Elmore Leonard and The Tall T (part 2)

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LaBrava (1983) begins Elmore Leonard’s evermore excessive referencing of Hollywood movies and the use of narrative devices that depend on a merging of the real and the reel that had its greatest success with Get Shorty (1991). Here, a middle-aged retired Hollywood star who specialised in femme fatales replays one of her old movies . . . Robert Mitchum is endlessly referred to, but it is talk of Henry Silva who jogs another movie memory:

“I know Henry Silva was the bad guy,” LaBrava said. “I remember him because he was in a Western just about the same time and I saw it again in Independence. The Tall T, with Richard Boone and, what’s his name, Randolph Scott.”