah’s chicken shoot in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but it’s also thematically relevant; the hare can’t survive alongside a rattlesnake and they allegorically foreshadow the innate characters (and crucial differences) of Cass and Billy. Arguably it would have all been more explicit if Peter Fonda had agreed to take the role of Cass, thereby drawing on his family history with the genre and his own New Hollywood image.

Like babes in the wood, Cass and Nellie wander through the lawless landscape of the West, full of dreams and oblivious to peril. Having spent much of the 60s mounting a documentary on bullfighting in Spain, Boetticher’s final depiction of a formative America is unsurprisingly of a cruel country doomed to perpetuate senseless acts of barbarism and brutality. He’s not afraid to address it honestly either, most notably in his refusal to go soft on prostitution, calling its practice out for what it was – sex trafficking – as opposed to the Hays Code-satisfying genre trope of bad piano playing, powder puffed and corseted comedy. This atmosphere of nihilism may strike fast and frequent, but it looms threateningly large over our central protagonists like the shadow of a gunman, and they’re increasingly blind to its dangers.

Enter Audie Murphy. Way back in 1950, in only his second movie role, America’s most decorated veteran of WWII had essayed the role of the young Jesse James in Kansas Raiders and now, in his final film role before the tragic plane crash that took him so prematurely, he gets to play an older James. Despite taking top billing, Murphy is only really delivering a cameo – and a brief one at that, lasting just a few minutes – but it is arguably his finest hour. At this point in his life Murphy was suffering from what we now know to be PTSD, which manifested itself in some reckless behaviour, most notably gambling. Legend has it that Murphy was in need of some quick funds to pay off his debts to the mob in Vegas and he turned to Boetticher, who he had worked with on the director’s first Western, The Cimarron Kid in 1952, for help.

The pair set up a production company, Fipco, with the intention of making several movies – A Time for Dying was the first, and unfortunately the last. Knowing what we ultimately now only enhances the elegiac nature of Murphy’s appearance. With his distinguished beard and handsome attire, this iteration of Jesse James is an unmistakable celebrity figure, foreshadowing Brad Pitt’s similar approach to the role in 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He is also of course a man steeped in bloody violence, one whose keen eye knows “natural ability” when he sees it. He certainly sees it in Cass and immediately offers him a job, but Cass is too straight to find the outlaw life in any way appealing and too polite to say so. He lies to James, claiming it is his intention to be a farmer like his father. It’s a lie James easily sees through, but decides not to push. Instead, he offers him some advice regarding the perspiration on his hands, contrasting them with his own bone dry palms. And with that premonitory moment passed, Murphy rides off into the sunset for the last time. As Kim Newman says in a video essay which accompanies this release, The Men Who Shot the James Gang, it’s almost as if Murphy – dead before the film got a proper release – is a ghost in his own movie. A Time for Dying indeed.

Newman’s isn’t the only extra on this release, there’s also a rather lovely appreciation from British filmmaker Chris Petit whose An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was released by Indicator in February and which I reviewed here. Petit rightly identifies the flaws of the movie, but defends it for its tone and its well-constructed screenplay and direction. He also draws a parallel that immediately resonated with me between the film and the kind of characters who inhabit the folkloric songs of Bob Dylan. There’s also an audio commentary from writer C Courtney Joyner and film historian Henry Parke.

A TIME FOR DYING – MARK’S ARCHIVE