.

Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Screenwriters: Lawrence Kasdan, Mark Kasdan

By Roderick Heath

In memoriam: Brian Dennehy 1938-2020

Miami-born, West Virginia-raised Lawrence Kasdan had ambitions to become a filmmaker since childhood. Determined to break into 1970s Hollywood with the aim of becoming a director, he nonetheless made his play as a screenwriter. Kasdan spent stints as a teacher and advertising copy writer before he landed an agent with a screenplay called The Bodyguard, a work that would take another seventeen years to hit movie screens. The first script he had produced was the romantic comedy Continental Divide (1978), shepherded by Steven Spielberg in one of his early forays into producing. The film wasn’t a great success but clearly Spielberg was impressed by Kasdan, as he and George Lucas tapped Kasdan to write both Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strike Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), swiftly establishing Kasdan as a talent equal to the challenge of the blockbuster age, a keen and canny wordsmith and a member of the Movie Brat tribe with a deep affection for genre fare of yore. Kasdan was swiftly rewarded with a shot at directing. Despite his skill at fleshing out fantastical material, Kasdan’s own taste was more earthbound and old-school, and he would challenge himself often during his directorial career to revive waned genres like film noir, westerns, and screwball comedy with a modern edge and relevance, and finding varying levels of success.

Kasdan’s directorial debut, the lean and mordant neo-noir Body Heat (1981), instantly grabbed him attention, and his follow-up, The Big Chill (1983), a comedy-drama rooted in Kasdan’s experiences in studying former ‘60s student radicals settling into comfortable middle age, was hugely successful and admired at the time although it eventually became a pop culture punchline. Kasdan’s later career slowly waned as he made a few too many middling comedies and smug, touch-feely dramedies. For his third film, Kasdan resolved to take a shot at reviving the Western. After the general box office catastrophe that met Heaven’s Gate (1980) and The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), the Western had been declared dead, but Kasdan felt it only needed a loving hand determined to remind the mass audience what a fun genre it could be, harking back to fare like The Big Country (1958) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Silverado is probably the high-water mark of Kasdan’s directing work, albeit one that was only mildly successful at the box office, ironically because the studio was so excited by the wild audience reaction at test screenings it was sent to theatres without a proper build-up. It even helped spark a sputtering revival for the Western, initially in the teenybopper shoot-‘em-up Young Guns (1988), and more substantially as Kasdan’s young acting discovery Kevin Costner would go on to score an Oscar-garlanded hit with Dances With Wolves (1990) and give impetus for a handful of new entries in the 1990s. Most of those didn’t land with audiences, however, and Silverado itself, despite its best intentions, might well reveal why the genre couldn’t truly return.

Kasdan executed the film with a sprawling sense of the genre’s visual and storytelling lexicon, but still made it adhere to his own, more personal fascination with a gallery of motley characters drawn together in because of a shared cause and experience. The film starts memorably and deliberately on a claustrophobic note, with a sequence that feels close to the climax of Blood Simple (1984). Emmett (Scott Glenn) is a man sleeping in a dark and tiny cabin, when someone starts shooting through the walls at him. Emmett manages to grab his rifle and fire back, killing his attackers, and he steps outside with the reveal that the cabin is perched on a ridge above a glorious landscape of valleys and snow-capped mountains, a great moment for cinematographer John Bailey. Kasdan nods to the famous opening of The Searchers (1956) here whilst also performing his own, specific piece of visual legerdemain, releasing the Western from a cage of dolour and reduced horizons. Emmett has just been released from prison, and he’s making his way back to the town of Silverado, where some of his family reside, with the ultimate intention of reach California with his younger brother Jake (Costner). As he crosses a stretch of desert, Emmett encounters a man laid out on the sand. This is Paden (Kevin Kline), who reports he was held up and robbed by some men he was travelling with, and left without water to die. Paden seems an amiable man, perhaps out of his depth, although anyone would look like a twit in such circumstances. Emmett helps him out of the desert.

