Great American Western Movies: Tombstone

Tombstone (1993) is one of the greatest American Western movies ever to come out of Hollywood. I place it in the top ten Westerns of all time. It may be my favorite Western film.

Tombstone the movie, starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Dana Delany and several other notable actors, has a somewhat colorful history, because it was made at a time when another movie about Wyatt Earp (by that name) starring Kevin Costner, was also about to be released. Tombstone was released in 1993 and Costner’s movie came out a few months later, in 1994, so the comparisons were inevitable. At this date on the IMDB web site, Tombstone is given a score of 7.5 and Wyatt Earp is given a score of 6.2, so one will have to make up their own mind about which was the “better” movie, but I am of the opinion that Tombstone wins out. It is unfortunate that both movies came out about the same time, because they both are worthy films, but as they say on the rodeo circuit, “That’s the way it goes in the cowboy shows”. And these movies are cowboy shows deluxe.

Tombstone has had an interesting effect on me and a number of other people. After seeing the screen portrayal of Wyatt and Doc Holliday and Josephine Marcus, I was intrigued about the “Legend of Wyatt Earp”, and especially Doc Holliday. To me, Val Kilmer, portraying “Doc”, was the most interesting character in the movie, and I began to do some research on Holliday, reading a few books and articles, even once, on a vacation, making a side trip to visit the real Doc Holliday’s final resting place in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, not far from Aspen. Such was the effect of Kilmer’s characterization of the gunfighter on me. I also read a book about Josephine Marcus as well, after seeing Dana Delany’s portrayal of the woman with whom Wyatt Earp spent the last part of his colorful life.

The true story of Wyatt Earp in his Tombstone days is one of those tales which has been revamped and turned and twisted and shaded so many times by the artistic license of authors, screenwriters, historians, magazine writers, family members on both sides of his controversies, and not to mention people of self-styled expert opinion at numerous saloons, coffee shops, and barber shops, that truth and fiction are hard to differentiate. One thing is clear, however, and that is that the story has aroused passion and grist for imagination in people ever since those illustrious days of Wyatt’s life.

Several movies besides Tombstone and Wyatt Earp have tried to give us a dramatic portrayal of the Wyatt Earp story across the years, perhaps most notably Henry Fonda’s My Darling Clementine (1946) and Burt Lancaster’s Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957), which serve to show that Hollywood still leans on this particular legend every few years to try to turn a profit from the tale.

Tombstone begins in an interesting way, with a (screenwriter-crafted) old-fashioned black-and-white newsreel telling the background of the story of the times, setting the stage. This interesting technique has been used in a number of other Westerns, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Big Jake, and a few others. It tells you from the git-go that the story we are about to see is (a) historical, because newsreels are a thing of the past, (b) newsworthy, for only news made it into the old newsreels, and (c) possibly true, for old-time newsreels were supposed to reflect “true” stories. The newsreel-beginning technique also establishes that what we are about to see here in our time is probably going to be entertaining, because it is heavily stylized. The scroll-beginnings of the Star Wars movies are a variation on the technique. Another interesting thing about the Tombstone newsreel-beginning is that it is narrated by gravel-voiced veteran actor Robert Michum, who might have had an acting role in the movie, but when that became impractical he became the beginning-and-ending narrator of the movie storyline. For those of us who remember Michum’s memorable roles in other Westerns of decades ago, his voice rekindles fond memories of other exciting Westerns, so that adds to the credibility of another entertaining Western story about to begin.

There are a couple of opening vignettes which establish who the bad guys are- a group of “organized criminals” who call themselves “the Cowboys”, and a scene which shows us a bit about Doc Holiday. Then the movie proper begins, and tells us of Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) as a hard-eyed young-middle-aged man, a retired law officer with a lofty reputation as a gunman and peacemaker. But we quickly see that he has become disillusioned with the life of a lawman. Wyatt is attempting to begin a new chapter of his life with a clean slate, as it were. No more killing, no more confrontations with outlaws and drunken cowboys, no more legal paperwork- just good honest work.

