Take Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character (1885/1886) and relocate the setting from 19th century England to a mountanous region in the American (actually Canadian) West after the American Civil War, just when the railroad is about to come through. Season with touches of C'era una volta il West / Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), High Plains Drifter (1973) and Deadwood (2004-2006), and voila -- there you have a gilded glimmer of Michael Winterbottom's The Claim. Wintry, mountainous backdrop, warm bordellos and other interior spaces, harshness versus comfort, health versus sickness, choice versus luck.
The ensemble cast of The Claim works well together, but three actors in particular make it worth the whole kit and caboodle: Nastassja Kinski, Milla Jovovich and Sarah Polley.
I love some of the international variations in the title, giving their own slant, as it were. In Québécois French: Le maître de Kingdom Come; in "regular" French, Rédemption; and in German, Das Reich und die Herrlichkeit.
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
1 comment:
This looks really good. Gonna try to find this. I didn't know it existed.
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