When they reach a frontier hamlet, Paden sees one of his attackers, and hurriedly buys a poor pistol with his last dollar. He shoots the thief, revealing his brilliance as a gunman, and reclaims his horse. Another man passing through town, Cobb (Brian Dennehy), vouches for him: Cobb and Paden were once partners in an outlaw gang together, but Paden is determined to go straight. Paden continues travelling with Emmett, until they reach a more substantial town, Turley, where Emmett expects to meet up with Jake. As they eat in a tavern, they watch in interest as a black cowboy, Malachi ‘Mal’ Johnson (Danny Glover) comes in and orders a drink, only to be brusquely told by the owner to leave, and a couple of local heavies take pleasure in backing him up. Mal instead pummels all three, only to attract the attention of the town’s very English, very strict Sheriff, Langston (John Cleese), who runs him out of town. They soon learn that Langston has Jake in prison awaiting hanging for killing a man in a gunfight, which Jake swears was self-defence. Emmett resolves to break Jake out, and Paden tells him he doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the law again, so they part amicably. But Paden spies another of his robbers, this one wearing his signature hat, and when the thief tries to shoot him Paden guns him down, which gets him thrown into the same cell with Jake. The duo work together to escape and link up with Emmett.

The way Kasdan introduces and develops Paden signifies his clever and witty approach to reclaiming the Western. Paden is first seen stripped to his long-johns, and speaks not with a hard-bitten western accent but a polite and bewildered lilt, a seemingly absurd figure who might be at home in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) or The Missouri Breaks (1975) or any number of other mud-and-blood Westerns, or even Blazing Saddles (1974). He’s mocked by his former fellow bandits for having dropped out of their number because concern for a dog triggered his capacity for empathy. Casting Kline, better known as a comic actor, compounds the initial miscue. But once Emmett helps him to civilisation, Paden begins reclaiming both his possessions and his pride, reassembling himself and the aura of his breed piece by piece, unveiling his near-supernatural talent with a six-shooter and an unyielding and fearless streak, hard to provoke but truly fearsome once activated. His progression makes literal Kasdan’s purposeful shift from recalling the shambolic and cynical strain of the genre seen in the ‘70s and moving back in the genre’s history to restore the figure of the Western hero in all his glory. This motif threads through the film’s first third, at the same time Emmett, Paden, Jake, and Mal form together into a band and make their way to the titular town, their amity fused by their shared and complimentary talents and their common experience of various forms of injustice, of which Mal’s struggle with racism is the most blatant example, although Emmett, Jake, and Paden all face their own versions.

The storyline, once the plot proper kicks into gear, actually uses the same basic plot as Heaven’s Gate in dealing with a range war sparked by a greedy cattleman, only in a less virulently anti-capital and more crowd-pleasing way. The opening credits, with Bruce Broughton’s grandiose, Alfred Newman-esque score thundering over shots of Emmett riding past vast and gritty-beautiful landscapes, situates the characters in a purely mythical movie zone. The films swiftly racks up a vivid sense of the genre’s classic motifs – the monumental landscape, the tough but decent heroes unveiled in all their badass brilliance. That said, Kasdan resists getting po-faced and square in restoring the classical Western grandeur, deploying a loose comedic edge to give familiar figures and ideas a new instability, particularly with an offbeat approach to casting, putting actors largely known for comedy in serious parts and vice versa. This extends to Cleese’s ingeniously droll and aggravating performance as Langston, bullying and railroading people with a very proper English manner, Basil Fawlty with a six shooter, and the diminutive Linda Hunt as Stella, the female bar owner who becomes Paden’s best friend but needs a raised platform behind the bar to serve drinks. Jeff Goldblum enters the film with his customary rubbery intonations as a gambler named Slick who seems at first like he might be an ally to the heroes but proves instead a villain. Most vitally, Kasdan gave young Costner, whose mature screen persona would often be dismayingly stolid, the part of jovial, livewire, fast-shootin’ Jake, making him an instant star.

