Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin in Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" (1995). Keith Carradine appears briefly as Buffalo Bill. Same final hymn as "True Grit," but not sung as well.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Where "Deadwood" came from
Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin in Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" (1995). Keith Carradine appears briefly as Buffalo Bill. Same final hymn as "True Grit," but not sung as well.
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3 comments:
Sadly underrated on release, mostly forgotten today. Shame.
Given that Walter Hill directed the first episode of Deadwood -- and that the director of the pilot of a show sets the tone for a series -- it isn't surprising that Deadwood and Hill's masterpiece are so similar.
I believe that Hill's "Wild Bill" is one of the great Westerns. It combines the style of the classic Westerns with the heart of a Peckinpah. It was the natural descendant of his excellent "The Long Riders."
Hill's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest" and "The Glass Key" -- "Last Man Standing" -- is also quite good. It's really too bad that critics are so stuck on their Kurosawa fetish that they couldn't notice when someone had gone back to the source of a tale.
Criticizing "Last Man Standing" for being Yojimbo is like criticizing "The Passion of the Christ" for being a rip of of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe."
Of course, Hill will always be in my list of creative geniuses for his adaptation of Xenophon's "Anabasis" as surreal New York gang narrative.
Can you dig it?!
Right on, Christian!
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