Streaming on Apple TV - Much to enjoy in Walter Hill's DEAD FOR A DOLLAR (USA, 2022)

Warren Burke, Christolph Waltz, Rachel Brosnahan
Dead for a Dollar

Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar premiered at Venice last year and doesn’t appear to have had  any theatrical screenings here. A western must have rather stood out amongst all the art on display at Venice.

I dont know if it had any theatre time but now it’s streaming on Apple TV, a near graveyard service established by the computer company. Selling computers in shops produces work a day wealth. Making movies gets you into a different stratosphere. Everyone wants to be a movie producer. “In fact”, said one local identity, “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t claim to be a movie producer”. 

Still you start from the position of what’s not to like about a western written and directed by 80 year old Walter Hill.

 

Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) is a bounty hunter who has an unpleasant opening encounter with gunman and card sharp Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe) in a New Mexico prison before being offered a bundle of money and a black army sergeant assistant Alonzo Poe (Warren Burke) to track down the abducted wife of ambitious rich man Martin Kidd. On their way to retrieve the wife (Rachel Brosnahan), who is hiding out in Mexico with her lover/abductor (Brandon Scott), Morlund and Poe have to cross land owned by Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt). Vargas wants payment.

 

Willem Dafoe

There are then about five points of power and authority and Hill puts this together quite effortlessly in a manner, that slowly becomes clear, is modelled on the movies of the Ranown Cycle directed by the legendary Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott as the sometimes troubled, sometimes laconic lead. The action gravitates between those power points so effortlessly and with a lot of uh oh as things twist and turn. Hill has picked up the narrative thread that Andrew Sarris described as “Constructed partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character took turns at bluffing about his hand until the final showdown…” Joe Cribbens even makes a couple of remarks about bluffing in poker and the game between him and the English mining executive ends badly for one of them.

 

There is more a bit of The Tall T and a dash of Buchanan Rides Alone in all this  and in the end  the first credit that comes up makes clear just what Hill was trying to do. And succeeded in doing…