Silverado (1985) Review

A man wakes in a shack in the desert and is shot at through the walls by three men who have followed him there. He kills all three, walks out into the light, and the film has told you exactly what it intends to be inside four minutes.

The 7 is for craft without a subject. Every sequence is well made, the cast is superb, John Bailey’s photography is enormous and the Bruce Broughton score is the best original Western music since Bernstein. There is simply nothing underneath it.

That is a legitimate thing to make and it is the reason the film sits below the others on this page. Everything here is a version of something the genre already did, executed with affection and considerable skill.

Four Leads Before They Were Famous

Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover and Kevin Costner, none of them a star at the time, and three of them within two years of becoming one.

Costner is the discovery and he is playing a character who is barely written. Jake is delighted by everything, jumps off things, rides badly on purpose, and the performance is pure kinetic enthusiasm in a film where everybody else is being cool.

Kline has the closest thing to an interior life. Paden is a former outlaw who keeps making decent decisions against his own interest, and the film gives him the best line in it, which is about not liking people who kill dogs.

That line is also the whole character. He cannot articulate a principle and he can identify a thing he will not stand, which is how most people operate in practice, and Kline plays the mild surprise of a man discovering where his own limits happen to lie and being no more pleased about the discovery than anybody else in that same position would probably have ended up being.

Danny Glover’s Mal has the material that should have been the film. A Black man returning home to a family farm that has been taken, refused service in a saloon, and the picture raises all of that and then routes it into the general plot.

His sister is the other half of it. She has been running a house in the settlement by means the film declines to name, and the reunion between them contains more history than anything else in two hours. Neither thread goes anywhere.

Every Convention, Assembled

A cattle baron who owns the sheriff. A corrupt lawman who was once a friend. A stagecoach robbery, a jailbreak, a cattle stampede, a saloon, a shootout in a street, and a final confrontation announced in advance.

Kasdan had written Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, both of which are assemblies of existing forms done exceptionally well, and this is the same instinct applied to a genre that was dormant. The difference is that those two had a want at the center and this has four men who mostly arrive at things.

The plot is genuinely difficult to summarize afterward, which is the symptom. Things happen, competently, in sequence, and the connective tissue is that these four keep encountering each other.

Compare it to Rio Bravo, which is on this page and has almost no plot at all. That film is easy to describe because the situation is one sentence and everything happens inside it. This one has a great deal of story and no situation.

What it does supply is pleasure. The film is fast, funny, handsome and generous, and there is nothing wrong with a work whose ambition is to be enjoyable for two hours.

Brian Dennehy

Cobb is a sheriff who was once an outlaw alongside Paden, is friendly, reasonable and entirely corrupt, and Dennehy plays him as somebody who genuinely likes the man he is going to have to kill.

That is the best idea in the film. He offers Paden a job, means it, and the offer is not a trap. He simply wants his friend to come and work for him and cannot understand why a former outlaw would object to the arrangement.

The performance is warm throughout, which makes it work. Dennehy never plays menace, so the threat comes entirely from the audience’s understanding that a pleasant man who owns a town is a worse problem than a hostile one.

His last scene is the one moment the film approaches something. He tells Paden he was never going to be the one who walked away from this, and he is correct, and neither of them is surprised.

The staging of it is also the film at its best. An empty street, a long wait, the two of them talking at a distance about the hat Paden is wearing, which Cobb once owned. A whole friendship compressed into a conversation about a piece of clothing.

It Looks Superb

John Bailey shot it in New Mexico in Super 35 and the film is built on enormous horizontal compositions with very small figures in them.

The opening is the statement. A shack in an empty desert, a gunfight in near darkness, and then a door opening onto a landscape so wide the screen can barely hold it, cut to a man riding into it.

Kasdan built a permanent town set near Santa Fe for the production, which was used for decades afterward by other productions. The town has weight because it is a town instead of a facade.

Bruce Broughton’s score was nominated and deserved to win. It is the last great original Western theme, unashamedly heroic, and it does a considerable amount of the work of persuading the audience that this matters.

That is worth stating plainly, because the score is carrying scenes the script has not earned. Strip the music out of the ride into town and what remains is four men on horses arriving somewhere, which is the test any film built on a great theme eventually fails.

Why It Did Not Revive the Genre

Twenty-three million dollars, a return around thirty-two, respectable reviews, and no wave of Westerns behind it.

The reason is the thing the 7 measures. A revival needs a film that makes an argument about why the form is worth returning to, and this one makes an argument that the form is fun, which does not sustain a movement.

What followed four years later was Dances with Wolves and then Unforgiven, both of which had something to say, and both of which are usually credited with the revival this film did not manage.

It is nevertheless the most purely enjoyable Western of the period, and the affection in it is real. Kasdan loved these films and made one, and the result is a very good time and a very slight object.

The supporting bench is also absurdly deep for a film nobody talks about. Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, John Cleese as an English sheriff, Rosanna Arquette, and a very young Costner, all in a picture that came and went in a summer.

Should you watch Silverado?

Yes, for a Saturday. Four superb actors before anybody knew them, a town built for real, the last great Western score, and a plot assembled from every convention the genre owned, executed with enormous skill and no argument whatsoever.

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