Dead for a Dollar Review

Last Updated on October 3, 2022

PLOT: In 1897, a veteran bounty hunter, Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz), is hired to find Rachel Price (Rachel Brosnahan), the wife of a businessman who’s supposedly been abducted by a black soldier, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott) and is now being held for ransom. He soon discovers that Rachel is far from a captive and is with Elijah by choice, putting him on a collision course with her husband, plus a Mexican land baron named Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt). He also has to worry about his sworn enemy, Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), who’s working for Vargas and is bent on killing the bounty hunter.

REVIEW: Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar is an interesting Neo-western with an agreeably off-kilter cast and a solid premise. Hill’s one of the few directors still working in the sphere, directing a handful of solid, modern westerns, including The Long Riders, Wild Bill and Geronimo: An American Legend. Many of his other films, including Streets of Fire, Last Man Standing and Extreme Prejudice, also work as quasi-westerns, so it’s fun to see him dip into the genre once more.

The movie carries a dedication to director Budd Boetticher, who, in the fifties, directed a whole series of westerns with Randolph Scott that seem to have loosely inspired this. Those films, which included Seven Men from Now, Ride Lonesome and The Tall T, were unique in their era as they were gritty and realistic compared to other western studio programmers. Indeed, Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe play the western archetypes one often saw in those films. Waltz is the upstanding hero with a past, being the kind of Randolph Scott-style hero, while Dafoe is the “good bad guy” in the mode of someone like Lee Marvin. You know these two will be on a deadly collision course, but underneath everything, there’s a grudging respect. Dafoe is the kind of bad guy who will shoot you, but not in the back, at least.

Hill has fun with his two leads, with Dafoe a natural for the genre, even though this is his first western. His Joe Cribbens has depth, with him having gotten out of jail after a long spell, realizing that the west he was once a master of is dying. He heads down to Mexico, where he can’t seem to stay out of trouble, ending up under the thumb of Benjamin Bratt’s Tiberio Vargas. Bratt’s character is interesting, with him a suave, sophisticated land baron with his own private army of bandits. He’s the movie’s primary threat to a certain extent, but like with Cribbens, there’s some depth. He’s not shown to be a sadist and is fair with his men, earning their loyalty. I could have watched a movie centred around him alone.

As our hero, Waltz is an interesting choice, with Hill dressing him in a way to make him seem quiet and unassuming. For the most part, Hill saves the carnage until the big showdown at the end, but Waltz is playing the “white hat” kind of hero, in that he’s a bounty hunter but one with a code of honor. It’s a less showy part than Dafoe’s, but he’s a unique, off-kilter piece of casting. The two most layered parts probably go to Rachel Brosnahan and Warren Burke. Brosnahan plays her tough, progressive-minded role with vigour. We know she’s using Elijah for her own means, and she acknowledges this, not pretending to Borlund that they’re star crossed-lovers. She dares to be unsympathetic at times which makes her an engaging heroine.

Meanwhile, Warren Burke plays Sergeant Poe, a former Buffalo soldier who seems to be selling out his friend Elijah but has divided loyalties. He has the movie’s big set piece, where he has a whip fight against a racist rival, in a moment reminiscent of Hill’s knife fight from The Long Riders.

Indeed, one can’t fault Dead for a Dollar’s script (which also seems inspired by the classic western The Professionals) or performances, and Hill still knows how to stage action impressively. Most of my problems with the movie come from its sense of pace, which drags on at times. A lot of those fifties westerns this seems to be patterned on ran under ninety minutes (most under eighty), and this could have been a bit more propulsive, with the pace sagging towards the middle. Even still, it’s an admirably old-fashioned western with a nice modern touch that makes it well worth checking out.

Dead For a Dollar

AVERAGE

6

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