I make no secret of the fact that this is my favorite Sam rami film, yes even ahead of “Evil Dead 2” and “Army of Darkness” and all the Spider-Man movies. The reasons are apparent when you look at the trailer: it is a western, it stars Gene Hackman, and it features a badass woman with a gun. That is a formula that is hard to screw up, and when you add in Sam Rami’s directing style and Sharon Stone as the Lady, it is perfect.  (Which I said back in 2013). 

We saw this as part of an Alamo series of films, saluting Gene Hackman and David Lynch and others. Those of you here for the first time will learn that Gene Hackman is my favorite actor and this is one of his great villain performances. John Herod is an evil prairie scum who has leveraged his way into absolute authority over a border town, and maintains control by holding a quick draw contest each year to preoccupy and identify potential threats.  There is always a threat from Leo DiCaprio who may be Herod’s illegitimate son. There are rival gunslingers who show up to challenge the undisputed dictator of the town of Redemption, and there is a mysterious woman who challenges the expectations of the 19th century Western Frontier, played by the aforementioned Sharon Stone. 

The movie is a homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, borrowing heavily from “Once Upon  a Time in the West” but also Leone’s style. There are sequences where the close ups get closer and they linger for more time than is comfortable. There are beads of perspiration that tell stories all by themselves, and the music while not being epic like Morricone, uses the instruments they way the master would, to set mood and accentuate a scene. Alan Silvestri is a terrific composer of movie scores and his work here is equal to the task. 

I listened to a podcast “That’s Da Bomb” on this film, and after the BS that starts the show, there is a nice discussion of this movie, although my opinion of the film is far higher than theirs. Even better, I went back and listened to the “Lambcast MOTM from February 2022″ where five of us discussed the movie in some detail. Once again, I am an outlier but I am also right. “The Quick and the Dead” rules, and there are just not enough people out there who appreciate to the degree that it deserves.