The film’s first third consists of a series of rolling challenges to the heroes that also draw them together, in a freewheeling and picaresque fashion that nonetheless obeys a particular logical flow. We move from Emmett rescuing Paden to Paden and Jake busting out of jail together with a goofy ruse, with the aid of Emmett, who blows up the town gallows to distract Langston and his deputies, and then with the intervention of Mal, who covers their flight from the sheriff with such frighteningly good marksmanship Langston decides his jurisdiction ends well short of the county line. This segues into a calculatedly iconic depiction of the four heroes riding abreast across the countryside with Broughton’s heroic theme swelling, all without a hint of irony. One the road to Silverado they come across a wagon train that’s been robbed by thieves posing as trail hands. Emmett and Mal’s altruism inspires them to go after the thieves, whilst Paden is more motivate by gaining the approval of one of the women of the train, Hannah (Rosanna Arquette), although she’s married to the bullish Conrad (Rusty Meyers), who, suspicious of the gang’s motives, elects himself to accompany them. The thieves prove to be part of a larger gang led by Dawson (James Gammon), but a successful combination of Emmett and Paden’s ruse and Mal and Jake’s shooting allows them to snatch back the train’s cashbox in a breezy, near-slapstick action sequence. Conrad holds the heroes up at gunpoint and demands the cashbox from them, but he is gunned down by one of the thieves.

Eventually the four heroes arrive with the wagon train in Silverado, where they go their separate ways: Mal to join his father Ezra (Joe Seneca), who owns his own ranch, Emmett and Jake to visit their sister Kate (Patricia Gaul), who’s married to the local land registrar J.T. Hollis (Earl Hindman) and has a son. Paden pays court to the widowed Hannah but is turned off by her professed determination to build her parcel of land into a great ranch. He soon finds Cobb is not just a local business owner but also the Silverado sheriff, positions he’s reached because he’s also the chief enforcer for the great local cattle rancher Ethan McKendrick (Ray Baker). Paden takes a job running the gaming in Cobb’s saloon the Midnight Star, managed by Stella, after Cobb fires and gut-punches the man who was in the job, Kelly (Richard Jenkins). Kelly vengefully tries to shoot Cobb but Cobb blows him away. Emmett has reasons to be wary of McKendrick, because he was in prison for shooting the cattle baron’s brother in self-defence. McKendrick professes to be satisfied by Emmett’s incarceration, but Emmett quickly learns the horse he’s riding, taken from one of the men who tried to kill him at the opening, has McKendrick’s brand, telling him McKendrick ordered the attempted hit. McKendrick is trying to take over all the nearby territory, terrorising the smaller land owners, including Ezra, who’s had his cabin burned down and now hides in a cave, and Mal’s resentful sister Rae (Lynn Whitfield) has moved into the town and become a prostitute. Upon Mal’s return he and Ezra stand up to McKendrick’s goons, but pay the price when Ezra is ambushed and shot dead.

Silverado was reportedly cut down from a greater running time prior to release, and it tells in places, but it doesn’t entirely excuse the film’s lumpiness. The way plot strands and characters pile up suddenly a good distance into the running time robs it of the gallivanting charm and pace established early on, and even a screenwriter as skilful and adroit as Kasdan can’t easily negotiate the speed bump. There’s enough raw material for a film twice Silverado’s already solid length, assembling elements at a frantic pace to build up a storyline busy enough to engage all of his heroes and justify the inclusion of an array of assorted classical genre tropes. In this regard it stands in contrast with the economic structure Kasdan managed for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and unlike that film, which so sleekly performed osmosis on generations of pulp adventuring it emerged diamond-hard, Silverado rather makes you more conscious of Kasdan’s attempt to rope together clichés. Such multiplying is also proof of Kasdan’s honourable desire to offer his fun with substance, fleshing out his heroes and providing each of them with a strong stake in the drama, even the professionally disengaged Paden.

