Netflix pick for 7/1/13 – ‘Quigley Down Under’

So who ordered the Australian-set western starring the mustachioed men? Cause this week the Crespodiso Randomizer 9000 spit out “Quigley Down Under” which means it is time to fire up the barbie, crack open a Fosters (which no one in Australia drinks) and get to watching this western about a crack shot riflemen from America heading to Australia for a job and finding out that he may have to settle some other things while he is there instead (of course with the aid of his custom-made gigantic rifle).

“Quigley Down Under” was actually developed in the late 70s for Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, but this project fell apart as so many projects do, and while it was subsequently picked up by a very interested Tom Selleck (whom I fully believe is one of the world’s biggest movie stars in a universe parallel to ours), it still took a number of years to get off the ground, finally becoming a reality in 1990, obviously as a different film than the one that was originally conceived. Who knows what the McQueen-Eastwood version would have been like, but we do have a version with Tom Selleck and Alan Rickman, so we can’t really be upset at that, can we?

This is something of a nouveau western, as it is playing with some tropes like the “Mexican stand off” but updates them just a little bit to feel more contemporary (at least contemporary for 1990), and also played heavily on a storyline dependent on the relationship between Australian and British whites in the country and their horrible mistreatment of the Aborigines, which has an obvious parallel to European settlers in North America and their tumultuous relationship with the Native American Indians, and while the movie is nowhere near perfect, it is still quite entertaining and has an ending that I find quite satisfying.

So check out “Quigley Down Under” here on the Netflix Instant and enjoy the dulcet tones of Tom Selleck and Alan Rickman.