Review of The Quick and the Dead (1995) by Eric H — 21 Dec 2009

Found this on a cheap Blu-ray deal at Fry's. Hadn't seen it in forever and at the time I did see it, I remembered not particularly liking it. I'm not sure why I was so critical at the time. I was endlessly amused by it this time around.

A couple of things might have affected my perspective. The movie is a pretty spread-out ensemble piece, and as time has drawn on, DiCaprio and Crowe have become bigger stars than all the other principals, so that feels like it lends their parts more weight than when they were relative unknowns. When you step back and look at the ensemble here in terms of simple numbers, you've got a total of 5 Oscar nominees (including some repeat nominators) and 2 winners. Not to mention Keith David and Lance Hendriksen for that B-movie badass flavor.

And the other thing was that at the time I wasn't as film literate in general. I certainly wasn't familiar with the Spaghetti Western styles as I am now after having been through film school. And I was only just recently getting introduced to the work of Sam Raimi, in particular Evil Dead 2, which I had only seen once or so at the time and had not yet developed my deep love for that film as I had in later viewings.

As it stands today, being a big fan of Sam Raimi's gleefully over the top, pull-out-all-the-stops filmmaking style, as well as a big fan of the styles and themes of Westerns, in particular the later revisionist works of people like Leone and Peckinpah, The Quick and the Dead stands up for me as a fun, energetic exercise in film style.

The story itself feels like an exaggerated exploitative version of a stock western ideal, specifically, the one-on-one gunfight. Two cowboys standing across from each other and testing to see who is faster on the draw is sorta an old fashioned myth perpetuated by the operatic sense of opposing ideologies in the Spaghetti Westerns. And here we have a story about a quickdraw gunfighting TOURNAMENT, complete with elimination brackets. The idea of it in the first place is more than a bit ridiculous, and The Quick and The Dead doesn't ever pretend like it's anything but ridiculous.

The point here is the style. The movie is simply dripping with exaggerated western style. The face-offs are edited with a rhythmic combination of close-ups and snap zooms and dutch angles that oddly enough feels reminiscent of both Sergio Leone's westerns AND Sam Raimi's horror movies. Raimi makes frequent use of his subjective moving cameras and oddly enough it feels at home in the genre.

In film school, they taught us a concept called in-camera editing, and it's a concept that's beautifully executed in The Quick and the Dead in shot after shot. In-camera editing is a concept of composition where you start off looking at one thing and somehow the image changes into something else, so in effect you've got two images in sequence that have been "edited" or put together anyway, in the camera. For instance, a character might speak in a close up and then ride off on a horse leaving the camera on the person he was talking to. This is accomplished in one shot instead of a shot of the man speaking and then a reverse shot of the person he's speaking to. It's a wonderful visual style which visually links ideas together and suggests relationship dynamics. Sam Raimi has a veritable field day with his in-camera editing strategies here, even just in expositional conversations.

Also worth note here is Alan Silvestri's often intrusively over-the-top musical score, which alternately brings to mind notes of Ennio Morricone's sparse western style as well as the grand, brassy orchestral notes of Franz Waxman. The music is so appropriately operatic that at times just the appropriateness of the music inspires laughs.

Sam Raimi is a real curiosity. He's got this uncanny ability to simultaneously work at making fun of a genre while actually effectively making a plausible entry in the genre. He's done it with horror films (Evil Dead 2, Drag Me to Hell), comic book films (Darkman, Spiderman), and with The Quick and the Dead, he's effectively done it with westerns. I'd love to see him return to the genre and do some more work.