Peter Viney's Blog

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 

Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Music by Carter Burwell

2018

I read about the Coen brothers latest, and kept checking local cinemas for a release date. None. I love the “negative Western” like Cat Ballou and the brilliant Support Your Local Sheriff. I love the big Westerns too.

Then I read the Sunday Times– it is released via Netflix, and there are no showings in cinemas anywhere near us.  The Sunday Timessaid:

With Bohemian Rhapsody showing no signs of biting the dust, and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald pitching up, a new Coens work would, frankly, struggle to find enough screens to make any dent at the box office right now.
Jonathan Dean, Sunday Times Culture 18 November 2018

He’s right – our nearest ten screen has Fantastic Beasts on five of them this weekend. So … our screen is big, our 5.1 system excellent, so bite the bullet and watch it on Netflix, and it looked great. It didn’t cost £24 for two plus £5 car parking either.  But if it comes to any of the local community / arts centre screens, I’ll go and watch again on a big one.

It consists of six segments, each with a different Wild West story. Not coincidentally, that’s how many kids experienced Westerns in Saturday Morning Matinees in the UK. Mine was at the Moderne Cinema, Moordown, Bournemouth. A retro touch is that the six stories are linked by turning the pages of a book (classic Disney animation), and each is introduced by a colour plate illustration, initially concealed by the protective gauzy film that high quality old books had. Watch carefully, because at the end of each segment, you see the page with the last few lines of the story. It was only by segment 3 or 4 that I noticed how neatly they round off the story.

So, dividing into six. I read a few reviews which give funny lines and are laden with plot spoilers. I’ll try to restrain myself.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The card game, the gunfight

Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson)

The title story, filmed in Monument Valley with a singing cowboy with guitar on a white horse (Tim Blake Nelson). The horse has a name, Dan, and answers the cowboy with an appropriate whinny. He arrives singing Bob Nolan’s C&W classic Cool Cool Water. Reviews mention Gene Autrey, and Bob Nolan did similar with The Sons of The Pioneers.

I go back to a chronological aspect to the six short films – this first one really is Saturday Morning Matinee stuff, and my link would be Roy Rogers and Trigger, or Hopalong Cassidy. My first experience of Westerns, and many others, and so it starts us off. Those Saturday Matinees saw us with our cap guns shooting at the screen, and the presentations were all short … add The Lone Ranger and the B&W Batman.

Apart from the scenery, there are cinematic piss-takes in there, like seeing the guitar strings from inside the guitar. That “from within” shot is so beloved of filmakers. We meet Buster Scruggs, a weedy fellow, who is a sure shot and known as The Misanthrope, to his chagrin. After being refused whisky, perhaps for wearing a white cowboy suit, he gets into a fight. He moves to another saloon and hangs up his guns, then he offers to join a poker game, taking over the hand left face down on the table … which turns out to be the “dead man’s hand” held by Wild Bill Hicock when he was shot in the back of the head in 1876: five cards, with two Aces and two Eights and the Queen of Hearts. OK, no plot spoilers, but it leads to two gun fights. The first is hilarious. The second is the end of Buster who ascends to heaven singing with angel wings.

It’s the most outrageously funny of the segments, and from there it steadily gets darker.

Near Algodones

The Bank Robber

The second is also funny, with James Franco as a bank robber. The bank is a shack in the desert in the middle of nowhere, and the old bank teller is ready to fight for his money. As the robber approaches, we get the rhythmic tapping of a bucket swinging in a well … a strong nod to Ennio Morricone and the Serge Leone trilogy. Later the robber wakes up to find himself on a horse with a noose around his neck. The intervention of a band of Injuns sees off the hanging party (in the context of this film, Native American, Comanche or Indigenous Peoples would be daft).

The robber (James Franco) has spied a pretty face in the crowd …

He’s eventually rescued, and for the second time that day, finds himself in another noose in the town square. He sees a beautiful girl in the crowd and …

This will be the first Western in years to be totally non-PC about Native Americans. When they appear again in Segment 5, they’re simply ‘the savages.’ The Coen Brothers dare go where no one else would go nowadays ; but they are showing classic Western myths.

