Finally sitting down to watch Dead for a Dollar, I didn’t quite know what to expect. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen a Walter Hill movie (I know, I know) and the IMDB parents’ guide makes it sound pretty rough. However, I love a good western, Dead for a Dollar looked interesting, and the since it’s only available on DVD it’s pretty cheap.
I liked it?
Even at a lean hour forty-seven, the story is difficult to summarize. Christoph Waltz plays Max Borlund, a bounty hunter tasked with tracking down the kidnapped wife of an aspiring politician. The woman, Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), has been taken to Mexico by a deserter Buffalo Soldier, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott), which also makes this a military operation. Rachel’s husband, Martin Kidd (Hamish Linklater, oozing evil like Alan Rickman in Quigley Down Under) wants things kept on the DL, but refuses to pay her ransom. So Borlund heads down to Mexico with another Buffalo Soldier, Sergeant Poe (Warren Burke), who has a lead on where Jones is hiding out.
But wait, there’s more!
The film opens with Borlund visiting a prisoner, Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), due to be released. He warns Cribbens not to come looking for him. We know that these two will most definitely meet again and one of them will die. The story follows Borlund and Cribben’s trajectories until they intersect. Old wounds never heal in the grime of the old west, and Hill’s old west is as grimey as they come.
Hill obviously had Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome in mind, even dedicating to film to the famed director.
Westerns are often old men stories. Not for old men, specifically, but about them. Westerns are often about outsiders, men called to sacrifice themselves for a world to which they can never belong. A man on the downward slope of life still has much to offer, but a righteous man understands his mortality and works to leave a legacy for the young. Evil men are selfish, looking toward their own self-interest at the expense of others.
Good and evil can be evident at any age.
I’ve some complaints online that in Dead for a Dollar Hill goes woke, and I don’t see it. Just because there’s an interracial romance doesn’t mean he’s pushing a progressive ideology. Just because there’s a strong woman, a proto-feminist, doesn’t mean, well, anything. We’ve seen these things long before the woke scolds started insisting on their inclusion, and as long as we tell human stories we will continue to see them.
We need human stories.
Once out on the trail, Poe tries to get to know Borlund, asking about his nationality. “I’m an American,” Borlund says. He’s surrendered all past allegiances and taken on a new mantle. He is the hero. He is not racist. He is American. And he is honorable. I don’t see the wokeness, perhaps because I choose not to see what I hate.
Lesson in that.
The movie has also gotten some hate for coming across as low-budget. Well, it is. But also, it’s an homage to the B-westerns that Boetticher made. Not every new western is going to have the glitz of Tombstone, nor should it. Everything has a yellow tint and Hill even uses wipes, encouraging us to set aside our pretentious attitudes and see his film for what it is: a B-western with an A-story.
Dead for a Dollar isn’t as aggressively violent as I feared, though there is some nudity and plenty of violence. The language is harsh, and the end result is something with hints of a grindhouse movie. But unlike those, I didn’t come away feeling dirty.
Yes, I did like it. Yes, I’ll watch it again.
