After directing ten "B" programmers for Columbia, Eagle-Lion and Monogram in the 1940s, Budd Boetticher got the chance to make a truly personal film: his dream project Torero, ultimately released as Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). As Boetticher recounted in his memoir, "I was finally able to make Bullfighter and the Lady thanks, almost completely, to John Wayne."

Wayne went to bat for the director by setting up and producing the film for Republic Pictures, where Wayne had a long-standing professional relationship. To secure financing, the Duke arranged a meeting with Republic chief Herb Yates. When Yates declared he did not want to produce Boetticher's story, Wayne reminded him that he was still owed about $1 million of the combined grosses of two earlier Republic features, Wake of the Red Witch (1948) and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). "Just write me a check and I'll finance Budd's show," said Wayne. Panicked, Yates capitulated, offering $200,000 to finance the film. After some back-and-forth haggling, the final budget was set at $350,000 and Boetticher was good to go.

The film's story was drawn from Boetticher's own experiences. As a young man traveling in Mexico, he had become enamored of bullfighting, befriended many of the top Mexican matadors and even trained in the sport himself, becoming a full-fledged bullfighter. Boetticher's treatment was essentially that tale, though it also injected a romantic subplot. A brash American (Robert Stack) falls for a beautiful Mexican woman (Joy Page) who is engaged to another man, and to impress her, he convinces a famous matador to give him bullfighting lessons in exchange for skeet shooting lessons. (Stack in real life was a champion skeet shooter.) Tragedy and redemption - both in and out of the bullring - follow. A strong Mexican flavor emanates from the finished film, which was shot entirely on location and utilized actual bullfighting venues. Actual matadors playing supporting roles and performing the stunts add much to the realism.

Also in the cast are the superb Mexican actress Katy Jurado - making her American film debut one year before her memorable turn in High Noon (1952) - and Gilbert Roland, the veteran star of silents and talkies, as the matador who trains Stack. While Boetticher was irritated to no end by Roland's colossal ego, he recognized that Roland nonetheless delivered an outstanding performance, infusing his character with bravery and vigor without overacting. "But," the director later wrote, "his personality on the screen didn't keep him from being a major pain in everyone's ass, most especially mine... His father had been a matador of some note and, from the actual signing of his contract to perform, he set about sort of 'condescending' to play one of my leads. He became so obnoxious that [assistant director] Andy McLaglen kept him on call most of the time so he could strut around in his bullfight suit and sign autographs, which placed him at a fair distance from me and my camera."

Wayne had hired his favorite screenwriter, James Edward Grant, to turn Boetticher's treatment into a finished script, but according to Boetticher, when "[Robert Stack] and I first read Grant's screenplay in Mexico City, we were shocked. It was supposed to be adapted from my original story, but what he had written certainly wasn't what either of us had planned to film. It was Jimmy's drunken version of what he thought bulls and bullfighters were like. However, I promised [Stack] we'd film the story, not the script, and we did. Well, when Grant saw the rough cut of the picture he threw a fit. He convinced Wayne that I had been completely disrespectful of his ability as a renowned screenwriter."

Panicked that his movie was going to be ignored or ruined (Wayne was now referring to it as "that Mexican hassle"), Boetticher called John Ford for help despite having never met him. Ford had an office at Republic, knew about the movie, and was anxious to see it. Upon screening it, Ford offered to recut it, even saying, "I'll win you an Academy Award." Boetticher signed a document readily accepting the great man's help, then heard this from Ford: "The only problem with your show, Budd, is that it's got about 40 minutes of chi-chi sh*t that's just gotta go." Out went footage of the real-life matadors, designed to lend Roland's character credibility and dignity. ("Mr. Ford claimed no one in the United States would know who they were anyway.") Out went sentimental scenes of Mexican children and domestic life designed to build atmosphere and warmth. "But most important," recounted Boetticher, "was the editing of the relationship between Stack and Roland...I have always believed that real men can love each other without concern that their honest affection might be misconstrued as something abnormal. 'Bullsh*t,' Mr. Ford said."

The result was 87 minutes long. Boetticher was devastated. He hated Ford for cutting his film down so drastically, but in the years that followed, the two became close friends. Decades later, when he was close to death, Ford explained to Boetticher the real reason he had shortened the film. It wasn't because Ford disliked the deleted footage - it was because Wayne believed the film would recoup its money only if released as a less-than-90-minute "B" feature. Screenwriter Grant went along with Wayne, and together they convinced Herb Yates. Ford got wind of all this, and knew that if he personally supervised the editing, Yates would leave him alone to at least do it in an acceptable way.

Ironically enough, Boetticher received an Oscar® nomination for Best Original Story. He shared the nomination with one Ray Nazarro, but that was because Nazarro, a former acquaintance, had registered Boetticher's synopsis for the film years earlier as a favor - and had signed his own name to it without permission. He'd had nothing whatsoever to do with its writing. Rather than fight him in court, Boetticher relented and gave him screen credit. Of course, that meant both wound up being nominated for an Oscar. "Lucky for him, we lost," wrote Boetticher. "So help me God, if we had won, little Ray Nazarro was going to end up in the orchestra pit."

Thirty-five years later, the UCLA Film and Television Archive restored Bullfighter and the Lady to a 124-minute running time. Boetticher was at the premiere and enjoyed experiencing his richer, more satisfying cut with an audience for the first time.

Bullfighting was the subject of two more Boetticher movies: The Magnificent Matador (1955), starring Anthony Quinn and Maureen O'Hara (with another studio-imposed title he despised), and Arruza (1972), a years-in-the-making documentary about Mexican matador (and Boetticher's friend) Carlos Arruza. And like Ford, John Wayne would remain a love-hate presence in Boetticher's life and career; the Duke later produced Seven Men from Now (1956), arguably Boetticher's finest film and the first in a series of top-drawer westerns he directed starring Randolph Scott.

For Robert Stack, Bullfighter and the Lady was his first true leading role after a decade of supporting parts in a variety of genres. It would also prove to be one of his most memorable. He later wrote in his autobiography, "When I began preparing to play the part of a young American matador, I had no suspicion that this role would affect my life so deeply."

Despite some close-ups which show Stack in the bullring, the closest Stack got to actual bullfighting was performing a few passes with a young cow (still a somewhat intimidating animal) in a tienta sequence, wherein cows are tested for bravery. (If they pass, they are saved for breeding bulls.) Stack did so well he got a little too cocky, and paid the price with a modest hit which sent him scrambling from the ring. Boetticher saved the filming of this sequence for the last day of production "so that [Stack] wouldn't get himself killed before we finished the picture... He fought some good-sized animals."

For the picture's finale, shot in Mexico City at the renowned Plaza Mexico, Stack entered the bullring with the real matadors, but he did not do any actual bullfighting. Just walking into the ring, however, was a huge honor and thrill, he later recalled. Still, the boisterous crowd did not take too kindly to the sight of a blond gringo, and they jeered him. "Hey blondie," one yelled. "Throw us a kiss!" That, wrote Stack, "was the nicest thing anyone had to say to me all afternoon. The rest was unprintable, in English or Spanish." To ensure a full house for the sequence, the production had taken out newspaper ads announcing free admission to see half a dozen of the finest matadors in the country. For these matadors as well as the crowd, it was a real bullfight and not just a movie, and there were real pressures at stake. Luis Briones, Stack's double, felt he had a chance to redeem himself after falling out of favor with the public in recent years. He performed magnificently and indeed won them over.

Luis' brother Felix Briones didn't get the chance to appear in the finale. While doubling for Roland in an earlier sequence, he was gored. Stack wrote: "The bull came in head high, hooked, and caught him over the eye, laying his scalp wide open. When I finally found Felix, after the doctors finished working on him, he was sitting in a darkened room of the hacienda. He turned toward me and I saw great tears running slowly down his face. 'I have ruined the movie and disgraced Mexico,' he said. He spoke not one word about damn near having his head torn off. The Briones brothers seemed to be treating the movie as a test of bravery and honor instead of an entertaining motion picture."

On a more comic note, Stack's hair had to be bleached blond so that the contrast between him and the Latin toreros would be visually apparent on black-and-white filmstock. Stack wrote, "Poor Luis Briones also had to undergo the bleaching treatment. Unfortunately, they never managed to get his hair to turn blond, even after blistering the top of his head repeatedly. He was so ashamed of his newly acquired orange hair that he only went out at night, and then only with a beret."

Producer: John Wayne
Director: Budd Boetticher
Screenplay: James Edward Grant, Budd Boetticher and Ray Nazarro (story)
Cinematography: Jack Draper
Art Direction: Alfred Ybarra
Film Editing: Richard L. Van Enger
Cast: Robert Stack (Johnny Regan), Joy Page (Anita de la Vega), Gilbert Roland (Manolo Estrada), Virginia Grey (Lisbeth Flood), John Hubbard (Barney Flood).
BW-124m.

by Jeremy Arnold