Meal Ticket

The Showman

The showman (Liam Neeson) watches a rival attraction

Getting much darker … and not just the snowy scenery and dismal mining camps. A showman (Liam Neeson) has a travelling sideshow with an orator (Harry Melling). The orator has no arms and no legs and is propped up on a chair to recite Shakespeare, Shelley & the Gettysburg Address. As they move onward and to higher and colder spots, the audience dwindles as we see him going through the same old routine. The showman has to carry the orator around, feed him. He can’t even leave him behind when he visits a brothel. Then one day he sees a rival show with a mathematical chicken who does calculations. He buys the chicken, but what is he to do with the orator?

All Gold Canyon 

The gold prospector

This one is based on a Jack London story from 1905, and is set in a lush green mountain valley with a stream. The original Jack London is faithfully reproduced on screen:

It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-deep in the water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated, many-antlered buck.
Jack London

The prospector (Tom Waits)

Our grizzled gruff prospector is singer-songwriter Tom Waits. Waits is having a dramatic year, what with providing the narration for Martin McDonagh’s play A Very Very Very Dark Matter. It’s beautifully set with an owl (real) as a character virtually, and the violence comes as a shock … but is soon eradicated from view.

The Gal Who Got Rattled

The pioneer, the wagon train

Alice Longbaugh (Zoe Kazan)

This is the longest story, and is more loosely based on a 1901 short story by Stewart Edward White. We start in a boarding house where Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) is staying with her brother, Gilbert, before setting out on the Oregon Trail. A resident has had a nasty cough too. We cut to the wagon train, with Conestoga wagons, pulled mainly by oxen, which is accurate. Poor Gilbert succumbs to the cough and dies, leaving Alice alone with their employee, who expects to be paid $400 which she does not have. The wagon train’s leaders are Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and Mr Arthur (Grainger Hines). There’s some convoluted Western grammar (She hadn’t ought to have did it) from Mr Arthur.

Alice (Zoe Kazan) and Billy Knapp (Bill Heck)

Billy is polite and formal and while awkward with women, is concerned at her dilemma. He proposes marriage, saying he will leave the wagon train business after a dozen years working with Mr Arthur and settle down in Oregon. There is her dog. No more plot spoilers, but she goes off to find it. Mr Arthur follows and they are attacked by “savages”. Mr Arthur explains in graphic detail what will happen if the savages capture her and gives her a revolver to escape the fate far worse than death. But that awful fate will ultimately result in death too. There is another attack. She thinks Mr. Arthur is dead, so …  but he isn’t.

Carter Burwell’s score for the Oregon Trail echoes the great Western themes.

Mr Arthur (Grainger Hines) and wagon train

The Mortal Remains

 The stagecoach, the horror story

The Englishman (Jonjo O’Neil) and The Irishman (Brendan Gleeson)

A complete change of mood and style, most of it taking place inside a stagecoach at night, with five passengers. Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O’Neill (a fine Richard III at the RSC, by the way) play two bounty hunters, who have a corpse on the roof.

Frenchman (Saul Rubineck), Lady (Tyne Daly), Trapper (Chechie Ross)

We have Tyne Daly as an upright Christian lady, Saul Rubineck as a cynical Frenchman and Checie Ross as a filthy old fur trapper. It’s a philosophical debate, enlivened by Brendan Gleeson singing an old Irish ballad, The Unfortunate Rake, (listed on IMDB as The Unfortunate Lad) which has the same melody as Streets of Laredo … which we had heard at the start of the film. The soundtrack lists The Unfortunate (Lad) twice, but when we hear it as an instrumental at the start, it is surely the words of The Streets of Laredo that come first to mind.

The lyrics are important:

As I was a walking down by the lough,
As I was walking one morning of late,
Who did I spy but my own dear comrade,
Wrapp’d in flannel, so hard is his fate.

Had she but told me when she disordered me,
Had she but told me of it at the time,
I might have got salts and pills of white mercury
But now I’m cut down in the height of my prime.

I boldly stepped up to him and kindly did ask him,
Why he was wrapp’d in flannel so white?
My body is injured and sadly disordered,
All by a young woman, my own heart’s delight.

In other words, the sickness is syphilis (salts and pills of white mercury were thought to be a cure). The song brings Jonjo O’Neill’s character to tears. The trapper has just told of his long relationship with  a “stout woman of the Hunkpapa Sioux” whose name he never found out. The Christian lady is appalled. They arrive at a strange hotel … the corpse is carried in by the bounty hunters. It’s pure Gothic horror as the Frenchman tries to pluck up courage to enter … the doors close behind him.

The end

Five stars. A great movie. One to watch many times, and I will.