Once Upon a Time in the West Vs. The Quick and the Dead

Narrative filmmaking began with the Western genre, in the form of the first true narrative film, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903. The genre has persisted for over a century and in this span of time has been through many periods of retrospection and revision, to the point where the entire genre has been declared dead more than once. Two landmark Western films showcase the differences which arose as Western films split along the lines of Modernist and Post-Modernist periods. Once Upon a Time in the West directed by Sergio Leone is a critically acclaimed Western from 1968, and The Quick and the Dead is a more recent film by Sam Raimi, from 1995. While Leone's film is a perfect example of the Post-classical styled spaghetti westerns, Raimi's is in stark contrast, a Post-modernist amalgamation of Western genre cliches, with no love for reality and a penchant for pastiche.

Popular art relies on formula, and the Western formula relies on a setting on or near a frontier (Saunders). Leone's film fits right in, since the film is set in and outside a border town on the frontier of the railroad's influence. Frank Gruber said that there were only seven basic plots available for any Western film. These are the Union Pacific or Pony Express story, the Homesteaders theme, the Cattle Drive, the Lawman story, the Revenge story, and the Outlaw story (Saunders). Many modern critics agree with this boiled down set of plots, and argue that all Westerns can be placed into one or more of these categories. Whether or not all films apply, Once Upon a Time in the West is certainly a combination of the Homesteader's theme, the Union Pacific, and the Revenge story. Each plot archetype is a myth inherently linked to the Western genre, and they form the backbone of Leone's tale.

In addition, the classic Western hero is not simply a brave man (or as we will see with Raimi's film, a woman), he is caught up with the defense of a town or its townspeople while sharing some of the characteristics which threaten it. (Saunders) Both male protagonists, Harmonica and Cheyenne, share this framework of the Western hero. Each character is technically heroic, they are the catalysts for the forces of �â'¬Å"good�â'¬ï¿½ in the film, however they are also murderers and outlaws. Each has their own, seemingly selfish agenda, and saving Jill's homestead is simply a means to an end. Jill, the third protagonist, is a civilizing force in a frontier which does not naturally cater to her gender.

Until this point Leone's West could be classified as a post-classical film, however it is in the character of Jill that we first see the characteristic elements of Post-Classical filmmaking. The conventions which governed female characters in the classical periods of the Western genre generally posed female characters as simple love interests or damsel-in-distress type plot catalysts (Saunders). However in Leone's film, we can see that the third protagonist, Jill, is no simple love interest, but a fleshed out lead all her own. Jill has intentions and independent desires, evidenced in her staying at the homestead despite the death of her new family, and she reflects the aspects of the �â'¬Å"civilization�â'¬ï¿½ Harmonica is attempting to defend; the independent, moral, mythical Old West.

With Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone includes all of the classical iconography common to the Western genre, but incorporates these standards into his film with a style all his own. The film includes the necessary fare, such as the cowboys on horses, the townships, the sidearms, and the endless expanses of desert which exemplify the Western frontier concept. But Leone presents these icons in fresh and unexpected ways, giving us a world where the homesteader is killed in the first five minutes, immediately after his introduction. The gunfights are long drawn out affairs, heavily choreographed, but in a style that gives an almost super-realistic air. We find the evildoer, the railroad master, in a suit and gaudy train car, obviously a symbol of the decadent civilization of the East moving to take the wilderness of the West. However, he is a cripple; he can barely walk even with the aid of two crutches. The costumes of the cowboys, the protagonists Cheyenne and Harmonica, as well as the characters they interact with, wear the standard dress of a western. Long coats, wide brimmed hats, holsters and enormous spurs obviously mark the men of the west. Unlike classical films however, Leone's cowboys are haggard and unkempt. There are no pretty boy actors here, besides the possible exception of Frank, the ultimate antagonist of the film. Leone's west is dusty, dirty, and unshaven.

