The Quick and the Dead

The Quick and the Dead (1995) is about a duelling tournament held in a small town. John Herod runs a town called Redemption. Every year he holds a contest: the entrants duel one at a time in the street until one is left. The prize is money. A woman with no name rides in and enters. Money is not the reason; she has an account to settle with Herod from her own past and can only close it inside the tournament's rules. The structure is a tournament bracket: each round a duel, each duel an introduction to a character. Sam Raimi takes the camera outside the western template. Shots looking up from beneath the lens, a shot from inside a pistol, the shadow of a clock falling across the ground, and in one duel the sun visible through the hole a bullet has made. The genre is deliberately exaggerated. Sharon Stone leads and is one of the producers; she drove the project herself. She also cast Russell Crowe. The studio did not want him; she insisted and had part of her own fee applied to his salary. He was unknown in America at the time. Leonardo DiCaprio is in it as well, then twenty; the studio objected again and she insisted again. Gene Hackman plays Herod. It failed commercially and critics disliked it; it became a cult film over the years. The style strikes some viewers as comic book, and that is deliberate. It runs 107 minutes. Good for: westerns, Raimi's style, and the nineties. Less good for: the story is thin, the characters have little depth, and the pacing repeats.