We’d argue there has never been a more clever idea for a Western movie.
Title – The Quick and the Dead
Year – 1995
Plot – “A female gunfighter (Sharon Stone) returns to a frontier town where a duelling tournament is being held, which she enters in an effort to avenge her father’s death.”
Cast – Dir. Sam Raimi; Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Lance Henriksen, Keith David
Rotten Tomatoes / IMDB scores: 58% / 6.5
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Despite the Western being one of the oldest and most iconic genres in cinema, movies of this type also seem to be quite divisive.
For every person that loves the trope of the taciturn gunslinging hero wandering into a lawless town and trying to clean it up, there is another viewer put off by these films’ often long run-times, as well their often languorous stories and old-fashioned themes.
It should be said though that in the ’90s, there was a resurgence of Westerns – with two in particular bucking these criticisms, making the genre feel fresh and modern again: 1993’s Tombstone (which one day, we will probably cover in a JOE Film Club Classics column) and 1995’s The Quick and the Dead.
Set in 1881, the latter follows The Lady (Sharon Stone) – a mysterious woman who arrives in an Old West town named Redemption (one of many Biblical allusions strewn throughout the story).
Very quickly it becomes clear that The Lady is seeking vengeance against the town’s mayor John Herod (Gene Hackman, fresh off an Oscar for his role in Unforgiven, another Western), a former outlaw who now rules the area with an iron fist.
Believing himself to be the fastest gun in the West, Herod organises a deadly duelling competition as a way to face his enemies head on.
The rules of the competition are as follows: Any contestant may challenge any other, no challenge can be refused, every contestant must fight once per day and a fight continues until one contestant either yields or dies.
As such, The Lady enters the tournament, competing against Herod, as well as a rogues’ gallery of other colourful characters.
The most pivotal of these are The Kid (a fresh-faced Leonardo DiCaprio), a young gunslinger with something to prove, and Cort (Russell Crowe in his first US movie), Herod’s former protégé when he was outlaw who has since renounced violence but is forced to take part in the competition.
There is also Ace Hanlon (Lance Henriksen), a flamboyant gunfighter who specialises in trick shots, and Sergeant Clay Cantrell (the truly never bad Keith David), a professional shootist hired by the town folk to kill Herod.
Written by British writer Simon Moore (Traffik) as a tribute to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood’s Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns – The Lady is essentially a gender-swapped version of Eastwood’s Man with No Name – there is an argument to be made that the central premise of The Quick and the Dead is the most ingenious in Western cinema history.
This is because its central duelling competition essentially enables the movie to capture the tension of the climactic stand-off scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – one of the most famous moments in films ever – for its entire 108-minute runtime.
That being said, another person who deserves a huge amount of credit for The Quick and the Dead is Sharon Stone.
Not only is she wonderfully steely but sympathetic in her lead role as The Lady (along with Basic Instinct and Casino, the movie is a great argument for Stone as one of Hollywood’s brightest stars), but she played a massive role in putting the film together.
After Sony Pictures Entertainment purchased Moore’s script, they approached the actress fresh off the success of Basic Instinct to star and co-produce the picture.
Because of this, she had an enormous amount of say on the project and campaigned heavily to get director Sam Raimi hired (the filmmaker worked on the Western in between his Evil Dead trilogy and his later Spider-Man trilogy).
Based on Raimi’s previous work at this time – which was renowned for its blend of violence and humour – Stone thought that he would be perfect to nail the complicated tone of The Quick and the Dead, a movie filled with camp and heightened moments which is also quite serious.
She was dead right but Raimi being selected was a masterstroke for another reason. Also well-known for his kinetic, over-the-top camera moves and incredibly precise staging, the filmmaker makes every stand-off in his Western look and feel different, preventing proceedings from ever becoming repetitive.
As well as this, Stone fought for Crowe’s casting in the lead male role based on his work in the Australian drama Romper Stomper – the future Oscar-winner had initially auditioned for a different part and was pretty unknown in the US at the time.
According to the actress, she also asked for the film to be “delayed two weeks” so they could get Crowe to the set from Australia.
As well as this, when the studio refused to cast another future Oscar-winner DiCaprio, Stone offered to pay for him out of her own salary so that he could play The Kid.
In a memoir, the actress recalled the studio stating: “Why an unknown, Sharon, why are you always shooting yourself in the foot?”
She added: “The studio said if I wanted him so much, I could pay him out of my own salary. So I did.”
Again, she was wise as Crowe and DiCaprio are fantastic in the film and in the years since, have become the main draws for audiences to the Western.
Crowe is effortlessly commanding as world-weary fighter forced back into a life of violence, something similar to his later Gladiator hero.
DiCaprio’s charisma and boyish charm in The Quick and the Dead, meanwhile, feels like what helped him land future roles in Romeo + Juliet and Titanic.
The two actors have since thanked Stone publicly for advocating for them and for helping get their careers started.
It’s worth noting that Crowe, DiCaprio, Hackman and Stone are backed-up by a brilliant cast of character actors.
This also includes the aforementioned effortlessly watchable Keith David and Lance Henriksen, as well as Gary Sinise (Ransom), Mark Boone Junior (Sons of Anarchy) and Tobin Bell (Jigsaw in the Saw films) – all of whom play really fun characters or get meaty acting scenes or both.
Despite all the incredible talent on display in The Quick and the Dead, the movie was not a huge box office success or hit with critics.
It perhaps suffered from coming after a wave of Westerns – Dances with Wolves, El Mariachi and its follow-up Desperado, Far and Away, Geronimo, Tombstone, Unforgiven, Wyatt Earp, Young Guns and its sequel – which may have left audiences a bit fatigued with the genre.
And though it has since received a critical reassessment, growing in many people’s estimations, it feels like the Western should be a bigger deal. Maybe now that it is on Netflix, it will be.
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