Quigley Down Under (1990)
DIRECTOR: Simon Wincer
CAST: Tom Selleck, Laura San Giacomo, Alan Rickman
REVIEW:
Westerns are a hard sell these days, and few and far between apart from 1985’s Silverado. Director Simon Wincer and screenwriter John Hill offer a somewhat unconventional entry that’s a Western set a bit farther west than usual, namely in Australia.
American sharpshooter Matthew Quigley (Tom Selleck) arrives in Australia to answer an advertisement by landowner Marston (Alan Rickman), but when he finds out he’s been hired to kill Aborigines, things go south fast, leaving Quigley and “Crazy Cora” (Laura San Giacomo), a seemingly delusional woman mistaking him for her long-lost husband, left for dead in the vast Australian Outback. There, Aborigines nurse them back to health, but the conflict with Marston continues when the landowner learns they’re still alive and dispatches his henchmen to hunt them down.
John Hill first began writing the script in 1978, with Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood considered for the lead, but production was scrapped until Tom Selleck and Simon Wincer became interested in the mid-1980s. The finished product serves up enough obligatory Western tropes—a tall and handsome hero sporting a big gun, a villainous landowner, gunfights with henchmen, chases on horseback, and a climactic showdown, in a corral, no less—to satisfy fans of the genre, but also varies things up a little with the Australian setting and touching on a serious issue like the brutal treatment dealt to the native Aborigines, shown graphically in a scene where some of Marston’s goons drive them over a cliff. At two hours, the movie arguably runs a little overlong, but there’s enough standout sequences—including a suspenseful sequence where Cora struggles to hold off a pack of Dingoes, and the unloading of her tragic backstory—that we don’t get too restless.
Tom Selleck brings his laidback charm to the Western hero, and seems right at home. He is nicely-paired with Laura San Giacomo, who moves between humor and pathos easily and makes Crazy Cora endearingly quirky instead of annoying. Alan Rickman, who established his mustache-twirling villain credentials in 1988’s Die Hard, is cast true to form here, though his screentime is more limited.
Quigley Down Under received mixed critical reviews and was not a box office success, only roughly making back its budget, but that’s a bit of a shame. The movie doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it’s a respectable entry in it that does a few different things while doing enough of the things that fans show up to see in a Western in the first place.
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