The Quick and The Dead

 TV, The Quick and The Dead (1995) film

The golden rule with Westerns is don't watch them post-1960s, but to my detriment I broke that rule with this film. Since Gene Hackman's death earlier in the year they've been showing a lot of his films and I'm often open to seeing what he's done, even if it is a Western made during the 90s. But they may as well have called it 'The Dull and The Nasty' since there aren't any positive characters and very little redemption. I will say I liked the theme that came through with Hackman's character, the big bad boss of the town, claiming he keeps order - no law, just order, so a kind of totalitarian control as he sees fit. And at the end, Sharon Stone's character tosses her Father's Marshal badge to Russell Crowe's priest with the injunction that now the town has law, so there was something there thematically, but it was only a sliver in the grand scheme. The trouble is there's no good role model character, and that's one reason why I don't like what the genre became: it's all relative, there may be avenging angels, and I'm sure some of Clint Eastwood's characters could be called heroic (Bronco Billy!), but for the most part it's about lecherous, leering types or vengeance-driven vigilantes, from those films I've seen, a grotesquerie of the toothy unclean shoved in your face, often apparently meant in a humorous way.

Take the nasty old lech who preys on the young girl, who must be only twelve or thirteen, maybe fourteen at best, grooming her to the point he has his way with her later in the film. I can see this is held in disgust by Stone's character and becomes added motivation for her to kill, but it has an inhumanly comedic angle to it at times as if we're meant to find it funny rather than disturbing. The same with many of the other members of this kill or be killed competition that have descended on this outpost town to win a suitcase full of money. I'm not sure what the object of it all was, maybe Wells Fargo put up the money hoping as many varmints in the area would kill each other off and they'd have an easier time sending their coaches through, but motivation isn't the film's strong point - the main one is Stone's revenge on Hackman for malevolently forcing her child self to kill her Father when he 'allows' her to try and shoot down the rope holding his neck in a noose, and being a child untrained in guns can't help but kill him. This is obviously what has led her to become an expert gunman (gun-woman?), and adds more reason to why she was so horrified at seeing Crowe strung up, able to shoot the rope and save his neck. But what became of her after her Father's death, she's obviously grown up full of hatred, bent on destroying Hackman, so not only did he waste her Father's life, but hers too, not a very optimistic place for the film to come from or go.

There's very little to like about her character, I assume she wanted to simply do a kind of female Eastwood who comes and goes with the wind, exacting her form of justice and disappearing again. The film could have taken a more memorable direction towards the end when she and Crowe, allies against Hackman, are forced into a duel to the death and she loses - if she really had died it might have had more of an impact to show that revenge leads to destruction for the person trying to carry it out, but I suspected it was all a trick, and so it proved in typical Hollywood fashion (complete with the town blasting into explosions all around, since it's believed a big explosion at the end of a film impresses the audience and makes it more profitable - that kind of template thinking that makes a film fit to a mould rather than be artistic in its own right). They could even have had the pair turn on Hackman's men and prevent them from enforcing what are changeable rules anyway, an alternative to the binary 'one dies, one lives' plot. Crowe is supposed to be a sympathetic character, the closest we have to a real hero in that he was once partners in crime with Hackman, but has since eschewed violence after he killed a priest and now believes he can never find redemption and get to Heaven, a false notion since even the worst sin can be forgiven if admitted to God and asked for forgiveness, so maybe he wasn't an actual priest as he doesn't seem to know even basic Biblical teaching.

He isn't really a hero since he isn't able to control himself and does kill when he has no other option - it's made to look in his first duel as if it was all instinct rather than choice, and that he's bewildered about what he's done, but it just serves to make him look weak and unable to stick to his principals - more realistic perhaps, but hardly inspiring, and when most of the characters behave like cartoon characters it doesn't really fit. We later see he's able to shoot two of Hackman's goons at once, on opposite rooftops, without aiming, so he and Stone could easily have dealt with them instead of going through with their duel, which didn't add to the believability! He's also unable to control himself when Stone drapes herself all over him since tomorrow they die, so again, if he is meant to be a priest he really doesn't know what he stands for, and lets it happen. I was excited to see Woody Strode's name in the opening credits, and Kevin Conway - the former was in many a Western of the past, my favourite role of his in 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' and I can see why they'd want to tie into the past like that - it shows even back then nostalgia was a factor in film decisions, but he only gets one line and maybe a couple of seconds of screen time, so that was disappointing. And Conway, whom I know as Emperor Kahless in 'TNG,' I never recognised out of his Klingon makeup, so that came to nothing, too!

What it comes down to is a bloodthirsty desire on the filmmakers to show violence and display the nastiness of human nature, the very opposite of what I saw in Westerns of the past which emphasised the battle to overcome such nature or to step in and deal with injustice (which does happen to a certain extent, I suppose) - whether that's realistic or not isn't the point, these are films after all, not reality, we're telling stories to entertain and hopefully come away refreshed and happy, not to wallow in ugliness and destruction. Director Sam Raimi was certainly capable of depicting the highest heroism since he went on to do the 'Spider-Man' trilogy in the following decade, but this film was far from a heroic effort. I imagine it was done on the cheap - even if they built an entire frontier town so they could blow it up, it's not going to be all that expensive, and no doubt the bulk of the budget went on the star names. And it worked: I saw Hackman's name and against better judgement gave it a go, only for it to follow the usual pattern of the 'modern' (1994+?), take on the genre. There's always a chance they can create a successful entry, I like 'Dances With Wolves' and 'The Last of The Mohicans,' a couple more Western-leaning productions of the early 90s, although they could just as easily be considered historical adventures. Perhaps it was the simple morality tales that filmmakers of more recent decades turned their nose up at? If so it was their loss and I'll stick to the traditional greats of the Western genre, for all the novelty of seeing Russell Crowe (whom I didn't even realise was acting as early as that), and Gene Hackman acting together on film.

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