Budd Boetticher

Unless there’s a big surprise in the next month and a half, I think Sony/Columbia’s Budd Boetticher Collection will wind up as the DVD release of the year. It really should be called the “Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott Collection,” because all five films in the set have Randolph Scott, the rugged, easy-going Western hero, as the star — but it’s Boetticher, and his cult following among filmmakers, that was the impetus for this set; Sony had never released these films on DVD before and most of them hadn’t even widely available on VHS, but Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and other bigshots got together and talked Sony into releasing obscure classics on DVD, starting with these Westerns. (Boetticher and Scott made seven Westerns together; the first, Seven Men From Now, is available in an excellent and inexpensive special edition from Paramount.)