Dead man's hand case these would have been combined with an unknown hole card. The expression "dead man's hand" appears to have had some currency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although no one connected it to Hickok until the 1920s. The earliest detailed reference to it was 1886, where it was described as a "full house consisting of three jacks and a pair of tens". Jacks and sevens are called the dead man's hand in the 1903 "Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences". Edmond Hoyle refers to it as Jacks and eights in 1907. What is considered the
Dead Man "Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don't have a clue what it is". Desson Howe and Rita Kempley, both writing for the "Washington Post", offered largely negative appraisals. Greil Marcus, however, mounted a spirited defense of the film, titling his review "Dead Again: Here are 10 reasons why 'Dead Man' is the best movie of the end of the 20th century." Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum dubbed the film an acid western, calling it "as exciting and as important as any new American movie I've seen in the 90s" and went on to write a book