WYATT EARP
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Instead of short films that inaccurate portray the Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Costner and Kasdan bring us a big 189-minute biopic of Wyatt Earp that inaccurately shows his whole life. Costner does not do too much for Earp, but Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday is a genuine tour de force. Still, the film just does not entertain or edify sufficiently to justify the length. Rating: high 0 (-4 to +4). A discussion of historical accuracy at the end of this review may contain minor spoilers.
Last year I reviewed TOMBSTONE and both criticized and praised the film for being half-accurate as a film version of the events around the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Well, I see the error of my ways. At least I have to say that there is a whole lot more to an historical film than accuracy. WYATT EARP is even a little more accurate than even TOMBSTONE on some points. But just recreating historical facts does not make for a good film. The two films are faithful to the historical detail about equally, but TOMBSTONE is certainly the more worthwhile. The definitive film about Wyatt Earp, if it is even possible, still remains to be made.
Basically the title of WYATT EARP tells it all. This is a biography of Wyatt Earp from the time he was a teenager to his retirement. When the film opens Wyatt is in the Oriental Saloon waiting for the most famous gunfight of his life and probably of the American West. Then we flash back and now Wyatt is a teenager on his family farm in Missouri, anxious to go off and join his brothers fighting the South. Instead he finds himself giving in to the will of an autocratic father (Gene Hackman). Wyatt's real father, incidentally, was not a lawyer as the film would have it, but a farmer and a cooper. Over some protest, Wyatt's father announces one day that the family will move west. Wyatt goes and finds the West beautiful but also lawless and violent. He returns to Missouri to learn to be a lawyer and to raise a family. When his wife dies he returns west and tries his hand at being an alcoholic, a low-life, a horse thief, and a mugger in the hopes that he will soon be able to add "corpse" to his resume. This doesn't work out for him either.
Getting back on his feet, he decides to hunt the mighty buffalo (or "titonka" to you Costner fans). Wyatt befriends Ed and Bat Masterson who come along with him as mule skinners. Later when Wyatt accidentally shows his prowess at subduing drunks he is asked to become a lawman, he brings the Masterson's along with him. And the rest is history--not that script writers Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan did much of a job of researching it.
Costner plays Wyatt as Costner. He glides through the part doing little we have not seen from him before. That is really a pity, since he desperately needs a role that will give him more to do. He has been in some good films, but it is becoming clear he wants to play the hero roles of an Errol Flynn without the dramatic range of a John Wayne. But if it looks like this film didn't give him much opportunity to stretch himself, look what it did for Dennis Quaid. As Doc Holliday, Quaid submerges himself into a Georgia accent, a moustache, and a beard, and is nearly unrecognizable. (The real Holliday wore no beard, by the way.) There are a host of other familiar faces including Mark Harmon, Catherine O'Hara, Tom Sizemore, and Betty Buckley. Clearly not much expense was spared on the cast or even the sets, yet the film has not much sparkle or style. James Newton Howard's score is never engaging. With all the beautiful Arizona scenery available Kasdan rarely lets the camera take much advantage of it.
Under Kasdan's direction the film ends up being somewhat ponderous and oddly dull. Events take a long time to develop. While no film has ever so well caught the complexity of the events surrounding the corral gunfight, and that is the difficult part, the gunfight itself is staged very inaccurately. The actual scenario of the fight is easily available so that piece of the script could have written itself, but apparentlyit just was not researched or Kasdan did not care. I am not certain, but I seem to remember in this film five men facing down the Earps rather than the actual four. It seems as if somebody who knew something about the Earps wrote an outline for the film that said at this point put in the gunfight, and then someone who didn't know as much wrote the description of the fight. The film is accurate on a high level, but very inaccurate on low-level details. And it is about an hour longer than it should have been to sustain audience interest. For what they got right, I am tempted to rate it higher, but it also makes some big mistakes. I rate it a high 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Minor Spoilers:
I have heard some critics praising this film as finally being an accurate representation of Wyatt Earp. I suppose that they mean that because this sees to be a warts-and-all representation of Wyatt. Actually this film just shows more of his life than most previous films, but it also is full of inaccuracy. As I say above, it is almost as if the writers started with an accurate outline of Wyatt's life, then invented the details they needed to flesh it out without checking on the truth of the details. Not that accurate details are easy to come by. Wyatt is one of the most fabled characters of the West and there seemto be all sorts of stories about him. But many of the details that were thrown into this version, while lending a believable historic texture, only distort the facts.
I don't know how emotionally scarred Wyatt was after the death of his first wife, but he and some of his brothers were supposedly involved in a twenty-minute street fight with two of his wife's brothers not long after the death. This torching of the house in grief was made up of the whole cloth.
Ed Masterson tells Wyatt that Bat picked the name Bat because he couldn't stand his real name, Bartholomew. And Bat is unhappy about divulging this secret. Actually, he was born William Barclay Masterson, not a particularly stigmatizing name. The story certainly added a realistic texture to the script, but it didn't come out of anybody's research.
The film shows Earp as being a crack shot and an honest lawman. None of this is true. In fact he took bribes, pocketed fines, and at least on one occasion nearly shot himself with his own gun. Most of his legend was little more than legend.
Big Nose Katie Elder (Isabella Rossellini, who strongly resembles her mother, Ingrid Bergman), explaining her unexpected good looks, says people get nicknames for all sorts of reasons. She points out her nose is not actually big. That is a nice piece of texture. And it is good script writing. But the real Big Nose Katie Elder, based on her portrait, was an ugly woman with a large nose. In fact, most of the Earp/Holliday women are portrayed far more attractively than their real counterparts. That is standard in the syntax of cinema. Probably only Josie Marcus would still be attractive by today's standards. Of course standards of beauty change, but it would be nice to see a film in which the people and not just the scenery and buildings look right.
There is a problem with Wyatt's distaste for prostitution and his reforming Mattie and getting her out of the profession. Again, it is invented. Some sources think that he actually was half-owner of brother James Earp's whorehouse. In any case, Mattie was apparently not in that profession before Wyatt Earp knew her, as this film would have it, but did become a prostitute after Wyatt abandoned her.
Hype has been around throughout all of history, and perhaps the emotional need for hype has been with us even longer. Wyatt was a convenient person to make a hero in his own time and in ours. And in truth he was one of the most colorful figures of the old West. But even the most admiring of his serious biographers conclude that Wyatt Earp was a long way from being a real hero or even an admirable character. If he fits any of the classic molds, it would be "scoundrel." And in showing more than usual of his negative side, though less than the truth, perhaps this film has its greatest virtue.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews