7 Men from Now

7 Men from Now (1956) is a lean western you can watch online on iFILM. Ben Stride, a former sheriff, rides across the Arizona desert after the seven men who shot his wife during a Wells Fargo holdup. He plans to find every last one of them.

Along the trail he falls in with a married couple bound for California and a smooth-talking drifter named Bill Masters, played by Lee Marvin. Masters reads Stride right away — he knows the quiet man is chasing something, and he means to be there when the chase pays off. The film runs barely 78 minutes, yet the tension between these three never lets up. Randolph Scott plays Stride as a man who kills not out of rage but because grief left him nothing else.

Directed by Budd Boetticher, this is the first of the seven Scott westerns known as the Ranown cycle, work critics rank beside John Ford's best. Spare, hard, almost no wasted dialogue — old-school filmmaking at its sharpest. Stream 7 Men from Now (1956) online on iFILM.