Cinema: Cuisinartistry

Friends! Do you wake up dead each morning because you watched another of those old-fashioned westerns on the late show? Have you stayed up past midnight to see High Noon ? Did you miss the bus to work because you caught Stagecoach at 3 a.m.? Well, suffer from horse-opera hangover no more! Now there's Silverado, the Cuisinart western! Silverado dices, splices, chops, co-opts, hones and clones every oater archetype in just 2 hr. 13 min.; that's less than 1% of the time it would take you to sit through the collected works of John Wayne! And if you act now, we'll throw in nine, yes, nine of the cinema's rising stars--Kevinklinescottglennrosannaarquettejohncleesekevincostnerbriandennehydannygloverjeffgoldblumandlindahunt--almost none of whom look at home on the range! That's Silverado, friends! The best of the western in one disposable film. (From K-Tell, a division of Kasdan Industry.)

Some movie genres will just not lie still under Lawrence Kasdan's knife. As screenwriter (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and writer-director (Body Heat), he has performed deft surgery on the Saturday-matinee serial and the film noir melodrama. But the western will not yield. Silverado sprays the buckshot of its four or five story lines across the screen with the abandon of a drunken galoot aiming at a barn door. Though the film interrupts its chases and shootouts to let some fine actors stare meaningfully or spit out a little sagebrush wisdom, it rarely allows them to build the camaraderie that an old cowhand like Gabby Hayes exuded with no sweat. Agreeable but never compelling, Silverado proves it takes more than love of the western to make a good one. Maybe the dudes at K-Tell were a mite too slick for the job. --By Richard Corliss