‘Dead For A Dollar’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Walter Hill. USA/Canada. 2022. 106mins.

It’s been six years since one of Hollywood’s great remaining mavericks last directed a movie, and a lot longer than that since one of them hit gold. But, at the age of 75, Walter Hill may just be at the start of a slow uptick with his long-postponed return to the western genre.

A revisionist western served up in a traditional twine-tied package

Dead for a Dollar is a revisionist western served up in a traditional twine-tied package. A baggy but entertaining yarn about frontier codes of honour, it embeds a feminist, anti-racist agenda in an utterly old-school example of the genre. Its name and Morricone-like soundtrack may channel Sergio Leone, and the presence of Christoph Waltz (on top form) may suggest a Tarantino connection ­– but the film’s soul lies in the more distant past, as a closing dedication, ‘In memory of Budd Boetticher’ suggests.

The film’s production values, which include the kind of pin-sharp desert landscape photography that has you careful not to breathe in the dust, are a little classier than those of the Randolph-Scott-starring B-westerns Boetticher made in the 1950s, with their three-week shooting schedules. But after flirting with the ‘Acid Western’ genre with Wild Bill in 1995, Hill tries a different, more nostalgic approach here. He may be onto something. It’s not unthinkable that audiences right now are looking for a modern western they can settle into like a saloon rocking chair.

Set between New Mexico and old Mexico in the summer of 1897, this is that most classic of western tales; a story of geographical and moral borderlands. Waltz is Max Borlund, a bounty hunter paid by a rich businessman to find and return his wife – Rachel Brosnahan’s Rachel Kidd – who, he claims, has been abducted and taken across the border into Mexico by a black army deserter, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott). Willem Dafoe’s ornery character Joe Cribbens, who feels like he was reverse-engineered into the story from its final shootout, is a professional gambler with a grudge against Borlund. Warren Burke plays another Buffalo Soldier, Alonzo Poe, who is assigned to accompany Borlund by a US army that is not above doing off-the-record favours for wealthy bigwigs like Rachel Kidd’s husband, Mr Kidd (Hamish Linklater).

It’s clear pretty much from the get-go that Mr Kidd is a cad and that Rachel – played by Brosnahan as a woman growing from romantic escapee to clear-eyed mistress of her own destiny – left of her own free will. It’s also obvious that the cultured, enigmatic Borlund keeps a moral code jammed beneath his Stetson and his pretence that only the money matters. So far, so predictable.

But once it’s firmly ensconced in its Chihuahan desert setting, Dead for a Dollar develops engagingly as a western in which the law of the gun is offset by a scenario in which characters are continually negotiating, adjusting their demands and expectations. Guns are pulled but not fired, and questions of jurisdiction become important. Bullying local landowner Tiberio Varga (a steely-eyed Benjamin Bratt) employs one of the film’s most engaging bit-players, serious young bowler-hatted lawyer Esteban (Luis Chavez) as his courteous bearer of ultimatums, while a practical yet principled Mexican sheriff-magistrate provides a refreshing corrective to all those Spaghetti Western cliches about the locals.

Fear not, however. Hill also delivers saloons with bottles on the counter just ready to pour, high-stakes poker games, campfire meals and horses galloping across vast desert landscapes, and a final shootout that fulfils the audience contract efficiently without adding much to the genre. Dominated by washed-out tans and browns, as if filmed through parchment, Dead for a Dollar is no western for the ages. But dang it, it’s an hour and three quarters well spent.