DEAD FOR A DOLLAR (2022) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Walter Hill
Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan,
Warren Burke, Brandon Scott, Benjamin Bratt,
Luis Chavez, Hamish Linklater, Guy Burnet,
Diane Villegas, Fidel Gomez, Alfredo Aragon
Right away in "Dead For a Dollar", you notice some of the things you'd associate with a spaghetti western: the title, the musical score, the desiccated landscapes. It's like Walter Hill's way of saying, "Look, I can make a spaghetti western if I want to," but that's not quite what it's about. It's more like, what if John Ford made a spaghetti western, or more to the point, Budd Boetticher, to whom the film is dedicated. Remember David Lynch as Ford in "The Fabelmans", telling young Steven Spielberg to look at the horizon? There are a lot of horizons to look at here. Christoph Waltz plays a bounty hunter. Willem Dafoe plays a gambling ex-con who's good with a gun. Rachel Brosnahan plays a kidnapped woman Waltz has been hired to rescue, only she hasn't been abducted and doesn't want to be saved. There's a classic look to the way the shots are set up, with lots of washed-out colors and sepia tones, and Hill's an economical storyteller, even when he's doing exposition. Also, he knows where to put the horizon.
