Remember When Sam Raimi Made A Western?

Sam Raimi is everyone’s favorite weirdo director, and looking over his filmography, his career has been surprisingly varied. When you hear his name, your brain goes immediately to either the Evil Dead series or his Spiderman trilogy, and rightfully so. One is a cult classic series in the horror genre, and the other is arguably the franchise that brought superhero films back into the mainstream—yes, we’re aware that Blade and X-Men came out first. If you’re a true diehard fan, you also know him from his random cameo appearances in other people’s movies, like Spies Like Us and Body Bags.

Raimi is a unique filmmaker because he makes movies that are widely seen and consistently enjoyed by a broad audience but still manages to have his own distinct brand of immediately recognizable weirdness. Besides his eccentric cinematography and tendency to combine comedy into otherwise non-comedic set pieces—only he could have a scene involving a séance and think, “Okay, but what if the sacrificial goat talked?” He also has a wonderful attitude towards the creative process, wherein he takes the material seriously but doesn’t take himself too seriously. If you take a look at the films he’s made over his career, you’ll notice that he’s far more willing to branch out in the types of films he makes than most people give him credit for.

People attribute Sam Raimi to being the horror guy, but when you think of the fourteen films he’s directed—fifteen if you count Crimewave, but he doesn’t, so we won’t either—he’s only made three of them. Army of Darkness doesn’t count, even though it’s wildly underappreciated. For as much as people think of horror when they hear his name—he’s produced more horror films than he’s directed, so that’s probably part of it—between the releases of Army of Darkness and the first Spiderman film, there was a ten-year gap where he broadened the horizons that his Oldsmobile Delta 88 could drive across.

He made A Simple Plan, which is tonally more in line with a Coen Brothers-esque thriller. He also made For Love of the Game, which is the most grammatically frustrating title ever written, but it’s a pretty solid entry in Kevin Costner’s unofficial baseball trilogy—a statement you would likely never associate with the guy who made Darkman. He also directed the supernatural thriller The Gift, a movie that’s probably most well-known for being name-dropped in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle (give it a minute; you know the scene). If you can see a thematic throughline across all three of these films, you must be excellent at yoga because you have an impeccable ability to make big stretches.

This period in Raimi’s career is very informative of the movies he’s stylistically capable of covering, sometimes without his trademark techniques, like Dutch tilts, smash zooms, and shaky-cam. Despite the polar opposite fields he’s experienced in—low-budget horror and big-budget blockbusters—he’s expressed interest in branching out into other genres. If you’ve ever heard his appearance on Episode #617 of The Nerdist Podcast (later retitled ID10T Podcast), he discussed wanting to try his hand at stories like heist films, science fiction, and even love stories. He also mentioned his interest in making a true western, which is interesting because he apparently forgot that he had already done it in 1995: The Quick and the Dead.

That’s right, we’re only now arriving to the point of the article. The film follows Sharon Stone as a mysterious lone gun(wo)man named Ellen, who, in proper Clint Eastwood fashion, enters a small crime-ridden town run under the tyrannical control of a cruel and violent man named Herod, played by Gene Hackman—it’s a Western film in the ‘90s, so that was just the archetypal role he was typecast in for a while. Once there, Ellen enters a quick-shot tournament with a prize of $123,000. Her fellow opponents include The Kid, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his earliest film roles—though he still looks about the same age as when he would later play Howard Hughes in The Aviator—and Russell Crowe as Cort, a reformed criminal-turned-preacher. Sprinkled throughout the rest of the cast is a colorful group of well-known character actors like Lance Henriksen, Keith David, Tobin Bell, and even Sven-Ole Thorsen. Unfortunately, when Thorsen gets shot and exits the tournament, nobody says, “Oh good. For a second there, I thought we were in trouble.” [Writer’s Note: If you don’t get it, look up the actor’s work and cross-reference the characters he’s played in relation to what they’re a nod to, and you’ll realize how clever and super cool that reference is.]

