The Quick and The Dead

The Quick and The Dead – 1995, Sam Raimi

The best thing about a lot of good films is their excellent ensemble cast. The best examples are of course Predator and the Alien films. An ensemble cast only works if all the characters are well established, even if they don’t have much screen time. The Quick and The Dead contains at least ten characters each with their personality and motivation are all clearly defined, even though only four of them are the main characters of the film. The four leads are, in order of importance; Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, pre gladiator Russel Crowe and a young Leonardo DeCaprio. Keith David and Lance Henriksen are in there as well, in a sense they are underused, but there’s enough going on in this film as it is.

TQATD is a western directed by the guy who did the Evil Dead trilogy, before he did the Spiderman trilogy. At the time it was his biggest budget picture to date, about twice the cost of Darkman (the Liam Neeson comic book vehicle).

The plot involves a gunfighter competition in a town called Redemption. Almost all the characters are gunslingers and the film revolves around them pairing up and taking part in shootouts in the street. Action and drama in equal measure, the perfect cocktail.

Sam’s western is an homage to westerns, made long before the self conscious referential homage became popular and quickly got old (rant, grumble etc). The film is full of B-Movie clichés, but they work perfectly within the story and whole ‘studio western’ vibe that Raimi achieved. He made exactly the film he intended to, but in later years he has apparently expressed his regret at how it turned out, suggesting he didn’t know what he was doing. He probably just regrets that it did so badly upon release.

This film and Bruce Willis’ Last Man Standing (a remake of Yojimbo directed by the great Walter Hill released a year earlier) both bombed at the box office, possibly because they were ahead of their time. For some reason it took Kill Bill to make such films cool.