Dead Souls: Alex Cox twists Gogol’s classic into a peppery spaghetti western
The Repo Man director returns with an intertextual tale of swindlers, gunslingers and crooked American politics.
Alex Cox has announced that Dead Souls, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s ‘epic poem in prose’ (1842) as a pastiche spaghetti western, will be his last film. Cox footnotes his declaration by citing musicians who take farewell tours but return for encores, so we might take this as only a provisional final bow.
An earlier Cox Western, Tombstone-Rashomon (2017), mashed up the oft-told tale of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Akira Kurosawa’s multi-perspective melodrama – a knot of cinematic, historical and political references. Here, 19th century Russian satire is filtered through 1960s Italian shot-in-Spain takes on the American west as mythologised by Hollywood. It approaches the intertextual complexity of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which retells samurai movie Yojimbo (1961) as a Western, though Kurosawa had already taken his plot from Dashiell Hammett’s gangster novel Red Harvest. Co-scripted by Cox and actor Gianni Garko, known as gunman Sartana in a run of gothic spaghettis, Dead Souls is apparently relaxed and anecdotal but runs a tight 88 minutes and narrows focus on particularly contemporary issues.
Cox stars as Strendler, an unassuming scarecrow in a suit and bowler hat who comes to a border town in 1890 posing as a census taker, a government agent, a preacher or an undertaker. He offers gold coins for something apparently of no value – the names and birthdates of otherwise uncatalogued Mexican workers who have died in America. Strendler dresses and acts like a minor comic player in most Westerns, good for a joke or two but irrelevant to the gunplay and power struggles of sheriffs, outlaws, land-owners and gunslingers (all of these feature here but are marginalised or killed off absurdly). Some folk deliberately get the name wrong (‘Swindler’) and there’s a ‘Strendler’s List’ joke. The stranger is in a line of descent from Gogol’s Chichikov, Herman Melville’s Confidence Man and Mark Twain’s Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg… a trickster who rooks the corrupt, emerging as paradoxically an honest man because his schemes depend on the crookedness of others.
Strendler’s use for his list is related to Chichikov’s tax scam but brings the film to a point – involving a brief trip into the future – which relates to the current demonisation of immigrants, refugees, the undocumented and the exploited in America and elsewhere. Like all Cox’s films, Dead Souls is also playful – musical turns evoke the Coen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) – and agreeably peppery.
► Dead Souls is touring UK screens now.