There are so many sight gags – not since The Hudsucker Proxy days have the shot choices felt so giddily inventive – jokes, witty lyrics and verbal badinage that repeat viewings are essential.Īfter such a brazenly iconoclastic opening, the next episode threatens to be slight as James Franco turns up in a Sergio Leone-style duster.
Buster is a Roy Rogers character who sings constantly – to relieve the monotony of the scenery – talks happily to his horse “Dan”, wears a goofy grin and will shoot your face off if the opportunity presents itself. The first introduces us to just about the most fun you can have with the western genre. Even magnificent scenery like this can get dull if there’s no invention or novelty to proceedings, but fortunately the six tales collected in the dusty old hardback book The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the Wild West, complete with colour plates and tracing paper, are packed with originality, poetry and glorious wit. 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. “Out here in the West the distances are great and the scenery monotonous,” states cheery singing cowboy Buster Scruggs (played with doofus aplomb by Tim Blake Nelson).
The Coen brothers go West once more with their latest offering The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Netflix-produced anthology of bizarre tales of the Wild West that are by turns hilarious, macabre and unexpectedly moving.
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