BEFORE: From Texas to North Carolina to California to Arizona - I feel like I'm on my World Tour from late last year all over again. But I don't think these films were even part of my list back then. Linking from "The Claim", Wes Bentley was in a 2013 film called "Pioneer" with Stephen Lang (last seen in "Guilty as Sin"). Which sounds like another Western, but apparently it wasn't.
THE PLOT: A successful lawman's plans to retire anonymously in Tombstone, Arizona, are disrupted by the kind of outlaws he was famous for eliminating.
AFTER: This is it, the classic story of a Western shootout - you know, the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona? Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday against the Clantons, McLaurys and Billy Claiborne in 1881, the most famous 30-second gunfight in the American West. This is not cowboys vs. Mexicans, or even cowboys vs. Indians, this is lawmen vs. "cowboys" - in this film, cowboys is a bad word, nearly interchangable with "outlaws".
I took some time after the film to read up on Earp's life after he moved to Tombstone, which this film sort of simplified, only detailing his interests in dealing cards and trying to open his own gambling house. But the truth is that he did serve as a deputy in Tombstone, and this film depicts him as dead-set against that, and trying to talk his brothers Virgil and Morgan out of working as lawmen. And it's all about wearing that star, since really that's all that seems to define the legality of someone's actions in the Old West.
The conflicts between the Earps and the Cowboys were more numerous in the real world, there were incidents of stagecoach robberies and stolen mules and competing over women that were also not shown in this film - so they really sort of simplified that conflict, if you ask me. However, the depiction of the shootout at the O.K. Corral seemed like it stuck pretty close to actual events, including the county sheriff trying to arrest the Earps and Doc Holliday afterwards.
Of course, any film would encounter difficulties in reducing a historical figure's entire life to a mere two-hour film, but choosing to focus on Wyatt Earp's time in Tombstone is probably the ideal choice. Thank God I wasn't subjected to flashbacks to his early life, or time in Dodge City, or anything like that.
This film marked the third depiction this week of someone with a "frontier illness" - there was Jim Bowie lying sick in bed at the Alamo, and then the character in "The Claim" with consumption, which is another name for tuberculosis, which plagued Doc Holliday in tonight's film. And both the town of Kingdom Come in "The Claim" and Tombstone demonstrated failed attempts at gun control (an odd theme tonight, considering the appearance of Charlton Heston...)
I reserve the right to revise the rating after tomorrow night's film, which is another telling of the same events...
Also starring Kurt Russell (last seen in "Miracle"), Val Kilmer (last seen in "Red Planet"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Contender"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "Mighty Joe Young"), Powers Boothe (last seen in "U Turn"), Michael Biehn, Dana Delany (last seen in "Housesitter"), Jon Tenney, Thomas Haden Church (last heard in "John Carter"), Jason Priestley, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Joanna Pacula, Michael Rooker (last seen in "The Bone Collector"), Terry O'Quinn (last seen in "The Cutting Edge"), John Corbett (last seen in "I Hate Valentine's Day"), Billy Zane (last seen in "Memphis Belle"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "Limitless"), with cameos from Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "The Alamo"), Frank Stallone and Charlton Heston (last seen in "Bowling for Columbine").
RATING: 6 out of 10 red sashes
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