The Iceman Cometh (1973)
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Set in 1912, inside a dive bar named The Last Chance Saloon, its destitute patrons eagerly await the arrival of Hickey, who arrives annually and props everyone up with free drinks and spirited stories of his travels. However, when Hickey does show up this year, it is with a message of temperance and an exhortation to give up hopeless dreams and face reality.
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What critics compared The Iceman Cometh to
But set mostly in the confined space of a remote haberdashery/stagecoach stop, the piece plays like a weird combination of John Ford's Stagecoach, Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, albeit with a word count closer to Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.
This is a director who hires the Mahler of spaghetti Westerns, Ennio Morricone , whose work he's sampled many times, to create an original score, then ladles it onto a film that is not a typically sumptuous revenge Western about characters' relationships to the land they're battling to claim, but something more like a crisply photographed stage play—think of Tarantino's debut film " Reservoir Dogs ," most of which took place in a warehouse, but with Stetsons and dropped g's, or a prairie rat cousin of Eugene O'Neill's tailbone-busting four-hour barroom fable " The Iceman Cometh " ("The Iceman Curseth"?), but with torture; rape; point-blank gunplay; multiple, possibly false identities, and gallons of blood.