Gunfights may be one of the big attractions of the classical movie western, but-from William S. Hart to Gary Cooper-there has always been something slightly absurd about them. In a brawling, near-anarchic 19th Century frontier town, wouldn’t hardened gunslingers be likelier to blast each other on sight, rather than march slowly and somberly down Main Street, like aristocratic French duelists?
That conscious absurdity is at the core of “The Quick and the Dead.” It’s a rousingly grotesque, often wildly entertaining western horror-comedy, with co-producer and star Sharon Stone as a sexy lady gunslinger taking on all comers in the gunfight tournament from hell. Directed by shockmeister Sam Raimi-of the all-stops-out “Evil Dead” trilogy-this picture is so visually flamboyant and raunchily over-the-top that, after a while, you begin to grin not just at the dialogue or the performances, but at the sheer excess, including Dante Spinotti’s deliberately overlush cinematography, the voluptuously tilted camera angles and the outrageous decor and costumes.
“Quick” is about a gunfighter’s elaborate contest, a sort of Wimbledon of slaughter held each year in a corrupt town called Redemption. Redemption is a safe zone for bandits on the lam, run by sadistic-but-smooth outlaw boss John Herod (Gene Hackman, lightly sending up his Little Bill role in “Unforgiven”). Like the amoral towns Clint Eastwood rode into in “A Fistful of Dollars” or “High Plains Drifter” (or their model, the evil Japanese city Toshiro Mifune destroyed in Akira Kurosawa’s jocular samurai epic “Yojimbo”), it’s seemingly beyond redemption.
The town has a few decent citizens: Blind Boy the peddler (Jerry Swindall), Moonlight the undertaker (played by the late Woody Strode) and Doc Wallace (Roberts Blossom), as well as several persecuted Mexicans who hire their own gunman to try to win back their rights. But mostly it’s a rotten town, full of murderers, brothel keepers and assorted Sam Peckinpah-style scum. It’s run by killers for killers, many of them gunned down each year by Herod in the annual shootout that he sponsors and always wins.
“The Quick and the Dead,” like the ’60s Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood movies it copies, is Western baroque. It’s not about the real West, but the make-believe nightmare-movie movie West. And putting Sharon Stone at the center, as Ellen, the mysterious female stranger in town who has a horrific past and a burning secret, gives every scene a giddy, eroticized spin.
All the action centers on the usual focal points in movie-western towns: hot dusty Main Street and a rank, shadowy saloon with swinging doors and psychopaths sitting around at the tables, waiting to pick fights. And by turning the gunfights into a tournament, “The Quick and the Dead” mocks both the familiar Western myth and what that myth means in our culture-the ways people in sports, business, politics, the arts or crime like to think of themselves metaphorically as the fastest guns around.
Here, the gunfights are treated just like sporting events, with fans, prize money and the betting odds scribbled on a blackboard by the bartender-scorekeeper (Pat Hingle).
As in all championships, there are superstars: Ellen (the “dark horse”); Herod himself; Herod’s wild, hair-trigger son, The Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio, of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”); and Cort, the preacher who used to ride with Herod and has sworn off violence. If Ellen shows one side of resistance to evil, Cort, the killer gone straight (played by Russell Crowe, the Australian star of “Romper Stomper”), shows another. He has to be manacled in between the fights and then handed a gun with only one bullet, so he won’t escape. Like most movie-western pacifists, Cort tries to bury the demons in himself. Ellen, for reasons revealed in her nightmares, has to pull them out.
Playing the vile but impeccably mannered Herod, Gene Hackman, whom Dennis Hopper once called an “automatic truth machine,” churns out the truth once again. This great actor solidifies the nightmare extravaganza; he puts some real blood and humanity beneath the blood-and-thunder conventions.
But Stone is at the hot center. And though the movies recently have exploited her mean, sexy blond looks in pretty uninteresting ways, this star turn works well. With her wary eyes, tight, black leather pants, cowgirl shirt unbuttoned past the cleavage and long blond hair whipping around Calvin Kleinishly in the wind, she fits the whole darkly humorous mood. (By the way, wouldn’t a gunfighter tie her hair back?)
Stone doesn’t summon up strong images of previous lady gunfighters-like Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in Nicholas Ray’s great 1954 role-reversal western “Johnny Guitar.” Instead, she plays Ellen as a female Eastwood. And watching her taut, clenched performance, you can see what Gerard Depardieu meant when he insisted that Eastwood’s fascination as actor or star comes from his “feminine” side. There’s not much difference in the way the barroom psychos size Ellen up, though here there’s rape, as well as murder, in their eyes. And when she displays the sexless gallantry toward women that’s been a staple of movie-western stars since the days of Tom Mix, it makes more sense. Her heroic empathy is real.
Simon Moore (“Traffik”), who wrote “The Quick and the Dead,” is a Britisher who knows the West only from movies. (It’s obvious that he’s stealing, with relish, from everywhere.) And though Sam Raimi borrows most of his superheated visual strategies here from the Leone westerns, he pushes them toward parody.
In this deadpan, hopped-up vendetta saga with its half-kidding biblical allegory, there’s a kick in the details, such as the way production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein makes Herod’s mansion look like a monster with huge teeth. Or the dead cacti and the deep-focus shot peeking through the hole in a gunfighter’s head after his cranium is perforated with a bullet. The violence is crazily excessive-and it’ll be offensive to people hostile to westerns and action movies generally-but it’s an amusing, imaginative, offbeat excess.
The movie has a consciously bastardized vision, filtered through at least three cultures (the U.S., Italy and Britain). But what makes “The Quick and the Dead” sting as well as amuse is the evil itch it shows at the bottom of the western, the existential slapstick. In a world where death is only a twitch of the trigger finger away, you have to ride the nightmare to kill it. By turning hero into heroine and butchery into a game, “The Quick and the Dead” peels open the dark roots of our favorite myth, savagely plays with them a while, and then tucks them away for another day. This movie is quick-and slick-but it’s far from dead.
”THE QUICK AND THE DEAD”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Sam Raimi; written by Simon Moore; photographed by Dante Spinotti; edited by Pietro Scalia; production designed by Patrizia Von Brandenstein; music by Alan Silvestri; produced by Joshua Donen, Allen Shapiro and Patrick Markey. A Tristar release; opens Friday at Burnham Plaza, Lincoln Village, McClurg Court, Webster Place and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:46. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Ellen………………………………………………..Sharon Stone
Herod………………………………………………..Gene Hackman
Cort………………………………………………..Russell Crowe
Kid………………………………………………Leonard DiCaprio
Doc Wallace………………………………………..Roberts Blossom
Ace Hanlon…………………………………………Lance Henriksen
