From the Rental Vault (1985): Silverado

By 1985, the Western as a movie genre was mostly dead and well on its way to being completely dead, to borrow a phrase from Miracle Max. None had grabbed much box office attention or critical admiration since the mid-1970s; the mythos on which the movies were based had been discredited through historical research and frequent overuse. The Western was as gone as the adventure cliffhanger.

Enter Lawrence Kasdan. A co-writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back, baby-boomer Kasdan was one of several young moviemakers who had a real love for the genre pictures of their youth. Being around George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as those two helped revive the big-screen wonder of those 1940s and 1950s genre movies made him a good fit to try to breathe life into another bygone form, the Western. With his brother Mark, Kasdan wrote and then took on the job of directing and producing Silverado, a pure 1950s big-budget Western spectacle with a distinct 1980s baby-boomer flavor.

We open with one of the Western's strongest features; the amazing scenery of the western American states, and we quickly find ourselves in the action as some men try to ambush Emmit (Scott Glenn) while he sleeps. They're unsuccessful, and as Emmit continues his journey he finds a man -- robbed and left to die -- named Paden (Kevin Kline). The pair join up and ride into the town of Turley in search of Emmit's brother Jake but find Jake is scheduled to hang for murder. In confronting the men who robbed him, Paden runs afoul of the town sheriff John Langston (John Cleese) and all three men leave town just ahead of a posse, when they are aided by Mal, a sharpshooting cowboy played by Danny Glover.

Before reaching the town of Silverado, the quartet come to the aid of a wagon train of settlers (including Roseanna Arquette). Then once in town, they separate and their friendship is strained as they sort out their lives in the town run by Ethan McKendrick and his sheriff, a former riding buddy of Paden's named Cobb (Brian Dennehy).

The above synopsis only scratches the surface of the top-rate cast the Kasdans assembled and leaves out small but important parts played by Jeff Goldblum, Linda Hunt and James Gammon, among others. The modern touches help make the movie even more fun, such as Kline's Zen-like deadpan Paden and Cleese's dry-witted Langston. Listing all of the pitch-perfect grace notes from every cast member would make this a novel-length review, and I won't try your patience. I'll just suggest you rent the movie.

But Silverado succeeds first of all not because it's a great retro Western or a great revisionist Western (it's not really all that revisionist) but because it's a great Western, period, and a great movie. The Kasdans include all the familiar elements -- the ambush sneak attacks, the villains' lack of concern for anything but their own interests, the dusty street showdown, the gunfight through town, and so on. They do them all well, though, not figuring they could skimp on the quality of their dialogue just because Western fans would see anything with a hat and a gunbelt. And they cast the roles perfectly: the taciturn Glenn, the contemplative Kline, the menacing Dennehy, the wild-card Costner, the solid and dignified Glover, and so on. First-time composer Bruce Broughton earned an Academy Award nomination for the score (he lost out to five-time winner John Barry), another exceptionally strong feature of the movie.

Silverado ends with a character shouting, "We'll be back," thought by some to indicate Kasdan's plans for a sequel. It never materialized (probably for the best; double lightning strikes may be rare but they outnumber good sequels by a wide margin), nor did a wide-scale revival of the Western itself. The next notable works in the genre would be television's Lonesome Dove in 1989, Costner's own Dances With Wolves in 1990 and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven in 1992. Those entries and others repeat what Silverado made clear -- there's plenty of life left in the most American of movie genres when moviemakers, writers and actors at the top of their game put out the kind of effort that makes great films of any genre.