Bullfighter and the Lady

Produced by John Wayne, and shorn down to 87 minutes by John Ford for a release print that surely must have had more dramatic bite than the complete version (a director's cut running 124 minutes has since been made available), this sees Boetticher getting far too close to the subject of his beloved bullfighting for the film's good. Stack is the arrogant American film-maker who, on a trip to Mexico, enlists Roland's champion toreador to pass on his skills. Inevitably, there must be death in the afternoon - not to mention many hard lessons in the Latin sense of honour - before Stack grows up enough to become a true man and great artist. Dire continuity and shifts in point of view, endless didactic sequences extolling the bullfighter's grace, and generally wooden performances result in a surprising fiasco of almost unbearable tedium.