Survival Arts

Quigley Down Under, with Tom Selleck, 1990

A couple of months ago, I picked up the 2003 Guns & Ammo Annual for several of its articles, one of which discussed the Quigley Sharps Rifle used by Tom Selleck in the 1990 film "Quigley Down Under". Right after reading the article - my memory being what it sometimes is - I committed the film to my DVD queue on Netflix and promptly forgot about it.

Well, the movie arrived a couple of days ago, and I watched it last night. It's a great flick, and I highly recommend it on several levels. For starters, it's a good, classic western, but with modern thematic elements that don't in any way detract from its Movie-with-a-big-M grandeur. The characterizations are excellent: Tom Selleck's Matt Quigley and Laura San Giacomo's Crazy Cora have superb on-screen chemistry, and Alan Rickman's Elliot Marston is a different take on the English villains he usually plays (by the way, for my Samizdatan friends: "some of my best friends are Englishmen; really...").

What I particularly appreciated was the insistence of actor Selleck - himself an avid shooter and firearms collector - on historical accuracy in the film. In the setup to a particularly amusing and dramatic shooting demonstration Quigley gives to Marston, the former says:

"It's a lever-action breech loader. Usual barrel length is 30 inches. The one has an extra four. It's converted to use a special .45-caliber, 110-grain metal cartridge with a 540-grain paper-patch bullet. Fitted with double set triggers and a Vernier sight. Marked up to 1,200 yards. This one shoots a mite farther..."

Selleck's Quigley is The Perfect Cowboy: rugged, handsome, tough, clever, moral, and unconventional. The "tough" and "clever" parts are evident in his skill as a rifleman, his tactics (which included not only his fieldcraft but the use of his rifle as a jo-like impact weapon in one scene and escape tool in another), and the "moral" part is evident in his immediate, unequivocal, and visceral reaction to Marston's revelation of his real reason for sending for Quigley from the Americas to the Antipodes: to slaughter aborigines at distances the local riflemen couldn't reach.

The film's strong technical accuracy is not its only draw of course, for the reasons above and more, but being the technical guy I am, I notice that on p21 of the Guns & Ammo article is this tidbit from Mike Gibbons of Gibbons Ltd., who supplied prop firearms for the film:

"You never have live ammo on a movie set, so anytime you see a cartridge, you can be sure it's either a dummy round or a blank. For the shooting scenes, .45-70 black-powder blanks were used."

This is particularly interesting to me because in one scene, the camera pulls in for a close-up like the one in the picture in this blog posting. I distinctly saw more than more instance of Quigley experiencing the manly recoil of a full-house .45-110, with the push and the muzzle rise and all that. If there were no live rounds loaded, then that piece of filmmaking could only have been made at the insistence of a conscientious, educated shooting enthusiast like the actor himself. As a shooter, I really appreciate that level of attention to detail.

I'll not reveal more, but I encourage the reader to rent then buy this film.