The Quick and the Dead: Sam Raimi’s Mythological Western Looms Larger Than Life

The 1990s are sometimes perceived as a dead period for certain film genres. To be certain, it wasn’t a great time for something like horror cinema, at least in the first half of the decade, as the 1980s slasher boom had long since limped into straight-to-video ubiquity, and a lauded film like 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs had garnered awards with a campaign that skirted the “horror” title whenever possible, knowing that the label would sap it of the prestige needed to have a shot at Academy Awards. The classic American Western is sometimes lumped in as another one of those 1990s genre casualties, but in truth, major studio Western movies actually experienced one of their bigger commercial fertile periods in the first half of the decade. From Dances with Wolves to Unforgiven, Tombstone to Maverick or Wyatt Earp, Westerns of varying shades populated early 1990s cinemas. They set the stage for one more, which would effectively bookend the era: Sam Raimi’s 1995 The Quick and the Dead, celebrating its 30th anniversary this week. Poorly received by contemporary critics but warmly reassessed by both film geeks and Raimi fans in the decades to follow, it is still potentially the director’s most underrated work, a bombastic and unabashedly hyperactive salute to old-fashioned gunslinger archetypes, brought to life by a generous application of Raimi’s signature aesthetics.

Compared to so many of the Westerns that preceded it in the first half of the 1990s, The Quick and the Dead stands out for its rejection of the prevailing norms of grounded revisionist Westerns in the era. Self-serious epics like Dances With Wolves, Wyatt Earp and Unforgiven had been dressing up the genre with heavy pathos and attempts at gritty verisimilitude, tearing down the mythological structure of gunslingers as heroes and villains, while attempting to broaden how representation might function in a Western. Raimi, suffice to say, ditched all that: His The Quick and the Dead (from a script by Simon Moore) zagged in the polar opposite direction, supercharging campy tropes and giving them more blood-pounding vitality than ever. It’s pure mythology and verve. His Western town of Redemption crackles with deadly potential energy around every corner, being simultaneously the most lively and energetic but also fraught with peril version of the archetype you’re likely to find. Not until Gore Verbinski’s Rango did we get another Old West town with this kind of colorful vibrancy.

In terms of structure, The Quick and the Dead functions more or less like the videogame genre one refers to as the “tournament fighter,” games in the style of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat where an all-powerful despot has brought together a collection of the world’s most deadly duelists to see who’s really deadly, and who’s just bloviating self-aggrandizement. The king of the mountain in Redemption is the tyrannical John Herod, played with scenery-chomping zeal by an absolutely game Gene Hackman, a petty tyrant of truly inspiring myopia. Herod aspires to nothing in particular; he has no grand ambition or aim to conquer the west or expand his influence. He owns the small town lock, stock and barrel and is instead focused on the all-consuming need to control every aspect of what happens there, bleeding the unlucky residents dry with taxes and tributes. In order to dangle some kind of dream of salvation, he also organizes a quickdraw dueling tournament with a huge cash prize, with one caveat–Herod himself has been the fastest gun around for ages, and he’s all too happy to gun down anyone who attempts to encourage unrest in his town. Herod must know that one day he’ll be too old for this, that he’ll crumple in the dirty main street of Redemption like so many others he’s slain, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s motivated by only two things: Holding on to his power, and proving his shooting supremacy. “If you live to see the dawn,” he bellows to the assembled town in the street, “it’s because I allow it.” And this is the status quo that outsiders like the deadly Cort (Russell Crowe) and mysterious Lady (Sharon Stone) arrive with intent to upend.

For Raimi, The Quick and the Dead was a transitional film, arriving at the end of what could be encapsulated as his lower-budget, horror genre beginnings (Evil Dead and sequels, Dark Man) and the more wide audience studio fare that would follow (For the Love of the Game, The Gift and eventually the juggernaut of Spider-Man). It was a bigger budget project than any of his previous work, anchored around several marquee actors (Stone, Hackman) and a few others who would become Hollywood royalty within a few years, in the form of Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. But behind the camera, Raimi refused to play things safe in pursuit of a conventionally styled or familiar Western–instead he heightens everything to the point of comedy. Men go flying through saloon doors like they’re being shot out of a cannon. Fighters crawl over a freshly killed gunslinger to loot his corpse like a horde of crabs picking his bones clean. Raimi and cinematographer Dante Spinotti indulge in every flashy camera technique the average film geek could name or appreciate, and a handful more besides–vaguely unsettling split diopter shots, rotating Dutch angles that follow the orientation of a revolver, and plenty of intensely dramatic zooms and rack focusing. It looks every bit as much a “comic book movie” as Spider-Man would, except with far more blood and bullet holes.

