Dead for a Dollar

[Winston T. Boogie]

Title: Dead for a Dollar

Genre: Western, Thriller

Director: Walter Hill

Cast: Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan, Benjamin Bratt, Brandon Scott, Kameron Hood, Guy Burnet, Hamish Linklater

Plot: A famed bounty hunter runs into his sworn enemy, a professional gambler and outlaw that he had sent to prison years before, while on a mission to find and return the wife of a successful businessman who is being held hostage in Mexico.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Kind of cool, Walter Hill has a new movie in post as I type this. Great cast too.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

 

[Malcolm R]

Rachel has not aged well.

I've never understood why they put actors' pictures on posters in a different order than the names? I know the names are usually dictated by contractual terms, but why can't they put the actor under their name on the poster, in whatever order they appear? This seems to happen regularly.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

A snippet from a review:

Hill dedicates this movie to the great Western director Budd Boetticher, and this dedication unlocks his and Waltz’s conception of Max Borlund. That is, Borlund is a character that could have been played by the Boetticher stalwart Randolph Scott. Borlund is scrupulously pragmatic but also utterly honest. He likes his money but when it comes down to brass tacks he’s particular about who he takes it from.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

So, this was scheduled to get a Blu-ray release yesterday but it did not happen. A DVD did get released yesterday and one site I went to said the Blu was cancelled. Not sure if they meant postponed or just flat out cancelled. I was looking forward to this release because this did not play in a cinema near me at any point.

I have not yet checked the streaming services for this but as a big Walter Hill fan I was going to grab this on Blu.

 

[Tino]

Available on iTunes in HD for $9.99.

 

[dpippel]

I'll wait for it to drop to $4.99 and then take a chance. Old Henry sure paid off when I rolled the dice on it.

 

[Tino]

I'll wait for it to drop to $4.99 and then take a chance. Old Henry sure paid off when I rolled the dice on it.

Exactly what I did too. Haven’t watched it yet tho.

 

[dpippel]

Exactly what I did too. Haven’t watched it yet tho.

Old Henry? I was pleasantly surprised. Tim Blake Nelson and Stephen Dorff are both excellent in it.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

I could not wait so I watched Dead for a Dollar last night. I enjoyed it quite a bit though this may be my bias towards Westerns and most of the people involved with this picture. This is a low budget affair, which does not hamper the production much and shows that the people that made this did so more out of love for this kind of picture than for a payday. The acting is pretty good, Waltz is pretty laid back in his performance, Dafoe brings his thing to his role, Brosnahan is very good in what is really a well written female part in a Western.

This was digitally shot and I think this is the one aspect that does not come across well. I think to improve the overall look they just sepia toned the entire picture and it does not really mask that the video looks like video. Oddly, I think if they had been able to shoot this on film, like if they shot it on 16mm it would have really improved the entire experience. This is a tribute to low budget Westerns and if it had a grainy look it would have really worked, Instead this looks very waxy smooth. This was my biggest complaint.

The story and direction are very straightforward. I mean the synopsis is exactly what you get. A man hires Waltz to go to Mexico to find his wife, who he claims was kidnapped by a soldier. Waltz takes the bounty and goes after them. Waltz is a no-nonsense type that does not much care about the details and believes in doing his job. Along the way he encounters various characters that he comes into conflict with and that mean to hinder his progress.

Walter Hill directs this in a matter-of-fact manner that the Waltz character would probably appreciate. Not much flamboyance here, gunfights are simply staged, no big action sequences, and during the action the characters all seem to treat the violence as if it was something they had no way around. Really, I would say that Hill, who also wrote this, was most concerned with story and less with making another action picture. When the gunfights happen, and they do, they just suddenly break out and quickly are over. Probably more true to what a gunfight might have been like back then, just a quick flurry of bullets and someone is dead.

This does mute the suspense though as there is not a lot of build-up and with the characters generally just standing right in front of each other the scenes are not very dynamic, I believe relying more on how you might feel about these characters.

Hill is known for being an action director but in many ways he tones that way down here. I think this was a stylistic choice because he is a guy that knows how to stage an action sequence. Maybe it was his response to how bombastic and over the top action scenes are today that he just made these simple and to the point.

Bottom line, I think if you are a Western fan you probably will enjoy this. He shoots a lot of things you would expect in a Western, big wide vistas, but they don't look as beautiful as they would were this shot on film. Or I guess if he had someone like Roger Deakins handling the photography. The writing is actually pretty good and he plays around with character motivations a bit to throw us some curves. Overall though this is a tribute to Budd Boetticher (it comes up in big letters on the screen at the end) and it essentially is that kind of straight ahead old fashioned Western.

I think if he could have just found a way to shoot on film it would have made it all look and feel much more authentic. I will be honest here, it is not going to end up on anybody's list of Best Westerns and it is not as good as all the classic Walter Hill stuff. It is a film, shot fast and cheap, with good actors and a good script. For Western and Walter Hill diehards only, I would say.