Well, I've written science fiction, fantasy, mystery, steampunk superheroes, pulp heroes...but not a western. Not yet, at least. Maybe I will at some point. My son and I have been delving into the old Lone Ranger TV series lately, but tonight I wanted something a bit more...grandiose. For research for future writing. That's the ticket.
So, I put on one of the all-time greats, Tombstone. A movie absolutely loaded with stars, past, present and future, based on real history and full of quotable lines that still resonate nearly thirty years later. And yes, I called it an all-time great, because it is exactly that. Action, romance, comedy...this movie has it all and then some. And, much like Desmond Doss of Hacksaw Ridge fame, the reality overshadows the movie, because some of the stuff these men did was too much even for Hollywood to believe.
I'm not going to recap the whole movie in detail; basically, Wyatt Earp and his brothers and their wives move to the silver mining hub called Tombstone, Arizona. There they encounter the Cowboys, a semi-organized crime gang of red-sashed riders who terrorize the civilians and threaten the lawmen. Wyatt just wants to settle down and live a normal life, but things keep piling up until he and his brothers are sworn in as sheriff and deputies. There's this famous gunfight you might have heard of, but in the aftermath, Wyatt's brothers are taken out. Wyatt and his friend, Doc Holliday, lead a small band of Marshals who go after the Cowboys, breaking their control over the region and restoring law and order.
That's the short version; now go watch the movie yourself, because it's fantastic.
So, the cast. As I mentioned, it's full of stars. The leads are Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp, Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, Sam Elliott as Virgil Earp, and Bill Paxton as Morgan Earp. Dana Delany plays the love interest, and Charlton Heston has a brief cameo as well. The bag guys include Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo, Powers Boothe as Curly Bill and Stephen Lang as Ike Clanton. Thomas Haden Church plays Billy Claiborne, and Billy Bob Thornton shows up as a cowardly bully who gets manhandled by an unarmed Wyatt in one of the movie's juiciest scenes. And there are plenty of others as well; this cast was stacked.
Favorite scenes (and everyone who has seen this movie has them) include the aforementioned bully take-down, the arrest of Curly Bill for murdering the sheriff (while high on some kind of opiates), the gunfight at the OK Corral, and the final showdown between Holliday and Ringo. Actually, any scene with Doc Holliday can be considered a favorite scene; Val Kilmer was absolutely spectacular in this role. Every time I look at a clip from the movie on YouTube, I see the same comment over and over: Kilmer should have won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this movie. To the Academy's eternal shame, he wasn't even nominated. In fact, Tombstone got a grand total of zero Oscar nominations that year, which is a crime against entertainment.
So, what is that makes this such a great movie? Well, it's a very masculine movie. These are men. They have a moral code (or, in the case of the Cowboys, the antithesis of one), they take action when necessary, and they aren't afraid to stand and fight when needed. But they don't go looking for fights; Wyatt's admonishment to his younger brother Morgan that killing a man 'changes you inside' rings true; Wyatt spends the first half of the movie trying to keep a low profile. It's only when Virgil has had enough and enlists Morgan to join him as a town deputy that Wyatt finally accepts the inevitable. And when bad men are doing bad things, it takes good men to stop them, and sometimes there is a price to pay. These men do what has to be done.
Is it 100% historically accurate? Of course not; it's a Hollywood movie. But the OK Corral gunfight did happen. Wyatt did try to stay out of law enforcement in Arizona until circumstances forced him to do so. Doc Holliday really did have the reputation of being one of the deadliest gunfighters in the West. And yes, Wyatt really did shoot Curly Bill at near-point-blank range while somehow managing to not get hit by a single bullet.
The Old West has been mythologized for decades, but it was a real time and place, and there were real men like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday who blazed a trail and wrote their names in the history books. And the Western is the American genre, more than any other. Aside from romance, the western was probably the most popular genre of fiction in America for decades. The first real movie (with a plot, beginning, middle and end) was a western, The Great Train Robbery. Hollywood made thousands of westerns; TV and radio shows like the Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and dozens of others were the most popular of their time. And even when the western began to die off during the Space Age, the most popular science fiction shows were basically westerns in space. Even Star Trek was originally pitched as a 'Wagon Train to the Stars' to get the green light from the studios.
So, I have to give this movie the highest recommendation; it's that good. Check it out, and see what I mean.
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