The Quick And The Dead(1995)

This was Russell Crowe's American Western film debut and was Woody Strode's final performance (the film is dedicated to him), as well as the last theatrical release of Roberts Blossom, who died in 2011. The phrase "the quick and the dead" is from the Second Epistle to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:1) in various Bible versions, including the King James Bible, describing the final judgment. The plot of this film bears no resemblance to that of the 1987 film of the same name, which was based on a Western novel by Louis L'Amour.

Extremely efficient story-telling, utilizing the same few spaces over the entire runtime but constantly re-contextualized by means of a one-on-one quickdraw tourney. It's the same dusty street nestled between the same ramshackle saloons with the same disheveled crowds, but these are mere backdrops for the central foci that is the life-or-death competition which the camera so gleefully treats like a playground. Someone's gotta die each time, so each standoff brings with it new stakes, new drama, and (most importantly) new trash-talk.

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When John Herod (Gene Hackman) forces Cort (Russell Crowe) to fight in a quickdraw duel, he takes him to his son's shop and tries to find a gun for him to use. After finding the guns in there too expensive, John ask for the most worthless piece of crap in the store. The Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio) pulls out a POS Colt 1851 Navy with a Richards-Mason cartridge conversion and slaps it on the table saying simply, "Five bucks." Cort uses it for all the duels, but John only gives him one round, which (mentioned in a later scene by Cort) is .38 Long Colt (In reality, authentic Colt 1851 Navy conversions were chambered for .38 Short Colt), for each duel so he can't shoot his way out of town. This proves troublesome when Cort duels the mighty Spotted Horse (Jonothon Gill), who refuses to go down after one shot.

In this edgy and darkly humorous Western, a mysterious young woman rides into the lawless town of Redemption to settle an old score that has haunted her since she was a child. She becomes swept up in a deadly quick-draw tournament and, in order to win her revenge, must compete in a contest in which gunslingers from all over put their lives on the line for fame and fortune.

Embodying the archetypal, anonymous gunslinger, Sharon Stone broods quietly from beneath the brim of her Stetson, chomping the tip of a cigarillo as an obvious nod to her cinematic ancestors (see A Fistful of Dollars). The narrative carries as many knowing clichÃs as its protagonist, recycling a cinematic canon of the corrupt and courageous as fodder for a quick-draw tournament, rifling through dramatis personae with the misanthropic glee of a side-scrolling fighting game.

Somewhere in the middle of the frontier lay the town of Redemption. Already, it was lost to time. It was said the man in charge could summon shadows and cut a man down quicker than any gunslinger in Novyi Zem.

'The Quick and the Dead,'' about a sheriff who keeps order by holding nonstop shootouts in the town square, is the liveliest western I've seen in ages. But many moviegoers will be slow to see it, since the western genre has been more dead than quick at the box office in recent years.

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