Streaming on Amazon Prime - Barrie Pattison unearths DEAD FOR A DOLLAR (Walter Hill, USA, 2022)

Making a comeback at eighty may not have been one of Walter Hill’s best career moves. His 2022 Dead for a Dollar (no connection to the 1968 John Ireland film) is a presentable enough cowboy movie but it keeps on registering as something that isn’t quite right, despite nice camerawork and some good performances.

We kick off in 1897 at Albuquerque Federal prison, with Bounty Man Christoph Waltz, who turned him in for the reward, warning time served Willem Dafoe to stay clear when they let him loose. The ochre colour scheme that will persist through the film is already dominant. Strong colours are all but absent. Allow for a bit of red blood.

Willem Dafoe

Christoph Waltz

The military (“Rider approaching, sir”) have a new assignment for Waltz. A (black) deserter has kidnapped rich man Hamish Linklater’s wife and is waiting South of the border for the $10,000 ransom. Waltz gets $2000 to bring her back and they give him (black) sharp shooter Warren Burke as sidekick on the job. Burke has details of the payout location. Waltz is already suspicious. “Private Jones just hands out maps after he deserts and abducts a white woman!”

After taking down a few colourful minor characters, Waltz has the job well in hand, getting warned off (“I don’t think we made a new friend”) by local Grandee Benjamin Bratt. Rachel (The Marvelous Miss Maisel) Brosnahan’s “Decorative wife” part is built up to meet 2020s demands and comes with her own purse pistol, which is a plot element. With her alleged captor Brandon Scott in deceptively servile local Captain Fidel Gomez’ jail, in view of a couple of men who have been hanging on the main street gallows a few days, they wait for interested parties to converge

Rachel Brosnahan, Christoph Waltz, Warren Burke

The film is dedicated to Budd Boetticher but it's more The Professionals, with a bit of Joe Kid and Rio Bravo mixed in, and the comparisons don’t benefit Hill’s movie. He never did have John Sturges’ eye for western scenics. Horsemen don’t converse in the saddle. The gunfights are unmemorable. Dialogues interrupt proceedings to get in lines like “Find the Gringo scumbags and kill them.” What about the pair of nuns? The use of fades is tame, though there is a nice wipe on a sideways tracking. 

There are a few reminders, like a figure eight mask view and a bull whip duel to recalis l the ones in Song of Scheherazade or Lewis Milestone’s Kangaroo, along with suitable atmosphere touches like Brosnahan playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on the upright or a plate overrun by roaches. The Latins are gangbusters at violating stereotypes - Gomez (particulaly), Brat, Luis Chávez, Alfredo Quiroz and (nice surprise) Diane Villegas, who joins in the big shoot-out.

This one is good enough to drag out of its obscurity, particularly for admirers of Hill’s The Long Riders, 48 Hours and Last Man Standing.