The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) on Netflix
Six tales of the post-Civil War frontier: singing gunslinger Buster Scruggs, a bank robber, a limbless reciter and his manager, a prospector, a woman bound for Oregon, and stagecoach strangers.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.2/10187,082 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Buster Scruggs, a singing cowboy dressed in white, rides into an isolated cantina full of outlaws and trades insults with a patron. A young cowboy holds up a bank in New Mexico and flees with the teller shooting at him. An aging impresario tours remote towns with Harrison, who has no arms or legs and recites poems and speeches from a wagon stage, while the takings dwindle. A grizzled prospector digs for gold in a meadow high in a mountain valley. Alice Longabaugh travels toward Oregon by wagon train with her brother Gilbert, who says a new business partner will marry her. Five passengers share a stagecoach to Fort Morgan, Colorado, exchanging views on human nature.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Tim Blake Nelson was handed the script for the title story in 2002 and told a second story, "Meal Ticket", was only an outline, but he did not hear until 2016 that the project would go into production.
- The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was the Coen brothers' first film shot digitally, a project the filmmakers used to experiment with the medium because it had 800 visual effects and late magic hour shoots.
- Composer Carter Burwell conducted his score with up to 40 musicians at Abbey Road Studios in London because Netflix, as distributor, was not a signatory to union agreements, so it wanted the recording done in London to stay outside them.
- Fourteen wagons for the wagon train in "The Gal Who Got Rattled" were built from scratch in a New Mexico blacksmith shop and shipped to Nebraska in pairs on flatbed trailers, with the 1930 film The Big Trail influencing their design.
- Most of the costumes were handmade, and designer Mary Zophres credited historical reenactment supply companies with carrying hard-to-find period fabrics, since U.S. wool production at the time of filming was "practically nil".
