Quigley Down Under (1990) Review

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(More customer reviews)Like many TV actors, "Quigley"'s star Tom Selleck gave much attention, during and after his small-screen career, to attempting to break into movies. If he'd been born in 1926, instead of 1946, he would probably have gained fame, not as Thomas Magnum, but in Western films and/or TV series like this one. Quigley is the role he was born to play, and in Quigley's adventures he has made, to my mind, the best movie of his career.
This slam-bang actioner, though often labelled a "Western," actually takes place, not in the American West, but in the Crown Colony of Western Australia, probably around 1875 (there are still convicts there). Selleck plays Matthew Quigley, a soft-spoken marksman from Wyoming, who answers an advertisement by Australian rancher Marston (Alan Rickman) for "the finest long-distance marksman in the world." After three months on a sailing ship, he steps ashore at the port of Fremantle, where he promptly gets into a brawl with what turn out to be three of Marston's men, come to meet him, and is mistaken by displaced "native-born Texian" Crazy Cora Cobb (Laura San Giacomo) for her husband Roy. At Marston Water he offers a display of his skill with his primary weapon, a customized Sharps .45 buffalo gun, and impresses everyone, including Marston, who describes himself as "a student of your American West" and is a fast draw, pinpoint-accurate, and quietly proud of it. Only now does Quigley find out that he was being hired, not to kill dingoes (Australian wild dogs) as he thought, but to clear Marston's lands of the native Aboriginies. He promptly throws Marston out the French window of his own house, but is eventually overwhelmed by Marston's crew and, with Cora, taken out to the desert to die. Managing to kill the two men who fetched them there, he recovers his rifle and big Stetson, but loses the buckboard and horses. Trying to walk out, he and Cora are found by a clan of Aboriginies, who take them in, and when a group of Marston's men appears to hunt the natives down, Quigley takes up his Sharps in their defense. Eventually he eliminates Marston and all but three of his men in a sort of one-man "long hunt," climaxed by a shootout in which, though wounded and battered and admitting that he "never had much use" for handguns (he doesn't even carry one), he kills three men so fast that his shots sound like one.
Though there's a good deal of violence in this video--in fact, it will probably be too intense for kids under the age of 12 or so--none of it is gratuitous: each instance either serves to further the story in some way or is portrayed as an inevitable result of the choices and character of the person acting or being acted against. Selleck's Quigley is a '90's version of the classic John Wayne hero: soft-spoken, quietly competent, modest and unassuming (he "spent a night" in Dodge City once, and describes it as "a nice place to get some sleep"), chivalrous toward women and even a little unsure of how to react to them. (His early interactions with San Giacomo's Cora, on the Fremantle docks and in their first outback camp, add a whimsical touch to the movie's tone and should draw laughs from all watchers.) He also has an iron code of behavior, and he doesn't hesitate to learn even from the primitive Aborigines: one of the most delightful sequences finds them teaching him to use a spear-thrower and to suck water out of the sand through a bamboo--after which he repays them by conducting a class in the making and proper use of a rawhide lasso. Rickman is the kind of villain you love to hate: smooth, silky, sneering, yet acting from what seem to him to be completely valid reasons. San Giacomo may be "touched in the head," but she's also earthy, practical, and fiercely loyal to Selleck and to the orphaned Aboriginie baby they find; her story of how she came to be in Australia is touchingly delivered.
And, like most of the best movies, "Quigley" can serve as a starting point for some penetrating family discussion. Parallels will quickly be seen between the Aborigines' situation and, not only the experiences of the American Indian, but the "ethnic cleansing" through which the former Yugoslavia suffered, and which kids may have studied in school. Quigley seems not to be revengeful against Marston and his crew of 20-odd tough English and Irish until they act against the Aborigines who have been his and Cora's friends, and even then a case can be made for his killing as many of them as he can hit: afoot and outnumbered, he doesn't want them in the area and angry at him; after the second Aboriginie drive and the accidental killing of a storekeeper's wife, he is simply resolved to keep them from doing any more harm.
Though action is the movie's keynote, it is above all the story of how three people inspire one another to certain inevitable acts--in short, like all the best stories, it turns on character. And its characters will remain in the memory for a long time to come. (A side-benefit is the blood-stirring score by Basil Poledouris, which was one of the first CD's I ever purchased.) The cinematography gives a powerful sense of the size and loneliness of the Australian outback (filming was done in Alice Springs and other Australian locations), as well as of how important it is that Quigley seems far better able to adjust himself to it than Marston's men are willing to do. Director Simon Wincer, though not of American birth, has turned out a movie which, while not strictly a "real" Western, should become a classic of the genre. By my criteria, it's definitely a 10--or perhaps even a 12.

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