Of course, this bombastic approach was exactly what turned some contemporary critics off about the film, accusing it of being unforgivably style over substance, seemingly irked by its proud embrace and revitalization of cliché. At a time when the Western was often being used to criticize the jingoistic notion of American exceptionalism, perhaps The Quick and the Dead was just too unabashedly pulpy for some. It certainly doesn’t pass many standards of representation–for a Western, American Indian characters are almost completely absent, except for one token gunfighter named Spotted Horse who boasts that he “can’t be killed by a bullet,” at one point showing off a gnarly collection of gunshot wounds across his body. Spoiler alert: That admittedly impressive power is a little less useful when someone puts a bullet in your brain.

With women, the film functions a bit better, although it’s hard not to note that there’s no other female character of any substance in this town other than Sharon Stone’s The Lady. She’s ultimately positioned as the true protagonist of the ensemble, however, and this was no coincidence–Stone signed on in 1993 as not only the marquee star but also a co-producer, and played quite an active role in the film’s development. She had approval over choice of director, and reportedly favored Raimi for the action and humor of 1992’s Army of Darkness, meaning that we probably wouldn’t be referring to The Quick and the Dead as an underrated Sam Raimi deep cut if not for Stone. She likewise spoke up for a young and relatively unknown Russell Crowe, who had auditioned for a smaller role, seeing in him the handsome, rugged outline of Cort (his hair is glorious), the former assassin outlaw turned remorseful, itinerant preacher. Stone even assuaged producers hesitant about an 18-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio by paying his salary out of her own wages on the film. In no small number of ways, we could just as easily be calling this Sharon Stone’s The Quick and the Dead.

Presumably, this degree of control on Stone’s part was also a factor in one of the film’s more surprising features, given the specific moment it arrived in U.S. theaters: It really doesn’t lean into the sexuality of The Lady, which was probably unexpected for quite a few rank and file multiplex patrons given that Stone’s notoriety was at record highs following the 1992 erotic thriller sensation of Basic Instinct. Predictably, she is subject to some leering and catcalling from the mangy collection of male gunslingers in the town, but most of them eventually get a righteous fist to the face for their efforts–Raimi plants his flag in the opening moments when The Lady strolls into the saloon, asks for a room and proceeds to kick the barkeep off a stool to the floor after he replies that the whorehouse is next door. There’s a lot more “yes ma’am,” after that. The only actual embrace of Stone’s vaunted 1990s sexuality, meanwhile, is in a brief love scene with Crowe’s Cort that was filmed but not included in the American release, though it was seen by some audiences overseas. Stone reportedly didn’t care for the love scene’s inclusion, and it’s hard to disagree with her–The Quick and the Dead isn’t a film crying out for a more overt romance, and the unspoken bond of attraction and respect between The Lady and Cort suffices just fine without any need for consummation. It’s the Lady’s single-minded focus on vengeance against Herod that ultimately supersedes any of her other, early desires–to get caught up in a romance could have undermined the purity of her aim, and The Quick and the Dead thrives in that kind of elemental purity. The woman is here on a mission, and she abides no distraction.

The result is a perfect fusion of loving genre pastiche and auteur director embracing so much of the recognizable style that made him an icon. Raimi has a way of making each and every one of the gunfighters seem cool and menacing in their introductions–look at genre movie legend Lance Henriksen as “Ace” Hanion, who strolls into the film as the camera saunters along his impossibly long shadow, panning up to reveal him in all his peacocked glory. Drink in Russell Crowe’s expression as he’s shown a collection of fine killing instruments at the gun shop, the telltale flicker in his eyes of a murder junkie who has been itching to get his fix for a long time. Admire the ridiculous mustached countenance of Keith David, the kind of actor who improves literally any film of this nature with his mere voice and presence. I love how confident every single fighter is in the fact that they’ll come out on top, totally convinced of their unique ability to deal death and not be murdered by the other death-dealers. It’s an incredible collection of sadists, fools, and foolish sadists.

And if you’re Sam Raimi, with a rather savvy Sharon Stone spotting for future Hollywood A-listers, that’s all you need to make a supremely entertaining mid-‘90s Western. The genre may have shuddered to a halt in the years after The Quick and the Dead, but it certainly wasn’t Raimi’s blazing revolvers that put it down.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.