It’s also plainly a style of drama Kasdan liked, the narrative with a panoramic sense of character and their individual straits which he visited in quite different keys in The Big Chill and later with Grand Canyon (1991) and Dreamcatcher (2002). Moreover, the film shifts gear from a romp to a more concerted melodrama as the heroes face Cobb and McKendrick, ruthless and competent villains determined to protect their interests. But some elements, particularly Paden and Emmett’s attentions to Hannah, don’t have the time to go anywhere. Hannah’s obviously been included as a sop to a more contemporary female ideal, she doesn’t really add anything to the film, unlike Whitfield’s Rae, who’s crucial to the plot and describes a neat character arc in herself. Pointedly perhaps, just about the only aspect of a good classic Western Kasdan fails then to encompass is a good romance, with Jake’s affair with good-natured saloon waitress Phoebe (Amanda Wyss) a very minor aside, whilst Paden’s quick but fierce platonic friendship with Stella ironically comes closest as a meeting of ironically inclined lost souls. Kasdan does better in racking up a number of swiftly and neatly described enemies, including Tyree (Jeff Fahey), another member of Paden and Cobb’s old gang and a more feral personality itching for a chance to take on his old comrade, and lesser imps like Slick. A string of events pitch the story towards crisis point. Ezra is murdered. In a crafty scene, Emmett is glimpsed in a regulation activity for a Western hero, practicing his shooting in a suitably quiet and deserted area. Once he empties all his guns, McKendrick’s goons suddenly spring out of hiding and attack him, only for Mal, who’s been hiding since his father’s death, to intervene and save Emmett who suffers a bad blow to the head from Tyree riding repeatedly over him. Mal is then captured and jailed by Cobb. McKendrick and more goons break into J.T.’s registrar office to burn all the land deeds, killing J.T. shot and kidnapping his and Kate’s son Augie (Thomas Wilson Brown), whilst Jake vanishes, presumed dead.

Early in his directing career, Kasdan revealed a genuine knack for spotting star talent, and his first three films launched a handful of big names. One great and obvious pleasure of Silverado is its excellent cast. Indeed there are few movies that include such a large percentage of my favourite actors, most of whom are given carefully crafted roles, and even the relatively small parts sport actors of the calibre of Seneca, Gammon, and Brion James filling them out. Even Costner is terrific in an atypical role as the jaunty, irrepressible Jake, a strong contrast to Glenn’s weathered intensity as his brother and Glover’s everyman grit. Dennehy wields enough bluff charisma to light up Manhattan. Only Kline feels slightly uneasy in his part. He’s good when playing Paden’s courteous side and portraying crisis of conscience when push comes to shove. But when Paden’s dangerous streak is roused, Kline aims for lethal focus in his glare but achieves only woodenness. When Glenn as Emmett resolves to go out and fight, you believe it, but Kline looks like he’s biting his tongue on a witticism: deadpan is not the same as seriousness. Paden is pushed into a quandary as he tries to obey his desire to avoid trouble but finds his friends in trouble and Cobb and McKendrick’s war intensifying and costing innocent lives. When he signals his displeasure to Cobb after trying to extinguish the fire consuming the registrar office and learning of Augie’s kidnapping, the sheriff responds by making veiled threats on Stella’s life to hold Paden in check. Paden and Stella get drunk together and Stella realises this.

Kasdan’s desire to balance aspects of the revisionist urge with a more classical and grandiose sensibility would see him return to the Western with the much undervalued Wyatt Earp (1994), on that occasion with Costner in the lead for a darker and more interrogative attempt to weld the two hemispheres, epic and expansive in form but psychological and troubled in details. Silverado notably only avoids dealing with Native Americans in ticking off genre clichés, whereas Costner with Dances With Wolves would make the issue central: between the two films they revealed that a neo-Western had to either entirely ignore Native Americans or commit wholly to examining their plight. Silverado patterns itself more after the type of Western that exploited the genre for a mythical stage for depicting social problems in microcosm: every Western town with its open main drag became a free-floating ahistorical island where moral drama was reduced to an essential scheme. Kasdan doesn’t entirely neglect this aspect despite the film’s generally high-spirited tone even. Many an old Western had the crooked sheriff and the bullying landowner, but Kasdan nudges the template along to make the heroes all outsiders to varying degrees, and where the social order often portrayed in the old westerns is made more explicitly a battle of those outsiders against corrupt blocs of power.

