A fiercely independent cowboy arranges to have himself locked up in jail in order to then escape with an old friend who has been sentenced to the penitentiary.
The last scenes are especially satisfying, both in movie terms — with the cliff-side echoes of Bogart in “High Sierra” (1941) and Kirk Douglas in “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962) — and in the final moral calculus of banker, lawman, farmer, thief.
Hamilton gets two very different final confrontations with the brothers, one a violent, action-filled shootout that recalls the end of Kirk Douglas classic Lonely Are the Brave, the other a tense conversation filled with resentful yet respectful subtext.
Paris, Texas evokes the iconic forms of American cinema, from films noir like Detour and Vertigo to grandiose Westerns like The Searchers and Lonely Are the Brave , at the same time as it calls forth a new wave of postmodern filmmaking from slacker movies to the surrealism of David Lynch and Blue Velvet .
Christopher Laws, www.facebook.com•Cultured Arm•Mar 5, 2020