Sad­dle up for Wal­ter Hill’s return to the West­ern in the Dead for a Dol­lar trailer

It’s been six years since Wal­ter Hill unveiled his last fea­ture film, the ill-advised trans­gen­der revenge thriller The Assign­ment (known for­mer­ly as (Re)Assignment, and even more for­mer­ly as Tomboy), which may have been just the right amount of time for him to look with­in and think about his deci­sions. He’ll make his come­back in tri­umphant fash­ion next week with a grand pre­mière at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val for his lat­est, the tough-as-nails neo-West­ern bear­ing the instant-clas­sic title Dead for a Dol­lar.

The reports from the Lido are sched­uled to hit on the 7^th, but until then, the rest of us can take a gan­der at this here oater with the first trail­er for the new film. It seems to show a Hill return­ing to form, from the pseu­do-Mor­ri­cone music to the pair of tiny mechan­i­cal binoc­u­lars and oth­er touch­es of pro­duc­tion design to the black­heart­ed spir­it of vengeance cours­ing through an irre­solv­able conflict.

He’s stick­ing to tra­di­tion as the plot set­up goes, not so far removed from the tem­plate laid down by genre canon text The Searchers: a well-heeled busi­ness­man (Hamish Lin­klater) has lost his wife (Rachel Bros­na­han), who he claims has been kid­napped by the Black gun­slinger Eli­jah Jones (Bran­don Scott), so he hires boun­ty hunter Max Bor­lund (Christoph Waltz) to bring her back. But three prob­lems stand in the way of this mission’s com­ple­tion — a Mex­i­can gang­ster (Ben­jamin Bratt) wants a piece of the fee, a mean-as-beans out­law (Willem Dafoe) that Bor­lund locked up ages ago back on the prowl, and the vic­tim in ques­tion may not be the damsel in dis­tress she’s made out to be.

Hill appears to be draw­ing on the favored themes of John Ford and the oth­er cow­boy-and-indi­an mae­stros, who repeat­ed­ly reck­oned with the dis­so­nance between a rapid­ly chang­ing Amer­i­ca and the hard­ened men unable to change along with it. Beneath the osten­si­ble hero­ism of the rough-rid­ers who ​“won the West” lay a fes­ter­ing racism, par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­nounced to a present-day audi­ence in this case for the dynam­ic with a Black foil.

Shoot­ing on dig­i­tal has changed the tex­ture of Hill’s out­put in an inte­gral way, his down-and-dirty B‑movies lack­ing some of the authen­tic visu­al grit that still endears The War­riors or The Dri­ver (or, more rel­e­vant to the West­ern dis­cus­sion, The Long Rid­ers) to today’s view­ers. All the same, his work is unmis­tak­able for any­body else’s, espe­cial­ly as his the­mat­ic and styl­is­tic predilec­tions fall fur­ther out of fash­ion, enmeshed in the past.