"The Quick and the Dead"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                             February 11, 1995

   It's pretty slim pickings for people interested in women and film out there
this week, so I gritted my teeth and paid my money and went to see the first
film I can recall about a female gunfighter. It's not that we haven't had
women in westerns before, there was the pretty bad "Bad Girls" last year, and
the pretty good "Ballad of Little Jo" as well. But this is the first one I
know where the woman protagonist is a fast-draw specialist who stands in the
middle of Main Street one-on-one and shoots to kill. The film is called "The
Quick and the Dead" (get it? ha ha) and the gunslinger in question, referred
to throughout the film as "Lady" (although the cast list does give her a name,
Ellen), is played laconically and, not ineffectively, by Sharon Stone. Stone
also co-produced the film.

   To like this film you have to have a very high tolerance for film violence.
The conceit around which the plot is built is that a little Arizona town
called "Redemption" is under the complete control of a baddie by the name of
John Herod (played to the hilt with villany by Gene Hackman) who entertains
himself by holding shoot out tournaments. Sixteen gunslingers sign up and
challenge one another and then pare the field down to the quarter-finals,
semi-finals and the final match-up. After the first round, you don't win until
the other person is dead. That's fifteen corpses (give or take a few), so, as
I say, you have to like seeing human beings shot to like this very much. On
the other hand, stylistically, the film is so much like a non- animated
cartoon that it's almost not like seeing human beings slaughtered. The
characters are nearly as cartoonish as those in "Dick Tracy" a few years
back--a make-up artist's field day of absurdly ugly men with scars, bad teeth,
and unappealing features.  To increase the similarity to a 'toon, there's
precious little blood and gore around, considering how many people are shot
and, not once but twice, we are treated to shots in which when a bullet goes
through somone we can see right through his body to the other side--more like
something that would happen to Daffy Duck than to a human being. I read the
other day about a child who got shot in committing a crime and was said to
have been surprised that it hurt to get shot. It's films like this one that
contribute to that kind of sense of unreality, and, presumably, to the
increasing use of handguns in this society.

   Back to gender issues. "Lady," is, of course, our hero, and unlike the
others she is here not for the ego-trip or for the money but for righteous
revenge, to kill John Herod for an earlier villany. And she is justified in
killing the man she kills in the quarter finals, too, for what he has done to
one of the town's few innocent young girls. It all ends up as you know it will
with the white hats winning (though this time the "white hat" is a woman in a
black hat wielding a man-sized weapon).

    There are some characters and plot twists I've not mentioned, in case you
go see this, but even they don't add much to make the plot of this film worth
while. For me, what pleasures it offered were all at the level of appreciating
the technicalities of the filmmaking.  Cinematography and editing are
normally things that in Hollywood films we're not supposed to notice.
But in this film the director, cinematographer and film editor go wild and
use  so many flashy tricks, odd camera angle, pans, zoom, and other kinds of
trick shots and editing that it's impossible not to notice them, and, I have
to admit, it's kind of fun. The other thing that I thought was particularly
good about this film was Patrizia von Brandstein's production design; there's
lots of really interesting stuff to look at, and beautiful desert locat ions
and sunsets. And I liked the fact that at least one thing about this town was
realistic, the fact that the population consists of Blacks, whites, Mexicans,
indians, European immigrants, old and young, as a 19th C. Arizona town would
have--an odd touch of realism in a film that, otherwise, is strictly shoot 'em
up fantasy. So it wasn't totally hateful or a total waste of time and money,
but I wouldn't urge anyone ot run right out and see "The Quick and the Dead"
either.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.
   Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.