The Quick and the Dead (1995)

One of my favorite genres of movie are the ones where someone finally builds up enough capital in Hollywood that they get the freedom to make whatever movie they want. Some people come in from the indie side of the house, but most folks work their way up the studio pictures ladder. From the outside directors seem like if they can make two or three decent hits or critical successes they get a (semi)blank check. And these are always interesting, because sometimes that gets you Star Wars, and sometimes that gets you 1941. With actors it can take a little longer, and those are usually even more interesting, because beyond just what roles they chose to take, you don’t always get a great sense of what their personal taste is until they finally get a chance to pick something themselves.

With that in mind, consider Sharon Stone. She’d been working steadily since 1980, mostly by being the best part of a string of extremely mediocre movies, and also Basic Instinct. In the wake of that, she found herself with some actual career juice.

So, given the opportunity to do whatever she wants, she picks a script for a semi-satirical western, hires the guy who did Army of Darkness to direct, and casts then then-unknown Russel Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. (DiCaprio was so unknown and so unwanted by the studio that Stone paid his salary out of her own pocket.) I think it’s a really enlightening view into her actual interests that after grinding her way (pun intended) though mostly terrible “erotic thrillers”, what Stone really wanted to do was shoot a bunch of people with Sam Raimi camera work.

To which I say: she’s got great taste.

Is it a great movie? Oh my word no. I’m not sure it’s even a “good” movie, but it sure is a fun movie. Everyone really seems to be enjoying themselves, in that way where it’s clear that no one is taking it too seriously but also no one is sending it up.

Not quite a spoof, not quite a homage, it’s a whirlwind tour of everyone’s favorite western tropes. Plot-wise, it’s as if someone dumped every western of the previous 30 years out on a table and Raimi, Stone, & co picked out all their favorite bits. Or, to mix in another metaphor, it’s like watching a really tight cover band do their take on something like “80s New Wave”; it’s not at all like watching the original bands, but the carnival of new spins on old standards with an infectious enthusiasm.

From Raimi’s perspective, it’s the stylistic missing link between Army of Darkness and Spider-Man. It’s sometimes unclear how funny this is all supposed to be. The closest other movie tone-wise to this in Raimi’s backlog is probably Darkman, where once again we have a group of incredible actors taking very silly material completely seriously.

The plot, such as it is, is simple: there’s a town in the Old West ruled by the evil Gene Hackman, every year he holds a quickdraw contest, at the end of which someone wins a bunch of money, and everyone else is dead. But just redoing western standards isn’t the movie’s only trick, structurally it’s more like a martial arts tournament movie than a western; it’s basically Enter the Dragon but with guns and cowboy hats. And in keeping with that set of genre traditions, we met a set of contestants, all of whom have their own reasons for entering, there are nefarious secret reasons why the contest is happening, between gunfights the contestants scheme, make alliances, make out, re-consider their goals. The contestants are mostly western archetypes, and so there’s some immediate sparks from just putting a set of stock characters from one genre into the plot of another.

The tournament structure gives the whole movie a sense of forward momentum. Every day there’s the next quickdraw contest at noon, and the contestants draw when the clock strikes, and so in practical terms that means every ten minutes or so there’s another shootout. This also gives the movie a certain “what if we only cooked the muffin tops” quality; they identify that quickdraw scenes are the best part of any Western, so they build a movie outward from having almost nothing but.

Sam Raimi, it has to be said, directs the hell out of these. Every shootout is different, and he really makes the most out having a literal ticking clock. The sound of the clock gets louder on the soundtrack, tick, tick, zoom in on one participant, tick, Rami cam zoom on the other, tick, Raimi cam on the clock, tick, tick, tick, boom. He manages to milk the tension to absurd highs, and it’s a hoot every time.

The funniest role here is Gene Hackman, who is basically doing a send up of his own character in Unforgiven, mostly by playing him as Lex Luthor. The result is like if Shatner himself had played the captain in Galaxy Quest. He’s clearly having a ball, and hits just the right tone of “cartoon villain” the movie needs to work.

