Silverado (1985)
9/10
"Silverado" carries us out into the overpowering grandeur of the American West...
16 April 2006
Warning: Spoilers
One of the cruel twists that sometimes appears in the showdown is the spectacle friend facing friend at opposite ends of a gun… Kline faces his friend and fellow lawman Dennehy… And the two come into direct conflict… They know that the only true test can be when one outdraws and kills the other… The inexorable outcome is a tense showdown… With such equal abilities a split second is the difference between life and death… The two friends square up and draw in the same instant and simultaneously… Kline is surprisingly effective as the cowboy with a troubled past and Dennehy, as Sheriff Cobb, generates a palpable menace…

Scott Glenn is a professional gunslinger, not an angel or a traditional 'goodie' by any means but a man with a certain honor and nobility… His life is a series of confrontations… He plans to start life over in California with his brother Jake but, as ever, there are always punks who wants to take him down…Glenn does not have the screen presence of some of the other characters of the film, but the action-oriented films ideally suited him…

Kevin Costner is charismatic as the sympathetic young hotshot gunslinger, soft at heart… He measures his self by his fancy double gun belt… Wearing two guns, he kills two armed guys in a couple of seconds with two shots— one bursts from each pearl-handled gun—and he didn't even aim…

Danny Glover must overcome the racism of Turley to find the 'baddies' who killed his old father and wounded his sister… No doubt racism is rampant in this part of the country… The film succeeded in introducing a strong black character with a look of high expectation on his face…

Villains in Lawrence Kasdan's "Silverado" are all quite good… Ray Baker (Ethan McKendrick) is totally without moral redemption whose job it is to run settlers off their homesteads… John Cleese, is the nasty sheriff (Langston) dressed rather elegantly in suit and bowler... Jeff Goldblum remembers me Lee Van Cleef in a scene from "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral". In this scene, Cleef prepares himself to kill Kirk Douglas by a small gun hidden in his left boot… Goldblum, in "Silverado" lifts his pant leg, at the poker table, and reveals the handle of a long knife secreted in his boot…

Rosanna Arquette's short scenes in the movie look to be going to a romantic relationship involving her and the two heroes (Kline and Glenn) but nothing ever occurs… Even Lynn Whitfield as Glover's sister has so little dialogue and screen time that she doesn't emerge well in her true character… Linda Hunt makes her best as Stella, the 'Midnight Star' in a velvet dress, who runs the local saloon…

Filmed on ravishing locations around New Mexico, "Silverado" is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre… It is filled with challenge, and excitement… It catches the perfect blue sky above the orange desert and celebrates the beauty of wagon trains moving through pretty, rolling country… splashing noisily across the river… It exhibits expansive saloons busy with gamblers, drinkers, and lovely brightly-dressed girls... It shows fantastic shootouts, ambushes, jail breaks, outlaw hideouts, bar fights, and cattle stampede
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