As western movie fans start the countdown for the Dead For a Dollar premiere at the end of this month, Quiver Distribution decided to ease the wait by releasing a trailer to tease what we can expect to see when the time comes to go check it out in theaters. The story centers around a bounty hunter who happens upon a nemesis he put in prison years before, as well as a new bounty that challenges him in unexpected ways.
The trailer is a follow-up to the stunning poster that Collider revealed exclusively last week. It amps up the animosity between Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) and Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), who can only be in the same room without trying to kill each other if there’s a set of prison bars between them. And there can only be one left standing when Joe is released and makes it his life’s mission to prove his innocence and kill Borlund.
The trailer also reveals Rachel Brosnahan’s (The Marvelous Ms. Maisel) character Rachel Kidd is advertised across the wild west as a damsel in distress, but she has actually run away from her husband. She knows that a bounty hunter was sent after her for a reason: Just so that her husband can kill her personally for fleeing. That’s why she’s getting more than ready to fight back when the time comes.
Dead For a Dollar is directed by two-time Emmy winner Walter Hill, who directed acclaimed modern films like 48 Hrs. and Geronimo. Next week, Hill will debut Dead For a Dollar at the 79th Venice Film Festival, and he will be honored with the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award. The prize is given to personalities who have made one or more particularly original contributions to the film industry.
Upon announcing the award, Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera had a lot of praise for Hill’s body of work. He said in an official statement:
“Both inside and outside of tradition, Walter Hill constantly redraws the contours of the genres that form the horizons of his cinema - if nothing else, in order to transcend conventions in his nonstop search for a constructive relationship with the legacy of the American legend, inherited from classic cinema, and, on the other hand, for authentic modernity in ethics and form. Whether it be westerns, thrillers, horror, war films, or detective movies, Hill never refrains from making them an opportunity to create formal and narrative geometries that aim to recount modern times through genre stereotypes and to propose an aesthetic point of view that disregards and goes beyond the traditional demarcation line between good and evil. An auteur in the full sense of the term, Walter Hill nevertheless has no problem recognizing himself as a specialist in action movies, whose violence is subjugated to various degrees of stylization, and his search for new visual effects is conducted through constant experimentation on how to use the various possibilities offered by the film language.”
Dead For a Dollar premieres in theaters on September 30. You can watch the trailer below:
Check out the official synopsis here:
Veteran bounty hunter Max Borlund is deep into Mexico where he encounters professional gambler and outlaw Joe Cribbens – a sworn enemy he sent to prison years before. Max is on a mission to find and return Rachel Kidd, the wife of a wealthy businessman, who as the story is told to Max, has been abducted by Buffalo Soldier Elijah Jones. Max is ultimately faced with a showdown to save honor.