Ballad of buster scruggs song9/18/2023 This is also, in turn, a showcase for the Coens in all of their filmmaking guises, from the playful to the profound and all points between. Instead, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays out as a tribute to the flexible nature of the western setting, which can accommodate comic vignettes, grim irony, gallows humour and even chilling, Gothic yarns set on a dark, misty night (as in the final story, the Stygian stagecoach journey The Mortal Remains). The pair, it seems, aren’t fussed about revisionism or directly subverting the formula – so expect to find savage ‘Indians’, war parties and damsels in distress all present, intact and untroubled by a 21st-century perspective. Throughout, the Coens delight in drawing out stories from this rich and varied western tradition, revelling in the various modes and moulds of storytelling inspired by the Old West. Scruggs’s singing cowboy is just one of a variety of western archetypes that are given the Coens treatment: in All Gold Canyon, a white-bearded prospector ( Tom Waits) scours an untouched American Eden for a pocket of gold, singing the old Irish song Mother Machree in Near Algodones, a would-be bank robber ( James Franco) is beset by misfortune in That Gal Who Got Rattled a young woman ( Zoe Kazan) travels the Oregon trail with an uncertain future ahead of her. Inside Llewyn Davis cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s hyper-real photography perfectly suits such a storybook vision of the frontier, while the Coens deploy stylistic flourishes one would expect to find in a Looney Tunes short: outline silhouettes of dust hang in the air faces blacken with gunpowder and bullets shoot right through the peaks of ten-gallon hats, leaving perfect, circular holes. He’s the San Saba Songbird, a singer and a gunslinger who both sounds and looks like the country music legend Hank Williams (who, in fact, once recorded that very song) with his broad smile and pristine white get-up. The camera peers closer as a hand turns the pages to reveal short stories with the names such as Meal Ticket, Near Algodones and All Gold Canyon.īefore all that, though, the Coens first recount The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is where our title hero ( Tim Blake Nelson, returning to the Coens fold after O Brother, Where Art Thou?) appears, coming into view from across a broad rural plain crooning the folk tune Cool, Clear Water. Impresario (segment Meal Ticket) Liam Neesonįirst, we open on a weathered green hardback, bearing the title The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier. The Man in Black (segment Near Algodones) Ralph Ineson Harrison (segment The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) Harry MellingĬowboy (segment Near Algodones) James Franco Buster Scruggs (segment The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) Tim Blake Nelsonįrenchman in Saloon (segment The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) David Krumholtz
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