I missed this 1985 Lawrence Kasdan film when it played theatrically; I was in college at the time and this opened in July, over summer break, and I was at home with our one local theater with maybe 5 screens. Did it even play there? I dunno, I missed both this one and Clint Eastwood's contemporaneous PALE RIDER; the "resurrection" of the western passed me by, as it did most people since the genre didn't stay alive for long. I saw both on VHS in the 90s, and have revisited them just lately on DVD. It's too bad they didn't do just a little bit better at the box office; neither of the two films are among the best ever, but they're both supremely entertaining and well-crafted, and though they both did OK business in theaters, it wasn't enough. Clint's film at least turned a good profit, being typically economical and quickly shot and having his name to draw people in; Kasdan's film with it's cast of then-unknowns or second-tier stars and it's very high budget probably lost money or barely broke even, and the director didn't get to make another western for another decade (1994's WYATT EARP).
The money shows in the film though, from the superbly done initial sequences detailing the four heroes (Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Kevin Kline and Danny Glover) escaping momentary troubles and coming together through chance and circumstance to the beautifully put together set of SILVERADO, the large-scale shootouts and cattle stampedes, and the spectacular on-location photography by John Bailey. It's rather amazing when you think about it that any studio would fork over $25 million + (a lot of money in 1985) on a western from a relatively untested director (Kasdan had only done the lower-budget BODY HEAT and THE BIG CHILL at this point) in the years immediately following the debacle of Michael Cimino's megaflop HEAVEN'S GATE. But SILVERADO was designed as a very audience-friendly, all-ages piece from the start, and it's got a slick commercial feel to it that's pretty typical in many ways of the Spielberg-Lucas-Zemeckis films of the era - and mostly in a good way.
Basically the storyline goes that Emmett (Glenn), just released after a few years in prison, is going to meet up with his younger brother Jake (Costner) and the two are to visit their sister and her family on their way to California. But Emmett gets waylaid by some no-accounts and sidetracked, and he ends up helping out gunslinger Paden (Kline) and eventually the two of them witness Mal (Glover) get into some trouble in a small-town bar. Turns out that Jake is a prisoner in the jail in said small town and Emmett has to bust him out. Through a series of adventures a little too complex for me to want to lay out here, the four all end up together and in Silverado, a town that is run by Paden's former buddy Cobb (Brian Dennehy) who is garrulous and charismatic and owns half the town including the huge saloon run by Stella (Linda Hunt) which Paden ends up working at. Turns out that Cobb is behind - or at least involved with - a group of no-accounts who have run Mal's family off their land and gotten into trouble with Jake and Emmett, and eventually a reckoning is going to be coming.
The biggest problem that SILVERADO has is that, having established the four main characters and the main nemesis pretty well, it's not content to focus on them but instead has to introduce a whole bunch of other characters who seem to be clamoring for development. There's John Cleese as the sheriff of Turley, the first town the group rides into; sure, he's not really important but hey, I'd always like to see more of Cleese; there's Rosanna Arquette as a settler whose husband gets killed while riding with our heroes and who ends up being romanced by Paden onscreen - and Emmett mostly offscreen; it's fairly obvious that much of her story is cut from a longer version of the film and the extras on the DVD clarify this a little. There's Mal's sister Ray (Lynn Whitfield) and her possible budding romance with a knife-thrower and professional gambler named Slick (Jeff Goldblum) - who is never clearly a hero or villain or...anything really other thana a side character who just shows up a couple of times only to suffer an ignominious ending. Basically there's just too much stuffed into this 130-minute film to fit and it all starts to pull at the seams in the last third in particular.
BUT, damn it's a fun film up until that point, and the ending isn't a disaster or anything - just something of a mess for a while. We get a couple of shootouts at the very end that are fairly satisfying and do manage to save the film, and we get a group of pretty solid western heroes who manage to avoid being TOO cliched while still seeming pretty familiar. Kasdan and his coscreenwriter/coproducer brother Mark manage to get most of the typical western tropes into place, do a reasonably sensitive job of handling the racial issue with Glover being essentially just another unwanted person only with an extra level of unwanted-ness than the others. The Kasdans' dialogue manages the difficult trick of seeming someone modern and relateable - yet not altogether too anachronistic. And Bruce Broughton's terrific score must be mentioned, sweeping and romantic and very, very old-fashioned, the kind of thing you can imagine Dmitri Tiomkin writing for a Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh film 30 years earlier.
The cast is pretty much a dream; I've never been a fan of Costner's but I liked him in a few of his early films, and he shows an energy and uninhibitideness in this film that I've never seen anywhere else. I'd have to say that at the moment I'd pick this early role, loose and technically imperfect though it might be, as his best work. The rest of the main cast hold their own - Kline and Glenn seem to be each doing variations of the typical tough and taciturn Wayne/Scott/Eastwood western hero and they both find nice resolutions to the problem; Glover seems more like the family man/future of the west type character and conveys more of a sense of the "new westerner", the man from the East bringing civilization; Dennehy, the arrogant guy who bosses everybody around through intimidation and a larger-than-life charisma. The actresses don't really have that much to do but Hunt gets in a couple of good scenes and she clearly represents the civilizing influence also, caught between Dennehy and the slightly more gentle if no less dangerous Kline.
All in all, it doesn't add up to anything particularly new or revelatory - though it feels at times like it could have, had it been allowed to be longer and "breathe" more - but it certainly does show that one could do a "modern" western with a young, fresh cast, and not make it stupid or childish.
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