The Quick and the Dead

Beautiful scenery of Sedona and Flagstaff AZ, not Wyoming in 1876 as advertised. Good acting and quality filming. Casting was pretty good especially Sam Elliott and the bad guys but the half breed Indian looked like a runway model.

The Louis Lamour plot was, as usual for the genre, a little contrived as Sam Elliott's character lives a charmed life in the film. I recommend it if you are a sentimentalist and believe in honor, valor, unrequited love and taking on the bad guys.

I might mention that one item in the movie about Custer's last stand where one of the characters relatives was assumed to be killed could have had a more hopeful outcome as not all of the Seventh Regiment was killed at Little Bighorn since Custer split his command and several hundred survived.

...with Tom Conti and Kate Capshaw as settlers in post-Civil War Wyoming. They, along with their young son (Kenny Morrison), run into a band of outlaws and cutthroats led by the deceptively-avuncular Doc Shabbit (Matt Clark). The family seem doomed until the intervention of the mysterious Con Vallain (Sam Elliott), who escorts the family across hostile territory.

Director Robert Day tells the story competently and in a straightforward fashion, with no stylistic excess. Elliott is well-cast, as is Conti as the kindly war veteran suspicious of Elliott's motives, as well his attention toward his wife. Capshaw looks nice, but her performance is spotty. She seems to adopt a period-specific speech pattern in many scenes that is admirable in its intent, but questionable as the others in the cast don't attempt the same. Still, I enjoyed this minor film well enough, and would recommend it to western fans.

Sam Elliott who is doing his level best to keep the western alive as an American art form stars in The Quick And The Dead which has nothing to do with the film Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Leonardo DiCaprio did. But it has one great western pedigree as the story is from the pen of Louis L'Amour.

In fact there are some elements in this story that are most similar to L'Amour's most famous western Hondo. Although Sam Elliott isn't quite the G-rated cowboy John Wayne was.

Tom Conti, Kate Capshaw and their son Kenny Morrison are traveling west to settle and work the homestead that Conti's late brother had in Wyoming territory. But they run afoul of some outlaws led by Matt Clark and the outlaws mean to them harm.

If you remember in Hondo the mutual attraction of the frontier scout and the settler's wife who is waiting for her husband to get home. That's going on big time here only Conti is very much on the scene. Elliott thinks him a worthless tenderfoot at first, but Conti's character develops over the course of the film and the more you see, the more you realize there's a lot to him. A lot more than there was to Leo Gordon in Hondo.

Nice location cinematography in Arizona standing in for Wyoming territory. The roles are well cast and cowboy heroes don't come any better than Sam Elliott.

This is one terrific western film. Sam Elliott, who is marvelous as a "Shane-like" character, plays a drifter who follows a family of green homesteaders across the western plains and protects them from a savage pack of outlaws. The family, which includes Tom Conti and Kate Capshaw, also becomes more sufficient as the story progresses. It's a lean, well-directed film, with not a scene or character wasted. Not until Unforgiven did a western film arrives as superior as this HBO production. The story is based on an entertaining L. Lamour novel of the same name. The novel has a significant plot twist from the film, which I won't reveal here.

Mysterious gunslinger Sam Elliot becomes a guardian angel to genteel easterners Kate Capshaw, Tom Conti, and their young son, who've unwittingly attracted the attention of a particularly nasty gang of cutthroats.

A simple story with lots of violence, there isn't much to ponder here. However, it's always a lot of fun to watch Elliot shoot and drawl his way through a made-for-television western. Matt Clark and Patrick Kilpatrick always make good villains as well.

One thing that made me kind of uneasy though, was watching Elliot's character's almost constant drooling over the married Kate Capshaw, often times in full view of her husband and son!

On a side note, I miss these old HBO Pictures of the eighties and nineties, before they became all political, all boring, all the time.