Milwaukee’s Ross Bigley’s revisionist western features Bai Ling and is streaming online for free
Since the days of John Ford, filmmakers have used the western to plumb the depths (and lies) of the American dream. Manifest destiny and westward expansion once colored an uncertain time in history with excitement but outside of Howdy Doody and whiz-bang pop guns, the West’s vast landscapes of opportunity and post-revolutionary freedom can just as easily give way to desolation, lawlessness, and death.
In Yellow Hill: The Stranger’s Tale, a short film by Milwaukee’s Ross Bigley, hope is as scarce a resource as clean water and hard times have worn down on its shadowy avenger, credited only as “the Stranger” (Bai Ling). Not unlike the Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, the Stranger is introduced more as a presence than a character. In the opening moments against the dried out crags of South Dakotan desert, she’s clipped from afar, shot by one of the many Milwaukee-Chicago native actors playing cowboy goons. Ling’s Stranger however, gets the final shot as she springs to life and plugs one into her would-be assassin. It’s a moment of brutal survivalism and cold vengeance — and the first of many to come.
As might be obvious in a story featuring a Chinese-American woman gunning down revolver-toting men with ease and (seeming) invincibility, Yellow Hill isn’t concerned with historical fidelity. Taking cues from the pulp revisionism of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Bigley and co-creator Ling blast their way through the exploitations of the period as the Stranger seeks to make amends with her estranged father, popping caps in the “coolie trade,” prostitution, and a railroad industry built on the backs of Chinese laborers. Yellow Hill isn’t a specific indictment of past injustices. It’s a genre exercise broadly executed (on a small scale budget) with cigarillo smoke, blood splatter, and a retro Beatrix Kiddo at its center.
Bigley, who is developing a follow-up feature with Ling, is President of the Milwaukee Independent Film Society. He also teaches filmmaking and storytelling at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in addition to spearheading the Milwaukee Short film Festival every year. Yellow Hill: The Stranger’s Tale is streaming FREE in its entirety online: