Quigley Down Under (Pathé Entertainment, MGM, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie my husband Charles and I ended up watching last night (Friday, November 26) was Quigley Down Under (1990), directed by Australia-born Simon Wincer straight off his triumphant success with the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove. It’s a novelty Western in which the biggest novelty was that it takes place in Australia, and screenwriter Jack Hill was inspired by a 1974 article he read in the Los Angeles Times about the genocidal campaign 19th century white settlers in Australia had launched against the Aborigines. It was one of those projects that quickly fell into “development hell,” cycling through several different studios, directors, and stars (one of the most interesting attempts would have starred Steve McQueen just after his 1980 film The Hunter, but McQueen’s asbestos-caused cancer caught up with him and The Hunter was his last film before he died) before it finally ended up with Pathé Entertainment. The star was Tom Selleck, just coming off not only his eight-season run as Hawai’i-based private investigator Thomas Magnum on Magnum, P.I. (the first time I tricked with my late partner John Gabrish, he had a huge photo of Selleck as Magnum on his bedroom wall) but also his surprise success in the Disney comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987). I’ve sometimes listed Selleck along with classic-era Hollywood stars like Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and Errol Flynn as someone whose acting chops developed as he lost his looks, but in 1990 he was still the tall, thin Selleck of Magnum, P.I. rather than the far heftier police commissioner Frank Reagan on a later CBS-TV series, Blue Bloods (2010-2024), a role he acted with power, authority, and depth. Alas, Quigley Down Under didn’t give him much of an acting challenge; though the film is set (and shot) in Australia, he’s still playing the typical “Western outsider,” riding implacably through a desert countryside and proving quick both with his fists and his gun. The gun in question is a long rifle which Matthew Quigley (Selleck) had custom-built (the gun was actually made by the Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing Company of Big Timber, Montana, which gets credit in the film) which we’re told has a range of 1,200 yards. (As Charles pointed out, that’s well over half a mile.)

Quigley has come to Australia in the first place in response to an ad from cattle rancher Elliott Marston (a superior villain performance by Alan Rickman) looking for long-range shooters. Marston explains to Quigley that the reason he got the job was that the other 28 applicants just sent him letters; Quigley sent him a wanted poster of himself with six well-placed shots drilled into it as a sample of his skills. We first know that Marston is a villain when he casually shoots two deserters from the British army after they, who’ve brought Quigley to Marston’s ranch in the first place on a cart drawn by cattle (“Doesn’t anyone ride horses in this place?” Quigley asks), plead with Marston to shelter them and give them work. Marston gives Quigley a bag of 50 gold coins as a retainer and says there’ll be more once he finishes the job, whatever it is. Only it turns out that the job Marston has hired Quigley for is a genocidal campaign against the Aborigines – he even cites the U.S.’s genocide against its own Native population as an example – and Quigley is so angry about this he literally throws Marston through the windows of his own home. (The people who make fake “glass” out of spun sugar sure had a workout with this film. So did the stunt people: Quigley Down Under’s imdb.com page has 40 stunt people listed, which is nice to know because it means Wincer didn’t do it all with CGI.) Marston’s Aboriginal servant sneaks up behind Quigley and knocks him out (he’s obviously the Aboriginal equivalent of a “house n****r”). The next thing Quigley knows, he and his sort-of girlfriend “Crazy Cora” (Laura San Giacomo, coming off her part in Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape that should have made her a star; alas, instead she sank into the salt mines of TV), whom Quigley previously rescued from a gang of kidnappers who obviously wanted to traffic her, are left on Marston’s orders in the middle of the Australian desert with the intent that the heat, thirst, and overall exposure will do them in. This reminded Charles of his joke about the James Bond movies, in which the villains, instead of simply shooting him when they capture him, cook up some elaborate way of killing him that just gives him a chance to escape.

Through their desert ordeal and afterwards Cora keeps calling Matthew “Roy,” which turns out to have been the name of her late husband from Texas. It seems that Cora accidentally killed their child back home, the police wanted to arrest her, and Roy arranged for the two of them to escape to Australia. (This was supposed to be delivered in a piece of expository dialogue from Laura San Giacomo that was almost totally buried during the movie from Simon Wincer’s deathly sound mix.) Cora even offers to have sex with Quigley, but he turns her down because she keeps calling him “Roy” and if he’s going to make love with her, he wants her to acknowledge his name. Fortunately, they’re rescued, partly by a raiding party which Quigley, even with his hands tied, is able to shoot them and grab his personal long-range rifle from one of his victims; and partly by the Aborigines. They take him in, allow him to recover in a cave decorated with sacred drawings that supposedly help him heal, and ultimately send him on his way. Later Quigley and Cora encounter another Marston raiding party who are literally throwing Aborigines off a cliff, and they rescue one of them, a baby. In between these incidents, Quigley rides off in search of a local town where he can get supplies and also more of the special ammunition his gun requires. He gets it from Grimmelman (Ron Haddrick), a German immigrant who runs the local general store and has a wife and young son. Alas, Marston’s men catch up with him and kidnap Grimmelman’s son so they can steal Quigley’s horse. Grimmelman, who helped Quigley in the first place because he hates what Marston is doing to the Aborigines, ends up with his wife dead in the ensuing gunfight but with the 50 gold coins Marston gave Quigley way back when. Then, after a few more confrontations with Marston’s men, Quigley returns to Marston’s ranch and ultimately kills Marston and his two surviving lieutenants with a revolver, the culmination of an in-joke throughout the movie because Quigley had always said he didn’t like handguns. As Marston lays dying from Quigley’s shots, Quigley tells him, “I said I never had much use for one; I never said I didn't know how to use it.” Then he’s confronted by Major Ashley-Pitt (Chris Haywood), commander of the local British army regiment, who brings 50 men to the ranch and threatens to arrest Quigley – only Quigley is saved by his Aborigine friends, who mass on the mountaintops and far outnumber the Brits. Quigley and Cora set off to take a ship to San Francisco (one wonders why they’re going back to the U.S. where they’re both wanted for murder), only when the clerk selling them the tickets asks for Quigley’s name, he says, “Roy Cobb” – the name of Cora’s late husband. The film’s tag scene shows Quigley kissing Cora after she finally tells him the two words he wanted most to hear from her: “Matthew Quigley.”

Quigley Down Under was a box-office flop and it got roasted by the critics, too. The film’s commercial failure probably had something to do with the fact that it was released around the same time as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, which pretty much cornered the market for Westerns with sympathetic depictions of Native people. The critics generally didn’t like it (except for Alan Rickman, whose man-you-love-to-hate performance got raves) because it just seemed like a recycling of old Western tropes; the New York Times damned it as “a formula Western at its most pokey.” Charles and I had the same feeling about it; Tom Selleck was just doing the same outlaw-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had done before him – and two films Wayne made about the Alaska Gold Rush, Ray Enright’s The Spoilers (1942) and Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960), did a much better job of transporting the standard Western clichés to a different but related locale. For some reason, though, Quigley Down Under gradually developed a cult following on cable TV. Apparently real-life snipers have coined the term “a Quigley” to indicate killing two people with the same bullet from the same gun, as Quigley does in the movie, and the town of Forsyth, Montana renames itself “Quigley” for one day each year, on which it hosts a long-range shooting contest. As far as the reason I was watching this movie – Basil Poledouris’s score – it, like the film itself, seems to be made from bits and pieces of old Western clichés. The “Main Title” theme started with a clarinet, then a tuba, then a banjo for a ragtime feel that had me expecting a more light-hearted movie than the one we got. Then it suddenly cut to a big theme reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein’s iconic score for The Magnificent Seven (1959) – but then, aside from Ennio Morricone and his pan-pipes for the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood “spaghetti Westerns” from the 1960’s, just about everyone who’s written a score for a Western since The Magnificent Seven has copied it. There’s a nice violin solo on the Irish folk song “The Rising of the Moon” (also known as “The Wearing of the Green” and sung under that title by Judy Garland in her 1940 musical Little Nellie Kelly) and a few relatively restrained moments before both the ragtime theme and the Magnificent Seven knock-off return. Overall, Quigley Down Under is a nice little movie and I don’t regret having seen it, but there’s nothing particularly special about it either.