The assiduous redistribution of screentime wealth pays real dividends in some cases, for example when Diane Villegas as hotel employee Esperanza gets to deliver, quite unexpectedly, a coup de grace in an action that in a more traditional film would have been a job for a white, male hero. Regard, for example, the film’s slightly strained effort to pay due representative diligence with a diverse range of characters, Black, white and Latino, with women who are strong and can shoot as straight as any man. It’s somewhere between the two, built on a narrative architecture as classical in its vernacular as Doric columns on a bank, but with details that will surely remind audiences of the future that it was made in the 2020s. Nor is it a revisionist postmodern deconstruction. Nevertheless, although Hill certainly puts in a few sly tips of the hat to canonical and cult favorites and is clearly enjoying exploiting the audience’s expectations of the genre, Dead for a Dollar is not an empty nostalgia exercise. That is certainly true of the ones set in the 20 th– and 21 St-century times in which they were made ( The Driver, The Warriors) as well as the ones that are “proper” westerns with cowboys, ten-gallon hats and the like ( The Long Riders, Wild Bill, Geronimo: An American Legendthe pilot for TV’s Deadwood). In any case, this wouldn’t really be a capper to a remarkable, eclectic career, especially given that Hill has said more than once that all his films are basically westerns. We hope that, as 80 is the new 50 these days given directorial longevity, Hill has more films in him. Screenwriters: Walter Hill, based on a story by Matt Harris, Walter Hill Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)Ĭast: Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan, Warren Burke, Brandon Scott, Benjamin Bratt, Luis Chavez, Hamish Linklater, Fidel Gomez, Guy Burnett, Alfredo Quiroz, Scott Peat, Diane Villegas, JD Garfield Remember that saying that at night all cats are black? Well, in Dead for a Dollarall the horses are sorrel or bay. The palette is a study in earth tones, all ochre, blood-rust red and high chaparral yellow. Even the highly jiggery-pokered look of the film, presumably shot on digital but adjusted in post so that all the blues get filtered out, makes the movie look like something made 60 or 70 years ago. Either way, this entertaining latest feature from venerable writer-producer-director Walter Hill is soaked in elegiac love for the clean lines, brisk storytelling and moral clarity of classic westerns, like the kind Boetticher used to make, such as The Cimarron Kid (1952), The Man From the Alamo (1953) or Comanche Station (1960). In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether or not it officially is the film’s subtitle. As the credits come up on screen at the end of Dead for a Dollarthe dedication “In Memory of Budd Boetticher” is bannered so prominently next to the title, it could almost serve as a subtitle for the film itself.
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