Strongly individualized characters and heroes such as Harmonica became a hallmark of the Italian, or �â'¬Å"Spaghetti Western.�â'¬ï¿½ Italian directors began making westerns consistently around 1963, and by 1969 the term �â'¬Å"Spaghetti Western�â'¬ï¿½ was well known in America (Lopez). Generally, the Italian takes had a Texas/Mexico border setting and sadistic looking Mexican bandits as the villains. The time frame was civil or post-civil war, with rape, torture, murder dominating the themes. The main protagonist was usually an antihero (a staple of the classical American western) who subscribed to very few gentlemanly codes (Fagen). These European takes on the Western pushed the myths and conventions of the genre, which were stale after half a decade of classical films. Once Upon a Time in the West stands out first and foremost among these Italian produced films, said by many critics to be the quintessential western. Leone, as an Italian filmmaker, was used to a different style of filmmaking than his American counterparts, and this allows him to take a look back on past westerns in key scenes, without resorting to downright theft.

In several moments, Leone nods his head to past American westerns nostalgically. The opening train scene itself bears an uncanny similarity to the film High Noon, though in that film it is the villain who arrives and not the hero, as in West. After this reversal of convention, the film has several nods to 3:10 to Yuma, including the way in which the character Harmonica begins to play his tune, and this song becomes his theme for the rest of the film. There are moments and scenes which bear a striking resemblance in composition to Shane, The Iron Horse, and Warlock. Sergio Leone himself said that his intention in creating West was to take the stock conventions of the Western genre and rework them in an ironic fashion, essentially creating a darker connotation (Fraying). Once Upon a Time in the West explores the western conventions in ways classical period films only briefly touched upon at best.

In 1995, Sam Raimi decided to try a new take on the aging western genre. The genre had already been declared legally dead several times by critics, but in 1992, Eastwood's Unforgiven showed that the western was still alive and kicking in modern American cinema. Raimi's film, The Quick and the Dead, showcased his distinctive style utilized first in his Evil Dead horror trilogy. However, despite his frenetic style of editing and a decidedly over-the-top plotline, The Quick and the Dead is ultimately a rehash of old concepts and overall pastiche.

Utilizing Gruber's western plotline analysis, Dead is most certainly a revenge story. However, this story is far from original, and rather than simply nodding to older western conventions, Raimi utilizes cliches from the genre and occasionally entire subplots rehashed from alternate works (including Leone's West). As Marc Savlov put it, �â'¬Å"Much of what is wrong with [The Quick and the Dead] lies with Simon Moore's patchwork script, which manages to cobble together as many western clichés as possible, and then throws in a female protagonist to give the whole mess a Nineties spin.�â'¬ï¿½ The characters presented in Dead are mostly one dimensional, fantastical stereotypes; cardboard cutouts of western character myths set up and then shot down. There is the gambler, who always puts an ace in his deck every time he kills a man. There's the convict, who has no respect for anyone and dies that way. There is the greedy gangster who owns the town and kills anyone who gets in his way. There's the Indian who believes he cannot die. There is the female cowboy who waltzes into town, built on revenge but afraid to die, and sadly, she is one of the most fleshed out characters available.

Raimi's film is definitively post-modern. At best, the content of the work has a tenuous hold on reality, and often becomes a combination of fantasy and semi-realistic parts. This film is a perfect example of a representation of a representation of reality: it is clearly what Raimi believed, or perhaps wished, the old west had looked like. It is a world built of stereotypes and cliches, further pulled away from any realistic setting by Raimi's distinct style of building tension through rapid cutting and bizarre angles. These compositional elements certainly give the film its distinctive style, but through their use, The Quick and the Dead also loses any sense of cinematic integrity it might have possessed had they been left out. The editing might be suitable for MTV, but the gunfights are still standard fare, conventional gunfights at their basest level.

The film pulls elements from a host of other films, including Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her, Woo's Hard-Boiled and even Leone's classic Once Upon a Time in the West (Savlov). However unlike Leone's film, the shots are not a loving reworking of the genre's conventions but instead are elements of pastiche, and in several places Raimi recreates scenes shot for shot without any sense of satire or parody. The most glaringly evident of these is a shot near the end of the film, where Sahron Stone's character Ellen has a flashback to her past, revealing to the audience why she is hell-bent on revenge in the first place. The scene, involving her father being hung and her one chance to save him from death, is taken almost in toto from Leone's West. This is no mere nod of the head to westerns of the past, instead it is meant to be taken entirely seriously that this is Ellen's story. In fact, it was already Harmonica's story in 1968.

