Venice Review: Walter Hill’s Western ‘Dead For A Dollar’

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For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects.

Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age (concessions to modern sensitivities have to be made, and digital cinematography somehow just doesn’t cut it with the subject matter), it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.Hill dedicates his film to Budd Boetticher, which is a shame as it has already given critics permission not to think any harder about a film that is actually more of a spaghetti Western in style, themes and music (Xander Rodzinski’s score is impressive, even if it never quite finds the Morricone-style motif it seems to be looking for).

And because of the Boetticher reference, many have latched on to its hero character as a surrogate for his favored Randolph Scott, but there’s also a lot of shifty Eli Wallach in the form of Max Borlund, a gnomic, meticulous European bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz.Venice Film Festival 2022 PhotosBorlund has been hired by a businessman named Kidd to return his wife Rachel (Rachel Brosnahan) who has apparently been kidnapped by a renegade Buffalo soldier Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott) for a serious ransom.

To track down the missing pair, Borlund is assigned Black cavalryman Sergeant Poe (Warren Burke), but their mission is disrupted, first