The Big Trail, which is said to have used 185 wagons in its production, is credited as an inspiration to Buster Scruggs production designer Jess Gonchor in a recent MPAA interview. And obviously, there is some trouble with Native Americans. Along the way, he falls in love, of course. The actor plays a trapper who becomes a guide for a train of covered wagons, mostly to follow some villains fleeing westward. Loeffler’s The Big Trail is one of the best films depicting a train on the Oregon Trail and stars John Wayne in his first major lead role (and his first credit with his stage name). Also, the apparently lost feature The Westerners, which like the Buster Scruggs wagon train story “The Gal Who Got Rattled” originated from a work by prolific Western author Stewart Edward White. But the cinematic depiction of this iconic venture of Manifest Destiny goes back to at least the 1910s and a number of films by D.W. It’s a tense little character drama and surprisingly not yet been remade - there is an American film adaptation in development according to IMDb, however.įor many of us, the old Oregon Trail video game is what first comes to mind with the image of a wagon train. The tale of a lonely prospector in search of a pocket of gold was previously turned into a short film in 1972 by Czech director Zdenek Sirový, but that’s not easily available so I suggest viewing a much earlier foreign London adaptation involving prospectors and the wickedness that comes with their territory.īy the Law ( Po Zakanu) is a silent Soviet feature by Lev Kuleshov, who is best known for demonstrating the “Kuleshov effect” of montage editing, and is based on London’s short story “The Unexpected.” The film follows a party of prospectors who’ve found fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush, but when one of the five suddenly shoots down two of the others, the remaining couple ponder what to do about their murderous colleague. The one chapter of Buster Scruggs that’s directly based on a previous work is “All Gold Canyon,” which is adapted from the Jack London story of the same name. We then see three separate, multicultural stories of Death’s dealings in tragic romances before returning to learn the fate of the desperate woman. After meeting a couple in a carriage and then killing off the man, Death makes a bet with the woman to save her love. The other, which I find more interesting for recommendation after Buster Scruggs, is Fritz Lang’s Destiny(aka Weary Death: A German Folk Story in Six Verses), which is also sort of an anthology film, albeit one where the stories are all tied together with a bookending tale. And both involve a carriage, not unlike the stagecoach with the two “bounty hunter” reapers in the Buster Scruggs segment “The Mortal Remains.” One is another Swedish feature, Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, which is credited as the film that got Bergman wanting to make movies.
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly the most famous cinematic depiction of the Grim Reaper, but decades earlier there were two important films with Death as a character released in 1921. They join with a few related Coen Brothers works that need to be seen in conjunction with this one.
BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS MOVIE
While the ingredients are not always blatant references, the six stories that make up the new Netflix movie share DNA with some essential classics, a select bunch of which I recommend below. What was the Old West really like? Some historians may know, but the reality and mythology of late 19th-century frontier America combine for a new truth perpetuated through literature, television, and movies.Īlways masters of the pastiche, Joel and Ethan Coen make films that are filtered through others, and their Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is no different. Westerns made today all pay homage to what came before.
The genre is so diverse in its narratives, yet they all have a certain look and feel connecting them all as one lump group. How difficult it must be to make an original Western.
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