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(From left) Warren Burke, Rachel Brosnahan, and Christoph Waltz in Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar<\/em><\/figcaption>photo: Quiver Distribution<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\nDirector Walter Hill is 80 years old, so unless he cranks out something real good real fast, his most widely remembered directing effort will be the 1982 Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte action comedy 48hrs<\/em><\/span>. That would be a shame because <\/em>the film, while terrific, is hardly Hill’s most accomplished work. His 1979 cult classic The Warriors<\/em><\/span> <\/em>is a better-helmed movie, and 1978’s The Driver<\/em> is the best car movie you’ve never seen. But it’s his Westerns\u2014the plodding Dead For A Dollar<\/em><\/span> notwithstanding\u2014that have earned him a place in the directing firmment. His most notable Westerns, like the pilot for HBO’s deadwood<\/em> and the 1980 drama The Long Riders<\/em>galloped into town on a familiar-looking horse, and their laconic frontier energy and blasts of violence ably split the difference between reverent tradition and bold revisionism.<\/p>\nOf Dead For A Dollar<\/em>Hill neither revisits the visual extremes he flirted with in 1995’s Wild Bill<\/em> nor does he honor his mentor, director Sam Peckinpah, with balletic brutality rendered in slow-motion. Where Hill seems to be going, other than nowhere fast, is revealed in a closing credit page that reads: In Memory of Budd Boetticher. An unsung B-movie helmer who was briefly a matador in Mexico before turning to film, Boetticher is best known for his Old West dramas starring cowboy icon Randolph Scott, most notably 1957’s The Tall T<\/em> and 1960’s Comanche Station<\/em>. His films were simple in style yet more psychologically probing than they’re given credit for. Boetticher once boiled down the allure of the Western by saying \u201ca man has a job to do, or a couple of men. They try to do it against tremendous odds. They do it.” And that brings us to Dead For A Dollar<\/em>about a bounty hunter named Max Borlund who has a job to do, and he does it.<\/p>\n