Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

This week I’m looking at three genre movies -– a heist, a western and a retro horror/thriller — about the search for gold. There’s an old bank robber lookin’ for love while stealing krugerrands, two brothers in the old west working as hitmen while searching for gold nuggets, and criminals in Corsica killing for gold bars.

The Old Man & the Gun

Dir: David Lowery

It’s the 1980s in Texas. Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) is the consummate gentleman, always kind and charming, especially with the ladies. He meets one such woman named Jewel (Cissie Spacek) by the side of the road where her car overheated. She’s a widow with a ranch but no family or friends nearby. He gives her a ride and they share lunch at a roadside diner. But when he jokingly tells her what he does for a living she doesn’t believe him. Who would think such a kindly old man is a bank robber?

But a bank robber he is, and a damned good one. Working with his partners Teddy and Waller (Danny Glover, Tom Waits) they pull off a stream of successful bank heists from Dallas to St Louis, without ever firing a shot or leaving a single fingerprint behind. That is until detective Hunt (a moustachioed Casey Affleck) connects the dots between these seemingly unrelated crimes. (This is long before google.) Can Tucker quit bankrobbing and settle down with Jewel before Hunt tracks him down?

The movie is based on a true story about a career criminal and escape artist but it’s so much more than that. It’s a tender love story (between Tucker and Jewel), and a buddy drama (between him and his respectful rival, the cop). It’s well-acted, wonderfully directed and with a classic script of the kind I thought Hollywood had forgotten how to write. It even has some filmmaking tricks – like a clever history of his escape attempts – inserted in an unexpected place.

What a feel-good movie this one is.

Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres)

Dir: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani

It’s a sundrenched day at a cliffside bed and breakfast in Corsica. Madame Luce (Elina Löwensohn) – a sultry, middle aged woman with a pageboy haircut – is your hostess, but don’t expect a five star rating. It’s a BnB… from hell. The rooms are made of crumbling rock shelters and breakfast means fried eggs served with live ammo. The guests include a scheming criminal, a crooked lawyer, a young tough, and a smash-faced thug. The only paying guest, Max Bernier, is an over-the-hill novelist from Paris in a perpetual drunken stupor. What are they all there for?

A heist, of course, in the form of a Brinks truck carrying a case of solid gold bars. They carry it off — killing two cops and the driver in the process — but then things start to go wrong. Bernier’s beautiful young wife and kid show up unexpectedly, and a pair of motorcycle cops, dressed in black leather, stop by to take a look around. At this point, gunshots start and rarely stop till the end of the movie. Some of the bad guys realize they’ve been stabbed in the back. Soon everyone on the mountainside is either a hostage or hostage taker, a shooter or a victim (or a potential sex partner) in a final shootout for the gold.

But this plot description doesn’t do justice to what this film really is. It’s an over-the-top horror/thriller/heist movie, flawlessly done in the style of 1960s spaghetti westerns. It’s intense, from the saturated colour to the Morricone score.  Every gun shot — and there are thousands – is followed by a mammoth splash of blood; every cigarette is lit with a whoosh of flame that fills the screen; every stabbing has a disgustingly loud squishing sound. There are extreme close ups, with a single eye or curled lip filling the entire screen. And lots of gratuitous nudity and violence, especially when the drunken novelist imagines stylized sex scenes from his own books.

See this one on a big screen.

The Sisters Brothers

Dir: Jacques Audiard

It’s the 1850s in the Oregon territory, and the country has gone gold crazy. Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix) are brothers who earn their living shooting to kill. Eli is smart and kind at heart, while Charlie takes after their dad, a drunk, mean bastard. They work for a shady robber baron known as the Commodore. Their latest job? Meet up with another man

who will provide them with their victim.

Meanwhile, in a town nearby, is the idealistic Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) a brilliant scientist who is flat broke. He has an invention that could make him a millionaire. It’s a chemical he claims will make panning for gold easy as pie. On his travels he meets an upper-class adventurer named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhall). Warm likes Morris’s polite relaxed manner and sees him as a genuinely nice guy. As they travel he share his secret, though not the details, with him. What he doesn’t know is Morris – like the Sisters Brothers – works for the evil Commodore, and that he plans to hand over his erstwhile friend to those killers. But things aren’t necessarily what they seem. The hunters become the hunted with posses tracking the Sisters brothers for their past crimes. The four find themselves on the same side, at least temporarily, but who can be trusted?

The Sisters Brothers is French director Audiard’s first English language film, and he totally pulls it off. This is an excellent western that captures the frantic expansion of the gold rush towns in the old west with entire settler towns appearing, on-screen. We watch characters discover new technology like toothbrushes and hot-water plumbing. It captures the utopian politics of the time (though completely ignoring the plight of indigenous people). Reilly and Phoenix make great shootists, but it’s Riz Ahmed who really steals the show. The Sisters Brothers (based on Canadian writer Patrick deWitt’s novel), is a wonderful, new take on the classic western.

The Old Man & the Gun, Let the Corpses Tan and The Sisters Brothers — all great movies, though for different reasons — all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.