Dead For A Dollar, Walter Hill’s cushy return to the western, to watch on Canal +
Ten years after Django Unchained, Christoph Waltz puts on his bounty hunter hat again for the director of 48 Hours.
When he made his first western at the end of the 70s, The James Brothers Gang, all about spectacular shootouts and macho lyricism, Walter Hill openly sought to follow in the footsteps of his mentor Sam Peckinpah. At 80 years old, while he continues to film against all odds, it is to another master of the western, less noisy, that he dedicates his latest, Dead For A Dollar : Budd Boetticher, author of a handful of classics of the genre in the 50s. A way for Hill to place his film under the sign of the B series, craftsmanship and a form of purity. And probably also an elegant way of apologizing for the somewhat broke appearance of the whole thing… Because Dead For A Dollar is obviously a DIY film, shot on the cheap. A western that prefers bedroom conversations and depopulated saloons to wide-open spaces.
Dead For A Dollar tells the Mexican adventure of a bounty hunter of European origin (Christoph Waltz, very sober, phew!), who joins forces with a black soldier (Warren Burke, in a Sidney Poitier-like role) in order to find the wife of a rich businessman (Rachel Brosnahan), allegedly kidnapped by a deserter… Along the way, they will cross paths with a whole bunch of colorful bastards, as well as Willem Dafoe, a smooth-talking bandit who has a grudge against bounty hunter…The black and white duo which leads the plot refers as much to 48 HoursHill’s iconic mega-hit, which Django Unchained by Tarantino, Waltz obliges.
The main problem of the film (besides its slightly ugly sepia photo) is that Walter Hill never manages to manage his overflow of characters, and all the themes that they convey: there is the classic rivalry between the veterans Waltz and Dafoe (the lawman and the outlaw), the woman who wants to escape her violent husband and claim her freedom in a wild West which refuses it to her, the black soldiers despised by their hierarchy, torn between integration and rebellion… The film has no real center of gravity and thus limply zaps from one subject to another. But the moral questions of the characters, who all refuse in one way or another to play the role that society has assigned to them, are not uninteresting, and certain dialogues manage to give the film the dynamism that the film lacks. staging. Despite adversity, the passage of time and meager budgets, Walter Hill refuses to give up and continues to create odes to insubordination in his corner. This is enough to prevent us from concluding that Dead For A Dollar not worth a kopeck.
Dead For A Dollarby Walter Hill, with Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan… On Canal+ on Saturday September 30 at 9:02 p.m.
