A Conversation with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Part 4: “All Gold Canyon”
You should know that many “spoilers” can be found in this article. My advice is to watch the movie, then come back and read this article, and If you like it then read the rest of the series too.
Here’s Part 1, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”
Part 2, “Near Algodones”
Part 3, “Meal Ticket”
Part 5, “The Gal Who Got Rattled”
and Part 6, “The Mortal Remains”
The framing device of the latest Coen Brothers movie is that each of its six episodes is a story in a book of Western adventures. Lore has it Buster Scruggs traces its lineage to a film concept called The Contemplations that the Coens have mentioned in interviews, a book of stories in a dusty old library book. Tim Blake Nelson says he got the script for the first part of the movie in 2002, 16 years before its release, and I’ve read that the stories were written by Joel and Ethan over 20–25 years.
The title pages of the book in the film don’t identify an author, but there is a dedication to Gaylord Gilpin, who would seem by the description to have been a cowboy who told these stories to his fellows around a campfire. This is probably a tribute to Gaylord Dubois, a legendarily prolific contract writer of the 1940s-70s…
