I have tried to like this movie, but was distracted by the tidiness. Most of the clothes looked like they just came from the dry cleaners and the people looked as if they had just stepped out of the shower. Even the buidings looked new. I like my westerns gritty, and this one didn't make the cut.
sharePaden's union suit looked kind of well-worn and grimy.
But I'll agree about Emmett's leather pants - looked new from the store.
Perhaps they had done; he just left prison after a 5 year term. Did you forget that plot point or miss it somehow? He killed a man in self-defense.
share"Did you forget that plot point or miss it somehow?"
Couldn't help yourself from adding that little bit of douche-ism, could you now?
I actually like this movie (I love Westerns) but don't really love it. It does lack the gritty element you would expect in the old West. You would not have seen as many cleanly shaven men. Even those that had beards were too neat.
I look for dusty clothes, hats gritty surroundings, and the normal scene you'd expect in the old Western towns. That said, it's a fun movie to watch, but not like the old style Clint Eastwood Western...
Technically then wouldn't this be kind of a throwback to the much neater earlier westerns? The kind of westerns made fun of in back to the future III for the red cowboy boots. I would say the majority of characters are a bit too neat and I think our is something that bugged me on first viewing too. But the main characters aren't really the shiftless nomadic kind of wanderers and had access to water. This is kind of the more civilized old west if you were.
Just look at slot of the westerns a decade previous to Eastwoods Leone era westerns. Heck even his own work on Rawhide a decade or so earlier. Then again it always bugged me how these outlaws always seemed to have a killer dental plan. Lol
I interpreted this 'cleaner' western as in the style of the old Maverick series, and the Maverick movie with Mel Gibson, just less silly - more drama, but the same wholesome feeling of the 60's western genre when a little comedy was added ...
It has parts that look gritty and the only way I think they can truly make it gritty is to film it with an old process like they filmed in the 60's (The Good, The Bad & The Ugly for example) but it's always about how much better of a filming process the newer movies seem to go after. Take Tombstone for example, I love that movie but that one does look all bright and tidy like you say about this movie. I'd love to see some new westerns come out but filmed to look like they came out in the 60's, that would totally fit with the western look. IMO
I love this movie by the way, I watch it all the time. One of my favorites.
I thought the costumes were gorgeous.
shareThe co-writer and director was Lawrence Kasdan, who had written some of the Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark films. I think Raiders is especially connected to "Silverado": the first Indiana Jones adventure kind of gave us a "clean" Disney-fied world of jungle adventure and desert action.
Without disrespecting them, Kasdan was out to reject both the slo-motion gore (blood spurting) of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and the slow moving operative foreign-ness of the Leone films(of which, said, Kasdan, "they were Westerns but never seemed to be set in the real American West.") Westerns in the late sixties and seventies had largely been grimy, muddy, grim affairs -- with anti-heroes and outright villains prevailing.
So Kasdan made sure that nobody(almost nobody?) bleeds when they get shot in Silverado(OK, Scott Glenn takes one to the thigh in the finale), even as LOTS of bad guys (and some good guys) do get killed. Kasdan kept the images clear, the clothes clean, the mud and the blood minimal.
He essentially made "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as a Western. And with four heroes who ALL survived the adventure(another rarity in modern Westerns.)
It was a fun movie.
And its about all we got of that nature. Eastwood's Pale Rider of the same 1985 summer made more money with a more dull story(but it had Clint in a Western.) More Westerns were coming, but they would be grim(Unforgiven) and gory(Tombstone and its failed competition, Wyatt Earp). Young Guns and Bad Girls would be rather "gimmick Westerns," neither authentic nor grim. Interesting to me: when did the Spaghetti Western END? I don't remember many after Leone quit making them.
I never bought this movie. Just too slick and refined. Kasdan likes things too carefully planned out to be able to not see his work as more than a precisely scripted blueprint of a movie.
shareIt's kind of the idea though. It's not meant to be a gritty western, but more of a throwback to the classic 'good vs evil' westerns of the 1940s and 50s.
shareThere was a lot of grit and grime and weathered clothing in movie westerns of the '40s and '50s. The nicely pressed outfits and bright lighting of "Silverado" are reminiscent of '50s and '60s television westerns like "Bonanza".
As for the buildings, if you're in a western town in the 1870s or 1880s, and the town was built in the 1870s, it's going to look pretty new. It's not going to look like a hundred-year-old ghost town.