Sharon Stone, meanwhile, plays The Lady as basically Clint Eastwood. This is a savvier choice that it first appears. I’m not a professional actor, but if I had hired Sam Raimi to direct the slightly goofy western I was going to star in, I’d be inclined to do something along the lines of a Bruce Campbell impression. And there are places that the script seems to expect the lead to be, basically, Brisco County Jr. But Stone seems to have learned the main lesson from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which is a stoic, underplayed centreal performance provides a contrast with the wacky stuff going on around it, and becomes the center of gravity the rest of the movie orbits around. Stone grounds the whole enterprise by underplaying the part, and things that otherwise would have been a Saturday morning cartoon acquire real menace. She’s a million miles away from the camp succubus of Total Recall or Basic Instinct. Frankly, she knows that a character that acts like The Man With No Name but looks like early 90s Sharon Stone is already as unusual as it needs to be.

I will say, to put it politely, that there are a couple of places that Raimi should have let Stone do a couple of more takes; she doesn’t always hit quite what she’s going for, but I’m inclined to ding the director for that, rather than the actor operating way outside of her wheelhouse. She’s recently had some… extremely not nice things to say about Sam Raimi, and it’s hard not to watch this movie and think he’s letting her down, especially considering who gave who a big break here.

The other really stand out performance here is a pre-everything Russel Crowe playing a priest that used to be a gunfighter that Gene Hackman is trying to force into the contest for $REASONS. He’s great, but also basically playing the same character he would play in The Nice Guys decades later. It’s funny to go back and watch this now and realize that his Big Star period after Gladiator was the abberation, and he was always better at playing sketchy character parts.

DiCaprio looks about twelve, and is obviously a star in the making. Of all the places Stone’s instincts were right here, casting him was the biggest; in retrospect it’s baffling that the studio didn’t want him, he’s already been nominated for an Oscar for goodness sake.

And finally, a shoutout to Lance Hendrickson as “Ace”, who just Hendricksons the hell out a part one suspects was originally written for Bruce Campbell. (Campbell is in the credits but does not appear in the movie, supposedly he was in a deleted scene that they never really meant to put in the movie, but no one knows for sure except Campbell and Raimi, and neither of them have ever let the facts get in the way of a good convention story.)

The 90s were full of semi-revisionist westerns, trying to figure out how to make the genre work at the turn of the millenium. Mostly, this resulted in a string of weird failures, but also Unforgiven and Tombstone. Sam Raimi, of all people, would crack the puzzle few years after this, and realize the answer was “make super hero movies instead.” Your mileage, as the saying goes, may vary on that.

The movie bombed, and got savaged in reviews, which reading them now all seem to boil down to “I’m disappointed she kept her shirt on the whole time.” One of those movies that just a little too out of step with what people were expecting, to their loss.

We rewatched this one over the summer, looking for a tween-friendly western that didn’t have either “violence nightmare fuel” or “John Wayne”, not realizing the 30th anniversary was coming up. I hadn’t seen it since it first came out, and it holds up! It’s a fun movie. There’s a lot to be said for a well-made, well-cast B-movie.

IMDB doesn’t list another producer credit for Stone for another decade, and then not for anything I remember hearing about. It’s clear this movie didn’t do anything great for her career, and not long after this she had a string of health and personal problems, for which I have nothing but sympathy, to be clear. It’s impossible not to look at this movie and wonder what she would have been able to do if this movie had done a little bit better. I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed those movies a lot more than Sphere.

It’s strange the way this one has just slipped under the waves, seemingly forgotten, considering the caliber of the people who worked on it. But the long tail of Home Video means nothing ever really vanishes, it’s just waiting. So, looking for something to watch this weekend? Well, get a load of this! Did you know the guy who directed the Spider-men movies with Seabiscuit directed a big-budget “oops all shootouts” western with the evil girlfriend from Total Recall, Royal Tenenbaum, Gladiator, the kid from Titanic, and Bishop from Aliens? It’s pretty good! Icecano says check it out.