Like any post-modernist work, The Quick and the Dead pushes style over substance in order to draw in an audience. Obvious examples can be found in the gunfights which take place throughout the film. Each fight follows many of the conventions whch have pervaded throughout the genre, such as the two opponents staring at each other harshly waiting for the clock to strike noon, and the itchy trigger finger sequences where each gunfighter waits for his chance to draw. Raimi intercuts these sequences much as he did in his earlier Evil Dead films, except here the style does not build tension and instead detracts from it. The rapid cuts and awkward angles showed a sense of madness and often satirical humor in the Evil Dead trilogy, but this film was not intended as a parody.

Raimi's film includes many sequences which might be right at home in a parody, due to their unintentional humor and obvious cliches. But due to his directorial decisions (or in retrospect, possibly Sharon Stone's influence on the film's production as Producer and investor) the film is not seen as a farce, it is seen as an attempt at a semi-serious film. The film wavers between attempting new takes on old conventions, and trying its best to stick with the past, hovering somewhere in the middle, unsure of itself. There are some gory special effects in the film, several times there are shots where people have holes blown through them in some way and the audience can see sunlight or in one case, main street, through a man's head. However these effects (and specific shots) have already been seen in films such as Woo's Hard-boiled (Savlov).

Wild effects such as these are great at punching the western to an American audience with few requirements for reality, but it dumbs down the cinematic elements established in the past in order to draw highbrow and lowbrow audiences together. A hole through a man's head can do wonders for a horror film, but in any realistic western film, they seem out of place. Once Upon a Time in the West features its share of gunfights, but each one is portrayed realistically, if shot with a choreographed flair. When a man is shot, he dies, and he dies quickly if he's shot in the head. In Raimi's film, men who have holes in their skull still have time to check their shadows, not to mention scream. In one sequence, Spotted Horse, the �â'¬Å"man who cannot be killed by a bullet,�â'¬ï¿½ is shot, but gets right back up. After being shot again, he raises his hand as if to raise from the dead (despite the fact that he has been shot in the head) and finally collapses to the dust. Scenes such as this push the film towards the realm of fantasy, but the pastiche elements and serious dialogue push the film in the opposite direction, towards a realistic end.

Despite a critical negative response at the film's release, Raimi's Dead is not necessarily a bad film per se, but it is a quintessential example of post-modernism. The film attempts to be too hip, too stylish too rooted in cliched conventions, and as such is executed with limited cinematic success. The film holds more of a cult status due to its heterogeneity than the critical and almost universal praise denoted to Once Upon a Time in the West, even so much as some calling it the greatest western ever made, despite its post-classical period. Like any post-modern work, the film disregards reality at will, works to erase the distinction between high and low culture (mixing Raimi's distinctive style with the myths and conventions of the ancient western genre), and holds an unbridled nostalgia for the past. However this nostalgia is merely a representation of a representation of reality, and further pushes the work towards the realm of fantasy. It's no wonder Sharon Stone's only award nomination for The Quick and the Dead came from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.

Both Leone and Raimi's films showcase the myths, conventions, and ideologies of the western genre. However in 1968, Leone worked to reinvent a dying breed of films with darker connotations, and create a loving nod to the films of the half decade which came before. If Raimi's film attempts this, it goes totally unseen, as it is overtly a hodgepodge of post-modern style and last century cliches. The western film has survived over a century, despite repeated death peals by critics and naysayers. Once Upon a Time in the West and The Quick and the Dead serve as landmarks in two major periods of the genre, and show that though popularity for the western may wax and wane, experimentation, evolution, and longevity, are all key elements to this American classic of the cinematic form.

Cited Works

Fagen, Herb. The Encyclopedia of Westerns. Checkmark Books. 2003.

Fraying, Sir Richard. Interview with Sergio Leone.An Opera of Violence. Once Upon a Time in the West DVD Commentary, Nov 18, 2003.

Lopez, Daniel. Films by Genre. McFarland and Co., 1993.

Saunders, John. The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey. Wallflower Press, 2001.

Savlov, Marc. �â'¬Å"The Quick and the Dead.�â'¬ï¿½ Austin Chronicle 02/10/1995.