The career of Budd Boetticher is one of the most interesting ever confined to B pictures. A collegiate athlete at Ohio State University, he traveled to Mexico in the mid-1930s, becoming so enamored with bullfighting that he eventually wielded the cape as a professional matador. Boetticher's experience in the bull ring led to his entrance in the film industry as a technical advisor on Rouben Mamoulian's "Blood and Sand" (1941), and he spent the next couple years as an assistant director, apprenticing to the likes of Charles Vidor and George Stevens. His first directing credit (as Oscar
