Producers: William Shockley, Grainger Hines, Tom Brady, Allen Gilmer, Tiiu Loigu and Justin Kreinbrink Director: William Shockley Screenplay: Shelley Reid, William Shockley and Grainger Hines Cast: Blaine Maye, Sarah Cortez, Grainger Hines, David St. Louis, Chris Mulkey, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Mark Markoff, Dominic Monaghan, Jacqueline Bisset, Dermot Mulroney, Anthony Skordi, Cosima Cabrera, Gavin Warren, Nancy La Scala, Pressly Coker, Robert Jensen. Edgar de Santiago, Ryder Franco, Devon Michaels, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Brick Patrick and Dawn Marie Distributor: ArtAffects Entertainment/Quiver Distribution
Grade: C-
For most of its running-time this first feature by veteran actor and writer William Shockley is an old Western standby—the revenge horse opera, in which a man grimly tracks down the outlaws who killed his family. Then in the last act it suddenly turns into a history lesson about law and medicine that allows for a happy ending despite all the mayhem that’s preceded it. “Long Shadows” is an oddball addition to a hoary sagebrush genre.
And a lugubrious one. Sergio Leone’s myriad versions of this plot were slow, but in an operatic way that had a hypnotic effect, with their swooning visuals backed up by Ennio Morricone’s inspired music. Shockley’s take, as edited by Chris Patterson, is simply ponderous, prettily shot by cinematographer A.J. Raitano on location in Arizona (even if Daniel Koenig’s production design and Paula Rogers’ costumes don’t have a really lived-in look) but with a bland score by Tommy Fields.
The catalyst for the plot is an 1880 attack on the Dollar homestead outside Tucson by an outlaw gang led by Knox Weaver (Ronnie Gene Blevins). All the details of what transpired are revealed only gradually in periodic flashbacks, but Preston Dollar (Brick Patrick) is shot to death along with his wife Rebecca (Dawn Marie), and their young son Marcus (Gavin Warren) is left for dead, one of the bandits having slit his throat.
The boy manages to survive through the efforts of local Dr. Ginsburg (Devon Michaels), however, and grows up in a Tucson orphanage. At eighteen he emerges, now played by Blaine Maye, with revenge on his mind. But before he undertakes the ride home to visit his parents’ graves, he stops at a brothel called Purgatory run by cunning Vivian Villeré (Jacqueline Bisset) and her preening lieutenant Ned Duxbury (Dominic Monaghan).
Those two, played archly by Bisset and Monaghan (the latter has an especially embarrassing drunk scene), don’t really have much to do in what follows, even though Shockley occasionally returns to them, but Vivian is important in that she introduces Marcus to Dulce Flores (Sarah Cortez), a local girl who plays piano in the bar but is being pressured to become part of Vivian’s upstairs staff. Instead of taking advantage of the girl, Marcus liberates her from the place on the mule he’s bought, dropping her off with her sister Blanca (Cosima Cabrera) before proceeding to his old homestead.
There he finds not only his parents’ tombstones, nicely inscribed, but the place’s new owner, gruff ex-gunman Dallas Garrett (Dermot Mulroney). Dallas takes a liking to the boy and reluctantly agrees when Marcus asks for instruction in gunplay. He’s spied one of the men who killed his folks in town, and is bent on beginning his work, even though Garrett warns that killing will take a heavy toll on him.
What follows is fairly predictable stuff. With some advice from Berto Medina, a friend from the orphanage (played as a boy by Ryder Franco and as a young man by Edgar de Santiago), Marcus tracks down two of the gang—Len Kasper (Mike Markoff) and Kip Riley (Robert Jensen)—and summarily shoots them. Then he sets his sights on Weaver.
By this time, however, he’s being pursued by the law in the person of Sheriff Wesley Tibbs (Grainger Hines), a grizzled veteran grieving the loss of his own family, and his loyal deputy Deac Barnes (David St. Louis). Eventually they take him in, gravely wounded, and Dulce returns to tend to him before the inevitable trial before ambitious Judge Roy Holt (Chris Mulkey), an old colleague of Tibbs who considers himself progressively minded.
That’s where Shockley and his co-writers Hines and Shelley Reid (who also takes a cameo in the movie) toss in a couple of curveballs involving late nineteenth-century changes in legal procedure. One altered a practice that allowed the Weaver gang to escape execution years earlier, while another permitted lesser charges in murder cases. But the latter was predicated on advancements in medicine, particularly what’s here referred to as the newfangled specialty of psychology. Fortunately for Marcus, Dr. Ginsburg’s friend Dr. Thomas Dorsey (Gilbert Glenn Brown)–an actual person who, as one of the historically-based end captions informs us–was among the first black graduates of Harvard, just happens to be in town to offer a diagnosis that changes dramatically what we were shown earlier in the picture, a trick that comes dangerously close to a cheat.
The last-act twists add some interest to what’s basically a formulaic tale, but the plodding presentation vitiates even those attempts at audience education. Only a few of the cast show much vitality given Shockley’s solemn pacing—Bisset and Monaghan to some extent but especially Mulkey, who’s the sole person to bring some humor to his performance. Everyone else plays things with such seriousness, and Mayes and Cortez such amateurishness to boot, that by the end the movie has a deadening effect. Even fanciers of that dying breed, the Western, will have a hard time finding much to like in “Long Shadows.”