Consequentially, Kasdan’s west can encompass black heroes and tough and unusual women: the emphasis on the Johnsons as black landowners threatened by racists and bullies is historically pertinent and little treated in the genre, and the subplot of Mal and Rae’s mutual resentment, as Mal returns from running off the big city, is the most substantial in the movie, and leads to Rae, after spurning her brother, trying nonetheless to save Mal from jail and getting clipped by a bullet for her pains. Kasdan works a strong if obvious visual idea in the climactic shoot-out framing Paden before the town with the white-painted church prominent in the background, whilst Cobb is pictured poised on the edge with the wild landscape behind him, suggesting one has become symbolic of the community whilst the other is the barbarian meeting his end. Part of the problems with Kasdan’s method of doubling up tropes lies in the very fact that he doesn’t quite use Dennehy, who was born to play a sagebrush feudal lord, effectively as a tyrannical figure, with villainy spread over Baker’s much less vivid and interesting McKendrick.

This kind of imprecision chokes off the film’s melodramatic potential just when it should be building to a pitch. The relationship between McKendrick and Cobb likewise lacks a sense of their dynamic as very different men with the same purpose in contorting the world to their will, and the impact of their reign over the town is, ironically, not as sharply described as Langston’s over his. And that leads into something that goes subtly awry with Silverado despite the general excellence on display. Kasdan never quite finds the live nerve of real emotional danger and ferocity. Whilst he provides each of his heroes with a strong spur to action, the stakes tend to drown each-other out. Instead Kasdan constantly provokes awareness that so much that’s in the movie because he wanted it in there. Such trope-harvesting movie has a habit of assimilating genres to a point where they extinguish them. Witness the way Star Wars has long since subordinated the entire space opera tradition, and who knows when anyone will try to make a pirate movie that doesn’t lurk in the shadow of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And yet Kasdan ultimately did a remarkable job of taking the most low-tech of genres and giving it a scale that didn’t feel out of place amidst ‘80s blockbusters, and he succeeded in his core desire, to make a Western that didn’t feel like a solemn chore, a lesson too many attempts since it was made haven’t kept in mind. Once Kasdan reaches clear ground to let his heroes off the leash again, the spectacle comes on hard, particularly with an excellent set-piece where Emmett and Mal ride to take back Augie at McKendrick’s ranch, with Paden finally and fatefully riding up to join them, before unleashing one of McKendrick’s cattle herds as a weapon by stampeding them through the homestead. A great gun battle ensues as the heroes take on McKendrick’s private army, with Jake reappearing and joining the fight, and Emmett managing to penetrate the McKendrick manse and save Augie whilst McKendrick himself flees to town. The heroes give chase, cueing the best of Kasdan’s shots that aim blatantly for instant genre iconography, as the quartet split apart on the separate paths into Silverado, with Augie watching them from a ridge as the incarnation of boyish admiration beholding mythologised grown-up bravery.

Today, in this regard, Silverado feels less like a revitalisation of the Western than a very early trial run for the popularity of superhero movies, envisioning the Western hero ultimately more as the realisation of a young person’s fantasy rather than an adult’s in the way, say, Sergio Leone’s films are, nor grand panoramas of social identity in the manner of John Ford’s. The distinction is minor, perhaps, but consequential. The battle that unfolds around Silverado gives all the heroes a crowning moment whilst also piling up different kinds of action resolution. Mal knifes Slick as he threatens the wounded Rae, Jake takes out multiple foes at once with brilliantly cocky moves, Emmett battles McKendrick on horseback and gets revenge when his nag kicks McKendrick’s head in, and Paden confronts Cobb at last for a classical shoot-out. Dennehy’s man-mountain falls before Kline’s gangly animal lover, and the epilogue sees the men parting ways with Paden now the anointed sheriff, the fitting end-point of his journey from the desert, whilst Mal and Rae return to the land and Emmett and Jake ride into the sunset in search of the next horizon. It’s ultimately true that Silverado tries too hard. But it’s a grand kind of trying too hard.