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"Loners. Drifters. Men bent on vengeance. Laconic in manner, economical in gesture, slow to anger but deadly when provoked. Begun unofficially in 1956 with Seven Men From Now, made under the auspices of John Wayne's Batjac Productions, director Budd Boettinger and actor Randolph Scott's "Ranown Cycle"would eventually encompass six films, of which Ride Lonesome is both the best, and representative of the whole cycle. Visually and aesthetically, Ride Lonesome more than justifies New York Times critic Richard T. Jameson's assessment of the entire Ranown cycle as "the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking (rivaled only by Val Lewton's 1940s horror films for RKO)." Shot in a mere seventeen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism, at once epic and austere. Running a tight 73 minutes, Boetticher turns traditional Western tropes into rituals of re-enactment and revenge"--
About the author
Kirk Ellis is a two-time Emmy Award and two-time Humanitas Prize-winning writer/producer who wrote and produced the acclaimed event series
John Adams. Among his many other credits are the Emmy-nominated
Into the West and the Emmy Award-winning
Anne Frank: The Whole Story. Formerly cogovernor of the writers' branch of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and past president of the Western Writers of America, Ellis splits his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Palm Springs, California.
