Silverado

Silverado is a richly entertaining film, the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. This is the meat loaf of Westerns. I saw it first in one of those film classes in NYC back in '85, and Brian Dennehy, who gives a charmingly malevolent performance, was the guest star at our class. I think I saw it once again before my latest screening yesterday.

Directed and co-written by Laurence Kasdan, it is an affectionate homage to old-fashioned Westerns. The genre began to change in the Vietnam-era, when attitudes about Indians and manifest destiny changed, and revisionist Westerns were the norm. But Silverado hearkens back to the days when Westerns were about bravery, loyalty, and the black and white-hatted sense of moral justice.

The opening scene, in which Scott Glenn is ambushed in a shack, recalls John Ford's The Searchers. That film ended with a door shutting while John Wayne stands outside. In Silverado, the door opens, and we see a beautiful vista of frontier America. Glenn survives the scrape, and comes across Kevin Kline, who has been robbed and left for dead in the desert. Glenn helps him out, and the two form a fast friendship. Kline's character is consistently entertaining, a gunfighter with a sentimental streak. I would have loved to see more films featuring this character.

The group of heroes doubles with Glenn's irrepressible brother, Kevin Costner (in an early role for him), and Danny Glover as tough guy with an unerring aim with his rifle who finds that his family's homestead in the title town has been burned out by the local cattle king. It turns out that Glenn and his family are also at odds with the cattlemen, and Kline's old partner in crime, Dennehy, is the town's sheriff and firmly in the pocket of these same cattlemen. Push comes to shove and there's a big battle between the forces of good on one side against the forces of evil. If it isn't clear who is who, when Kline faces down Dennehy in an old-fashioned quick-draw, the church is right behind his shoulder.

This is all a lot of fun, even if it parts of it ring a little hollow. Silverado is a copy, not an original, but it's a good copy. There are bit too many characters--when Jeff Goldblum shows up halfway through as a gambler called Slick there could be some eye-rolling--but Kasdan does a pretty nice job of keeping all the balls in the air. I enjoyed a brief appearance by John Cleese as a sheriff, who reprises the Monty Python line, "What's all this, then?" Each of the four heroes has his particular nemesis to face down at the end, so there isn't just one ending but four. Depending on your taste, this is either way too many endings or an abundance of riches.