The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Directed by Joel Coen
Vignettes weaving together the stories of six individuals in the old West at the end of the Civil War. Following the tales of a sharp-shooting songster, a wannabe bank robber, two weary traveling performers, a lone gold prospector, a woman traveling the West to an uncertain future, and a motley crew of strangers undertaking a carriage ride.
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54 films that influenced The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
What critics say influenced The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
It’s “The Mortal Remains,” which references John Ford’s classic “Stagecoach” yarn with a definite “Twilight Zone” twist.
In this, the Coens borrow a page from Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight, in the form of a discussion among a group of mismatched stagecoach passengers (both films were influenced by John Ford's Stagecoach.)
The final act is an outright homage to John Ford’s 1939 Western classic Stagecoach , with none of the social impact.
Back before John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille elevated the genre from pulp pablum to legitimate pop-art with their 1939 hits Stagecoach and Union Pacific , many of the most popular Westerns featured clean-cut, smiling do-gooders like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and yes, John Wayne, who were quick with a gun but quicker with a song.
Their “True Grit” is one of the few remakes to surpass its original, and “No Country for Old Men” remains their least forgiving, most biblical work.
The Coens themselves have fared much better on the high lonesome, with their 2010 adaptation of the Charles Portis novel “True Grit” outgrossing its closest rival in their filmography (the modern-day Western “No Country For Old Men”) by $100 million — yet, for the most part, the horse opera genre has largely ceded cineplexes to the CGI franchise universe while establishing a secure new home on a range of cable channels from HBO’s “Deadwood” and “Westworld” to AMC’s “Broken Trail” and, of course, the snowier plains of Noah Hawley’s serialized “Fargo” on FX).
Over the years they’ve perfected the art of onscreen death, and many of their most memorable moments involve sudden, unexpected violence: the woodchipper reveal in Fargo (1996); the bolt pistol murders in No Country for Old Men (2007); the Brad Pitt closet discovery in Burn After Reading (2008).
Their last official oater was True Grit in 2010, but they’re brought campfire sensibilities and locales to other films, including No Country for Old Men, Fargo and Blood Simple.
Anyone tempted to take a moment to compare and contrast him with Javier Bardem’s coin-flipping villain in the Coens’ far more ambitious “No Country for Old Men” will find themselves left in the dust while the brothers barrel ahead to the next chapter of their dime-store novel.
The Coens decisively proved themselves as devotees of Western lore past in True Grit and present in No Country for Old Men, and their keenness for the genre comes through palpably in the music, language, storytelling tropes and settings they’ve chosen for this diversion.
The Franco installment, for example, contains a direct homage to the creaky, loud-as-hell sound design of the famous opening scene of Once Upon A Time In The West .
An overture featuring Tim Blake Nelson as a musical cowboy – think Rory Calhoun with a psychopathic hit rate to rival Henry Fonda’s in Once Upon a Time in the West – provides the first of many neat genre inversions.
Given that Buster is riding through Monument Valley – Ford country and the setting for Once Upon a Time in the West – there’s a hint of meta-commentary here.
Watching it, I couldn’t help but compare it in my mind (unfavorably) to the 1955 Looney Tunes short “One Froggy Evening.”
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The third, "Meal Ticket," has haunted me since I saw it; one of my colleagues compared it to Fellini's La Strada, and that's apt, but it's far more melancholy.
Back before John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille elevated the genre from pulp pablum to legitimate pop-art with their 1939 hits Stagecoach and Union Pacific , many of the most popular Westerns featured clean-cut, smiling do-gooders like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and yes, John Wayne, who were quick with a gun but quicker with a song.
The scene of the vengeful banker in armoured plating made of pots and pans evokes memories of Orson Welles’ Falstaff charging across the battlefield in Chimes At Midnight .
In the whimsical, if also violent first installment, Tim Blake Nelson plays the eponymous singing and card-playing cowboy Buster Scruggs, a darkly comic and cartoonish variation on a theme of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry with a dash of the revisionist Western classic “Cat Ballou.”
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Sometimes called omnibus films, these efforts often feature, as in 1945’s classic “Dead of Night,” a variety of directors.
Nelson, Neeson, Waits and Kazan stand out in the ensemble, but among the others Ross is hilarious as a codger as addicted to the sound of his own voice as the pedant Joseph Finsbury played by Ralph Richardson was in “The Wrong Box,” and at the other end of the spectrum Melling, with his wistful blue eyes, exudes an authentically tragic dimension as the totally dependent Artist.