Quigley Down Under [DVD]

Although set in 1870s Western Australia, this is a very traditional western adventure, and it is all the better for that! After watching that recent, truly awful film "Australia", "Quigley Down Under" is like a breath of fresh air. Tom Selleck plays Matthew Quigley a, yes you've guessed it, very traditional western character in the mould of William S Hart, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott and of course John Wayne. He is the typical taciturn self sufficient westerner. A man of few words, but not a man to rub up the wrong way. He also happens to be quite useful with a gun.

In the film Quigley travels to the Western Australian outback in response to an advertisement by wealthy rancher Alan Rickman, who wants a marksman who can shoot accurately over long distances. Soon after arriving Quigley learns that he will be employed to shoot local aborigines as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign headed by the rancher. The two have an explosive confrontation which ends with Quigley being badly beaten and dumped in the desert with a young woman who has befriended him. But Quigley is not finished yet. They really should have finished him off when they had the chance! Big mistake! We head to an old fashioned showdown, where Quigley does not believe that Rickman measures up to the likes of Wild Bill Hickock.

Tom Selleck does an excellent job in the lead role. He is a natural born westerner who could sleepwalk through the part. He looks and acts the real deal. The diminutive Laura San Giacamo provides attractive and feisty support. Alan Rickman is excellent in another of his cadaverous panto villain roles. He does not ham it up to the same extent as his overblown performance that same year as the Sheriff of Nottingham in "Robin Hood Prince of Thieves". Perhaps the real star of the film though, was the custom made 13 pound, single shot, 34" barrel, Sharps Buffalo rifle used to deadly effect by Quigley. This was a legendary gun in the annals of the old west. Any gun that would stop a buffalo, would most certainly do the job on a man. A replica was specially made for the film. The only other film I can recall that featured the gun, was the now largely forgotten "Billy Two Hats" starring Gregory Peck and filmed unusually in Israel.

John Hill started writing the story in 1974 and Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood were both considered for the role. When production eventually started in 1980, McQueen was ill and the project was put on the shelf for a decade. The excellent cinematography is by the highly respected native Australian Dean Semler, who was also responsible for some sumptuous photography in the very fine recent traditional western "Appaloosa". The rousing musical score by Basil Poledouris is also worthy of note. It reminded me of those memorable earlier compositions by Elmer Bernstein, which is high praise indeed! The Brits in the film follow an unfortunate recent Hollywood tradition of being the bad guys. Well I guess we weren't perfect in our old colonial days! The treatment of Australia's aboriginal people in the 1800s is also honestly dealt with. They were hunted down like game, much in the way that the early Dutch settlers hunted down the bushmen in South Africa and the Spanish annihilated the early inhabitants of the Canary Islands.

The film was not a box office success, and only just managed to recoup its budget. It is by no means a classic, but it is enjoyable and entertaining to watch, and its heart is in the right place! It has to be worth four stars. Recommended.

Quigley Down Under is a terrific old-school western relocated to Australia that never found the audience it deserved. Originally intended as a Steve McQueen vehicle, Tom Selleck makes a surprisingly excellent replacement as the American sharpshooter who travels to Australia only to find new employer and Wild West buff Alan Rickman (in typical sneering mode) wants him to kill the local aborigines. Naturally, Selleck and Laura San Giacomo's crazy woman who thinks he's her lost love find themselves dumped in the desert and on the other side with the expected results, but the pleasure's all in the telling, not least thanks to an exceptionally well-crafted script by John Hill. Selleck's Quigley is a likeable, decent yet believable hero that in another era would have set the actor on the path to making the genre his own, Giacomo's character is surprisingly well drawn, the actress managing to make a potentially irritating role both funny and touching while being absolutely convincing, and Simon Wincer stages the action and character scenes with equal aplomb. Add superlative scope photography from David Eggby and one of Basil Poledouris' best and most enjoyable scores and it adds up to the most purely enjoyable old-fashioned Western in the past few decades.

The R2 PAL DVD includes the original trailer but not the negligible 2 TV spots and brief featurette from the R1 NTSC release, but it's worth picking up just for the film. MGM/UA's US region-free Blu-ray also offers the extras from the US DVd and a superior widescreen transfer.

"Matthew Quigley is really beginning to annoy me." That's Elliot Marston (Alan Rickman) speaking. He owns a huge cattle station in Australia's outback and he's hired Quigley (Tom Selleck) to come over from America's wild west and do some shooting for him. When Quigley arrives at the station, however, he finds out the shooting Marston has in mind is the killing of Aborigines. The Australian government has left the "problem" of Aborigines up to the land owners and calls it pacification by force. As Marston points out to Quigley, "As primitive as they are, they've still learned to keep themselves out of rifle range." But Quigley's having none of it, gets into a fight with Marston, and winds up abandoned with a woman he befriended, Cora (Laura San Giacomo), in the middle of the Australian desert. After many long slogs through the heat, the befriending of a group of Aborigines, encounters with Marston's hired guns and then seeing how Marston deals with the Aborigines, Quigley decides the solution to his problems is to take care of Marston once and for all. Marston, however, has decided that the solution to his problems is to take care of Quigley.

What we have is an Australian western, complete with fist fights, shootouts, galloping horses, buckboards, draggings and, of course, a dramatic shootout which the beaten-up hero doesn't lose. Quigley Down Under, however, began to annoy me when I realized that all of this in the two hour movie would have benefited greatly through editing out at least 20 minutes. Scenes go on too long. Characters say too much. Much time is spent seeing how innocent and true to nature the Aborigines are. Hours seem to be spent watching Quigley and Cora slog through one desert sequence after another.

And yet...I enjoyed the movie. Selleck, in my view, is a better light comedian than a brusque he-man. The film provides plenty of quirky, sly dialogue for both Selleck and Giacomo to work with. Alan Rickman, with those wet lips and that born-in sneer, makes a first-rate villain. He knows how to deliver a nasty line so that it drips onto your foot. The action sequences are well handled. The scenery of the Australian outback is austere. The portrayal of the Aborigines is matter-of-fact and respectful, at least until the end when they are used to create some sort of mystical experience that convinces the local British troops to leave Quigley alone. Marston's crew of crude henchmen are well portrayed. They look as grimy as men in real life were. In fact, the movie is pervaded by a feeling of heat and sweat. For most of the movie Selleck looks like you could smell him well before you could see him, and much the same goes for Giacomo. I think the griminess adds a lot of charm to the movie.

For me, Quigley Down Under is a movie with a pleasant star, an engaging villain and an interesting locale. It's worth watching every now and then. The movie could have been much better, however, with a hard-nosed editor doing some clipping.

The DVD presentation looks just fine to me.