The early scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon are a symphony of pointed dissonance. The director revels in the frantic bustle of the Oklahoma boomtown of Fairfax where most of the film is set — a world of fast, shiny cars, hollering cowboys, and seemingly endless oil fields. World War I has recently ended, and the turn-of-the-century discovery of black gold in this region, to which the Osage were moved from their ancestral homes along the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, has unexpectedly created immense wealth, making the Osage “the richest people per capita on earth.” But the new money has also led to a series of unsolved murders, and Scorsese grimly interrupts the action at regular intervals to show the faces, and say the names, of the Native American dead. It’s a somber historical accounting, but it also happens to be a familiar western-movie trope: One is reminded of Charles Bronson’s Harmonica hauntingly reciting the many victims of Henry Fonda’s aspiring-capitalist gunslinger Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.
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