I always dream of a return of the great cowboy movie. Not that there haven't been honorable attempts - Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Tom Selleck. Now we have The DEAD DON'THURT. Hopes rise as we open with drunken psychopath Solly McLeod exiting the saloon, where he's shot four people, and taking down a wounded local and the agreeable boy deputy on his way. Star-director-writer-producer-musician Viggo Mortensen pulls his weight there, making McLeod the nastiest bad guy in memory. Frank Faylen, in WHISPERING SMITH, shooting people just to see them jump, seems neighborly by comparison.
Ah but there's more. The frontier proves to be in the hands of avaricious land grabbers with a side line in vice. The admirable Danny Huston's speech about expanding the one saloon to house "sporting ladies" sets the tone. There's Ray McKinnon's bought judge contrasted with the indignant girl who has to be silenced when she is the one person to stand and speak out in his court or the appalled town doctor who refuses to charge for his ominous visit. There is a complete world here, one that's subtly different from the ones we know from earlier films, more savage, more connected to the earth.
Mortenson is really good with performers. Putting him opposite now star of the moment Vicky Krieps makes this one compulsory viewing. We first see her bored with the well dressed suitor who will not stand for that, dismissing her as "not the freshest either." It sets her up nicely as the idealised frontier woman, a suitable mate to roll in manure with fellow European migrant, war veteran Mortenson.
The film is full of nice pieces of staging - Viggo initiating his courtship by offering Krieps a slice of salmon on the flat of his Bowie knife, the pair of them reaching the isolated house he has used his carpenter skills to build in what seems an inexplicable choice among all the empty Nevada land ("What do you do?" "As little as possible.") her dropping her two bags as she faces the horses she has loaded her chair onto, - even the lamp wick dimming after the assault. He manages the use of the convincing Heaven's Gate-like setting - boots ringing on the timber board walks, the shadow of the rain on window glass falling on faces or scenic panoramas like the striking (Mexican) rock outcrops that telegraph the fact that we are going to see bullets impacting them.
Viggo has kind of crept up on us, doing support parts in conspicuous movies for forty years until he became someone whose efforts automatically rated our attention. I hate to say that there's too much Viggo here but as a producer, he should have congratulated himself on his stringed instrument skills, gone off to one side and told himself director Viggo needs more editing discipline.
The DEAD DON'T HURT is plagued by unwelcome elaboration. Throwing the military medal off the cliff just doubles up on the lead's view of the Civil war, moving from "fighting against slavery" to "not what I expected." The whole flashback structure just makes it hard to follow and dissipates the action movie energy. The knight in armor is mystifying at first and dim when it's explained - the Indian girl with the fish? Joan of Arc?
Somewhere buried in the over-length The Dead DON'T HURT there is a superior, atmospheric example waiting to take its place in the new cycle of ultra sadistic westerns, along with The BONE TOMYHAWK or The HATEFUL EIGHT I kind of feel I was cheated out of it.