The Quick and the Dead is a neat experiment that demonstrates how Sam Raimi’s visual style isn’t exclusive to the horror genre but actually fits comfortably in the Western genre as well. Raimi’s style is all his own, and movie nerds the world over recognize it because of how he covers a scene and how he visually tells a story. A typical director might see a scene as written where a knight shoots a man with a bow and arrow and immediately kills him, and that would be good enough. Mr. Raimi is not a typical director, and that means you see the arrow’s journey from the bow, its perspective as it travels through the air, and then into the back of the man it intends to execute. Are all of those additional details necessary? Probably not, but it’s one of the cool directorial trademarks that makes Army of Darkness when one of the greatest films ever made by a human. We’re not talking about Army of Darkness right now, but you should watch it and talk about it, as should everyone. Why don’t more people love that movie? Sure, it’s a far cry from how the Evil Dead series started out, but that just makes it more distinct as a sequel. More movies could benefit from the—sorry, not the point. We’ll cut this out later.

You would think his wacky style wouldn’t transition well to the Western genre, considering Westerns are usually clean-cut, like John Wayne films, or gritty, like the films that were released post-Sergio Leone and his Spaghetti Westerns. Aside from Maverick and Blazing Saddles, there aren’t that many Westerns that are goofy and zany. That’s not to say that The Quick and the Dead is a screwball comedy; it’s actually a pretty standard western purely from a screenplay perspective with its ‘stranger in a strange land’ concept and a vendetta plot, but what elevates it is the Raimi-isms that are flooded throughout the story. The comically abusive treatment of the character Cort at the hands of Herod is so over the top in showcasing Raimi’s love for tormenting his performers that it’s a wonder why he didn’t cast Bruce Campbell in the role. Maybe Campbell had his fill of Westerns after The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, or he needed a break from Raimi being mean to him on set. Neither would be surprising. 

There are also a bunch of little things that Raimi sprinkles throughout, like a POV shot of a beer glass that’s thrown at Cort’s head, which he promptly catches, to the first-person perspective of the barrel of a revolver that shoots out the legs of a chair that Cort is balancing precariously on before potentially getting hanged. Even something as simple as Cort doing some gun-twirling with a revolver, like Johnny Ringo in Tombstone, has the camera follow along wherever he spins it, which makes the moment look even more precise and slick. Details like these have the watermark of Sam Raimi all over them, and it’s not just in the service to show his trademark quirkiness.

For every major quick-draw duel that happens in the film, Raimi soaks in the tension of the moments leading up to it. The gunfighters aren’t allowed to draw their pistols until the clock strikes the hour, so for the few seconds leading up to it, the editing becomes quicker, and the camera zooms in closer and closer to their faces, which seems like a nod to the final standoff in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. If you don’t think you could make (multiple) action scenes where two people just stare at each other, this movie proves otherwise. No matter the genre, Raimi is usually pretty consistent in not being coy and just giving audiences what they want to see out of his movies, as well as knowing to keep the runtimes low. In a crazy horror film, he knows to give you weird imagery and to keep it coming. When it’s a Western, he knows you want to see shootouts and brawls, so he gives you plenty. The movie can’t go more than five minutes without seeing somebody get shot or punched, and it’s glorious.

Besides showing that his style isn’t reserved solely for the horror genre, The Quick and the Dead demonstrates that Sam Raimi isn’t easily persuaded to subdue his style for the sake of receiving a paycheck. Keep in mind, this was the first film he made after Army of Darkness—the best 96 minutes of your life if you give it a chance—and that film notoriously did not do well at the box office, especially relative to its budget, which was pretty substantial for a Raimi film at the time. For lesser filmmakers, that could’ve been a splash of cold water to the face to tone it down and not be so eccentric and stylized. We’ve seen what happens when movies are made as a way to course-correct (or over-correct), and a lot of the times, the cynicism of it can be so transparent.

This film feels like Raimi sticking to what he wants to do and not apologizing for it. Sure, his other films mentioned earlier feel like more traditional studio films, but they almost seem to prove that he can do movies like that if he wants to; he just chooses not to. He always says that all he cares about is making the movie he wants to make and being able to make it profitable enough to pay back the investors who gave him money to do it. That’s all. For as distinct as his style is, he’s one of the least pretentious filmmakers out there. The Quick and the Dead could’ve just been a quick paycheck for him since it was essentially a director-for-hire situation, but he gave it his all, and what could’ve been just a throwaway entry in his filmography ended up being one of his most underrated and entertaining…not as entertaining as Army of Darkness, but it’s difficult to surpass perfection.

Mitchell Brown: He is a Wisconsin-based writer and film fanatic whose publication history includes MovieWeb, the independent horror website Slay Away, and the bi-monthly publication Route Magazine, which covers Route 66, road travel, and Americana. When he's not watching movies or writing about the films he's already seen...no, that about covers it.
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