Quigley Down Under

Tom Selleck was quite popular on Magnum, PI back in the 1980s, but for whatever reason he nevr got that many good movie parts. One of the best would be in Quigley Down Under.

Selleck plays Matthew Quigley, who at the start of the movie is getting off a boat in Fremantle, Australia (the port city for Perth on Australia's west coast) in the late 19th century. As he's getting off the boat, there's another American dubbed Crazy Cora (Laura San Giacomo) who is being harassed, so Quigley defends her. The thanks he gets is that Cora keeps calling him "Roy". Also thankless is the fact that the people who were harassing Cora are working for the man who's hiring Quigley, a ranch owner named Elliott Marston (Alan Rickman), they not realizing this is the man they're supposed to pick up.

Quigley is down in Australia because he needed to get away from whatever about the American West made him uncomfortable, and because he's got a skill Marston can use. Marston had taken out newspaper ads for a marksman, and boy is Quigley a good one. He, like Lucas McCain, has a modified rifle that, in Quigley's case, allows him to shoot highly accurately at distances over a half mile, which is pretty amazing for the late 1800s. You can imagine the sort of vermin in the Australian outback that might be a threat to a sheep rancher.

However, Quigley finds out over dinner with Marston that those aren't the vermin Marston has in mind. Instead, the Australian government has a policy of "pacification" regarding the Aborigines, with ranchers allowed to pacify them by any appropriate measures. For Marston, this means exterminating them. However, they've learned to stay out of range of traditional pistols and rifles, which is why he wants a sharpshooter who can shoot at extreme range.

If Quigly was displeased with what he saw in America, you can only imagine how he's going to react to this. First he throws Marston out of his own house through the front door, and when Marston comes back in, throws him out a second time. Quigley is badly outnumbered however, as nobody else seems to have a problem with exterminating the Aborigines. So they concuss him, drag him out to the middle of nowhere, and leave him and Cora to die.

However, the men assigned that job made one mistake. Quigley had been promised £50 in gold coins, a substantial sum in those days, and the men who left Quigley for dead didn't think to take that money. So Quigley appeals to their greed, and is able to stab one of the two while getting his hands on his rifle to shoot the other one.

What follows next is a mix of a whole bunch of movies, like the Robert Ryan Inferno, or Walkabout or The African Queen, albeit on dry land, as Quigley and Cora try to escape and survive while falling in love along the way. It's a predictable formula, but one that works well, which is probably it's been used so many times in the movies. Selleck, despite his facial hair being styled to ridiculous levels, fits the role easily, while San Giacomo is good as a woman with a past. Rickman wasn't too far removed from Die Hard, and is unsurprisingly good as a nasty villain.

But what really surprised me about Quigley Down Under is how dark it was. For some reason, probably because of Tom Selleck in the lead role, I thought it would be a fairly light, if not outright comic, western. Sure there's some comic relief, mostly having to do with Quigley constantly being called "Roy", but for the most part the movie isn't light at all, being particularly unflinching in its depiction of the treatment of Aborigines.

Quigley Down Under is currently in the rotation on one of the commercial cable channels, but it's also on DVD the last I checked.