Boasting a screenplay by Gabriel Garciá Márquez, with dialogue "Mexican-ized" by Carlos Fuentes, Ripstein's strikingly accomplished debut film boldly announced the engaged fascination with Latin American literature that has remained an important constant across his career. Originally designated for another director and producer, Time to Die offered the precocious twenty-one year old Ripstein a chance to prove himself as director after multiple failed attempts as an actor and in spite of the heavy weight of his father's influential position within the Mexican film industry and as producer of the film. A late entry in the cycle of so-called "chile-Westerns" that flourished in Mexico from the late 1950s through the 1960s, Time to Die is a stark and fatalistic revenge story set in a small tumbleweed town that follows the final days of a released convict destined to encounter the vengeful wrath of the son whose father's murder was the cause of his eighteen-year sentence. Anticipating Márquez's own Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Time to Die reveals machismo as a pernicious cultural heredity, a curse pushing men towards unrelenting violence and sexism.