Dead for a Dollar: Walter Hill’s Old-Fashioned, New-Fangled Western

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Walter Hill’s new film Dead for a Dollar is in some ways your grandpa’s Western, a big-sky drama full of horses, hats, guns, hairpin plot turns and an ensemble of colourfully drawn characters.

There’s Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz), a hero with a talent for violence and an ethical code, lots of macho stand-offs, and a town under siege from a gang of hairy-faced bad guys, with all of it culminating in a lively climactic shoot-out. There’s is even (as if Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had never existed) a scene of characters sitting around a campfire eating canned beans.

The formulaic quaintness is entirely deliberate and only part of the story. Hill’s film is dedicated to the late Budd Boetticher, an admired low-budget Western director of the late 1950s. At the same time, Dead for a Dollar, set in 1897 at the end of the Western era, has a contemporary bent, with feminist, anti-racist elements mixed with its vintage style.

Hill, who is now 80, came into film in the early seventies as a writer and director. He was always known as someone who had one foot in the present and one in the past. He reworked traditional genres, the Western and film noir, into action films, including The Warriors and The Driver, and later the hit 1982 buddy cop franchise, 48 Hours and a string of Westerns (The Long Riders, Geronimo: An American Legend, Wild Bill, and TV’s Deadwood and Broken Trail.)

Though typically overlooked in accounts of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, Hill has undergone a re-appreciation recently, with two books about his work released this year, and a lifetime award at the Venice Film Festival, where Dead for a Dollar had its premiere earlier this month.

Neither clearly retro nor revisionist, the movie is entertaining for its mash-up of old and new elements. Throughout, Hill and co-writer Matt Harris offering sprinkles of archaic dialogue (“I’m no goddam bindlestiff!” fumes one character). And, of course, Waltz — even with his usual drollness toned down — can’t help suggesting a hint of ironic distance from his straight-shooting character.

In an opening scene, Borlund visits a jail house to deliver a warning to an old arch-rival, Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), who’s about to be released after a five-year stretch. Next, Borlund heads out to the desert for a clandestine meeting about a new job assignment. He’s hired by an oily New Mexican businessman, Martin Kidd (Hamish Linklater) to travel to Mexico to retrieve Kidd’s wife Rachel (Rachel Brosnahan).

Mrs. Kidd is reportedly being held for ransom by a Black army deserter, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott). Kidd has arranged, through a bribe to the army, to give Borlund an escort, an army sharpshooter, Sgt Poe (Warren Burke), another Black soldier and a former colleague of Elijah’s. Poe knows that Elijah and Rachel Kidd are hiding out in the small town of Pueblo de Guadeloupe. The mission gets derailed shortly after Borlund meets the supposed kidnapping victim.

“Are you under the impression that you’re here to rescue me?” Mrs. Kidd asks him sternly.

“I was told you were abducted.”

“That was a lie.”

In fact, Elijah is Mrs. Kidd’s lover and the pair are hoping for safe passage out of reach of the U.S. law to Cuba through local criminal warlord, Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt). He has his own foppish lawyer and translator, Estaban (a very funny Luis Chavez), who translates Tiberio’s grim threats into polite English.

Things soon get, as Esteban puts it, “muy complicada.” Extraneous characters include a supercilious Englishman investor (Guy Burnet) ready to bring “many pesos” in a mining venture, and, of course, Dafoe again, chewing it up, as a trigger-happy sociopath who, at one point, goes on a shooting spree against cockroaches eating his lunch.

While the central conflict involves the social outsider Borlund working out his ethical obligations to the independent Rachel Kidd, their story gets hopelessly entangled in distracting side plots. Too many promising characters have their brief colourful moment on the screen before being Whack-a-Moled out of existence in a way that doesn’t offer either dramatic satisfaction or a sense of justice.

Enjoy Dead for a Dollar for what it is though: an erratically entertaining contrivance that links the Hollywood past and present, from a filmmaker who’s been there.

CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Walter Hill, Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Warren Burke and Benjamin Bratt.

Dead for a Dollar. Directed by Walter Hill. Written by Walter Hill and Mathew Harris. Starring Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan, Warren Burke, Benjamin Bratt, Luis Chavez, Hamish Linklater and Brandon Scott. Available on video on demand September 30 on Cineplex, Telus, Shaw, Rogers, Bell, Sasktel, Cogeco, Apple (iTunes), Microsoft and Google.