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The Quick and the Dead
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Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead is a feminist Western starring a gun-toting Sharon Stone, a little in the tradition of that classic Women’s Western of 1950s, Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1953). But it relates much more intensely and immediately to the so-called Spaghetti Westerns from Italy in the 1960s, and to the Main Man of my childhood filmgoing, Sergio Leone.
It’s
a remarkably pure, distilled, almost abstract Western. It’s not about the
complexities of law, morality or violence like Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven (1992), even though it has (like that film) the remarkable Gene Hackman as a blood-chilling,
capitalistic villain (here colourfully named Herod). The Quick and the Dead is
really just a bunch of gunfights in the main street of a spindly little Western
town, strung together as a formal contest progressively waged among the baddies,
hotheads and opportunists who have gathered there.
There
are only two characters who are to any degree motivated by righteous moral
impulses: “The Lady” (Stone), avenging the gruesome death of her father long
ago, and Cort (Russell Crowe), a gunfighter-turned-preacher who has to turn back
into a gunfighter. Lady and Cort – or, as I prefer to say (in desperate search
of a pun), Stone and Crowe – get it on together in a memorable scene, a sweaty
tryst between this lone tough woman in an oppressively male hell-hole and this
confused Man of God. “Why choose me?”, he gasps as they tumble on. “Because we
could both be dead tomorrow”, she sagely replies.
This
is an exciting, often brilliant piece of filmmaking. Sam Raimi’s past movies
have included the landmark gore horror film The Evil Dead (1982), the florid fantasy
melodrama Darkman (1990) and the
surreal, cartoonish comedy Army of Darkness (1993). There are traces of
all these outsize moods and tones here. It starts out like a camp pastiche of
Westerns, not too removed from Mel Brooks or the Naked Gun series (1988-1994). The saloon door opens and a gust of
wind dramatically blows Lady’s blonde hair: that kind of gag. But once the
violent gunfighting contest revs up, things become steadily more earnest. They also
rapidly get more stylised: the camera angles get weirder and more pronounced,
the editing quickens, the soundtrack amplifies every little breath and movement
of clothing and insect buzz. This is the Leone legacy. As Lady strides out to
her first round of fighting, Cort whispers some advice in her ear about the
central town clock that determines the moment of the draw. “Listen carefully to
the clock”, he says. “There’s a click before the strike”. And Raimi sure makes
you hang on the sound of that click.
There’s
a mystery element in the plot intrigue, and a few frissons of drama involving
Lady’s fear, Herod’s menace, and particularly the pathetic, adolescent
posturings of a young gunfighter called The Kid, performed wonderfully by
Leonardo DiCaprio (age 21 in ‘95). The script is by Simon Moore, a Brit who
wrote the TV series Traffik and much
else for that medium, as well as directing Under Suspicion (1991). Raimi plays out the
intrigue and the drama quite well enough, but you know his heart is basically
elsewhere: in the sudden, outrageous moments of violent gore, in the
accelerated rushes of melodramatic action, in the grotesque comedy of bodies
slouching, spitting, falling or being knocked flying to the ground by an
almighty, slow-motion bullet. His wildest effect as director comes when Herod
interrupts his Overlord spiel (“I’m in charge of everything! I decide who lives
and dies!”) to kill Clay (Keith David): he blows a large (and bloodless) hole
clear through his skull, allowing Raimi to frame this sadistic baddie through
the opening.
Raimi
is one of those directors for whom the cinema is essentially a game, an
exhibitionistic display. He has fun with the conclusion of each gunfight – who’s
left standing, who’s been shot, who’s really dead or alive? And he goes all-out
for big, wild, cinema effects, as in a terrific scene where Lady goes berserk
and challenges a guy who has just sexually abused the teenage daughter of the
sad saloonkeeper. Raimi takes us straight from Stone’s split-second outburst of
recognition to the sight of her racing forward in the pelting rain, both guns
firing in righteous fury, screaming from the depths of her soul. Leone himself
couldn’t have done that bit any better.
Some
old-timer Western fans (like my Dad) are probably going to experience some
resistance to The Quick and the Dead,
since it juggles a high-ball mixture of corny camp humour, intense generic
emotion, and a severe, majestic sense of film form. But I came into the genre,
as a spectator, with Leone at a tender, impressionable age – and I’m grateful
for that. I wonder: do you have to remain an 11 year-old cinephile all your
life in order to truly appreciate movies like these? I sincerely hope so.
MORE Raimi: For Love of the Game, The Gift, A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2 © Adrian Martin June 1995 / March 2007 |
