The Murder of Hi Good

Hi Good is a historical figure, a notorious hunter of Indians who operated in North Carolina and was brutally murdered in 1870, a few years after abandoning his sinister mandate. While Lee Lynch gained his reputation with films that are curiously ‘anthropological’, tied in with the American landscape and its distant past (including: The Wash, FID 2006 and Bower’s Cave, FID 2009, both made with Lee Anne Schmidt), he comes back this time with an authentic Western, in costume. All this, on a budget that is clearly more than a tad modest and a traditional narrative that is somewhat chaotic. For here, from the starting point of this true story, we revisit the relationship between Pale Faces and Red Skins, refusing over-simplification and digging deeper into these ambiguous relationships made, according to the film, as much through fascination as repulsion, as much through blind paternalism as the desire to do away with a fraudulent, guilty father. By the same token, The Murder mixes mocked-up old style images with others treated in an explicitly contemporary way, blurring naturalism with the fantastic and all without turning a hair. In the end, this is a genre film that breaks its own rules specifically so as to shed new light on the very genre itself.