With his recent passing at age 95, Gene Hackman left behind a legacy few other actors could match. Despite retiring over 20 years ago, Hackman still loomed large in American movie culture, a testament to his commanding screen presence and deep wells of humanity. His versatility meant that he could comfortably slot into any number of genres, and the ’90s saw him step effortlessly into a run of westerns, beginning in 1992 with his Oscar-winning turn as a corrupt sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
A few years later in 1995, Hackman took on another villainous western role in Sam Raimi’s amped-up genre homage The Quick and the Dead, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. While the film flopped pretty hard upon release, it’s come to be considered an underrated cult classic on the strength of Raimi’s direction and strong performances from Hackman, Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe, and a 20-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. It might not rank with the genre’s very best, but it’s a deliriously fun pastiche that pays homage to the style of Spaghetti Westerns, along with the genre’s more low-budget entries.
‘The Quick and the Dead’s Wacky Western World
Simon Moore’s script for The Quick and the Dead was originally written in the early ’90s, and eventually brought to Sharon Stone as a possible vehicle after her star-making turn in 1992’s Basic Instinct. Excited by the opportunity to front a female-led western (still a woefully miniscule portion of the genre), Stone clearly believed in the project, signing on as star and executive producer. Impressed with his work on 1991’s Army of Darkness, Stone lobbied for Raimi to direct, even staking her own participation on it.
Stone pulled similar moves to get Crowe and DiCaprio cast; while big in Australia, Crowe hadn’t made much of an impression stateside yet, and DiCaprio hadn’t yet transitioned from talented kid actor to adult superstar. Stone believed in him so much that she agreed to pay his salary herself in order to secure his casting. As for Hackman, shooting was moved from Mexico to Arizona to accommodate him.
Stone unquestionably made The Quick and the Dead happen, and the film pretty much belongs to her. She stars as a figure known only as The Lady, a mysterious gunfighter who’s come to the crime-ridden town of Redemption to enact revenge on John Herod (Hackman), a ruthless gangster who lords over the town and was responsible for her father’s death years before. Her arrival coincides with a quick-draw contest that’s brought skilled gunslingers from across the frontier to compete for a huge cash payout, including the likes of Ace Hanlon (Lance Henriksen) and Sgt. Clay Cantrell (Keith David), not to mention Herod’s cocky young son Fee “The Kid” (DiCaprio).
Also strolling into town is Cort (Crowe), a former outlaw and member of Herod’s gang who’s supposedly renounced violence and been reborn as a preacher. Herod has him chained up in the town square and forces him to compete, knowing that his killer instinct will take over no matter how much he fights against it.
Plot-wise, The Quick and the Dead is pretty boilerplate, to an almost cliché degree, but this is by design. Raimi and his cohort have a blast playing around with the conventions of western films, loading the gunfight scenes with quick zooms and cartoon logic, where bullets blow perfectly round holes through people with minimal blood. It’s clear they’re not trying to make a straightforward western, but rather one that amplifies the aesthetics of the genre to a comical, almost fetishistic degree. The story feels like a loose framework for Raimi to import his oddball sensibility from Evil Dead’s horror into the western genre.
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Why ‘The Quick and the Dead’ Should Ride Again
The Quick and the Dead was met with a mix of praise and confusion upon its release. It didn’t make back its $47 million budget and earned middling reviews, with some praising Raimi’s direction and others calling out the clichéd story. Raimi has referred to the film as a teaching experience in the years since, one that helped him grow as a director and work better with actors, but it doesn’t seem like he looks back on the film itself very fondly. In 2024, Stone called out Raimi in an interview for never reaching out to her again after the film’s release, so it’s clear there’s still some bad blood surrounding the project.
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Despite this, it’s been reappraised somewhat in recent years, with retrospective reviews heralding it as a stylish, tongue-in-cheek western homage, and one of Raimi’s best films. Stone’s rare western female lead has also become more appreciated with time, as an ahead-of-its-time role that focuses more on her gunslinger bona-fides than on easy sex appeal, forgoing any predictable romance subplot with Crowe’s character (though a love scene was filmed and eventually cut from the US release).
The Quick and the Dead might not rank at the very top of the high mesa of western classics, but it’s an appealingly loony entry with some terrific performances. In addition to the talent at the top of the call sheet, it features winning turns from great character actors like Lance Henriksen, Keith David, Home Alone’s not-so-scary old man Roberts Blossom, Sons of Anarchy’s Mark Boone Junior, and Pat Hingle, who played Commissioner Gordon for three different Batmen. 30 years later, it’s a great time to ride on into town and see what’s what.
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