Well, maybe not all-that-honest work, if you count running a gambling operation as a less than fully legitimate occupation. Wyatt joins together with his brothers Virgil Earp (Sam Elliott, who gives us his usual sterling “Hipshot Percussion” persona), and Morgan Earp (Bill Paxton, an actor with fine depth and an ability to elevate the performance of the actors around him). The Earp brothers travel to the town of Tombstone, Arizona with their horses and, oh yeah, their wives. Actually, wives do figure more prominently in the story than horses, so at least you know that this is a modern Western, unlike some of the early ones.

Tombstone is a booming mining town with rip-roaring saloons, bawdy houses, merchants, and all types of wild-west characters. Wyatt, after a toughness-establishing confrontation with a low-life gambler (played by an effectively smarmy Billy Bob Thornton) soon meets his old and somewhat improbable good friend Doc Holliday, played with incredible skill by Val Kilmer.

I say that their friendship seems a bit incredulous because the real (historical) Doc Holliday was accounted by many to be an almost sometimes-psychopathic killer, and the lawman Wyatt must have had a special rationalized place in his heart for such a man; we are never told. What is true, from their on-screen performances is that these men respect and like each other with a bond of loyalty so strong they would willingly die for each other. Doc Holliday is slowly dying of tuberculosis. He has a lady friend named Kate.

If Wyatt is seeking a new life with a clean slate in Tombstone, however, that life, it soon becomes apparent, is going to have a few problems in it. For one thing, Wyatt’s wife Mattie (Dana Wheeler Nicholson) is becoming an opium addict through the use of the then-OTC medicine laudanum to relieve her headaches, and all is not domestic bliss between them. Wyatt’s resolve to be a faithful husband is tested.

Then, after getting their gambling business going, the Earp Brothers encounter the Cowboys gang, headed by “Curly Bill” Brocious (Powers Boothe, in a role tailor-made for the jovially sadistic slant he can sometimes bring to his acting portrayals). Sharpening this encounter to a razor-lethal edge is the head-to-head hard but amiably skillful battle of wits between Kilmer’s Doc Holliday character and the Cowboys’ champion killer-deluxe, the truly psychopathic and yet highly intelligent Johnny Ringo, played full-throttle deadly by Michael Beihn. You can almost hear the lightning crackle when these two make eye contact on-screen, and you know that somewhere in this movie one of them is going to go down hard. And bloody. I am hard-put to remember when two killers have had such cold, sullen hatred, masked by conventional cordiality, for each other.

Kilmer has the best lines, and the best body-language acts, in this gods-of-death dueling relationship with Beihn’s character Ringo. “I’m your Huckleberry,” has become a line many will remember for a lifetime, as well as the look in Kilmer’s eyes, which tell of a man who knows he can’t be really killed because he knows he is already dead, or soon will be. With absolutely nothing to lose, he is a man free to go straight into Ringo’s psychopathic brain and play twisted mind-games with the man that everyone in the West cowers away from in absolute fear. Checkmate, baby.

Wyatt develops a love relationship with a newcomer to Tombstone, a theatre actress named Josephine Marcus, played by Dana Delany. Some have found this to be a weakness in the story, principally because of what they see is a detached quality in Dana’s acting. One critic I read said that she acts positively “goofy.” Yet I respectfully disagree. I saw her performance as Josephine in her relationship with Wyatt not as with the sharp and direct connectedness that Wyatt has with the other male actors, with whom one would expect such directness, but rather in the will-he-won’t-he-will-I-won’t-I variable series of interactions that a woman in love in real life will have with a man like Wyatt Earp. Her apparent vacillations and doubts would perhaps be more acceptable in a movie whose principle theme is romance, and they might seem out of place in a movie about justice, violence, bloodshed, and revenge, but I found her to be quite credible, thank you. I really respected most of Dana’s work after seeing the movie.

The plot, as we say, thickens, as the Earp Brothers become dismayed, then angry, and finally enraged at the way the Cowboys throw their weight around in Tombstone. Virgil Earp (Elliot) serves as the moral conscience of the brothers, and finally he can take it no more, and he becomes a law man. His brother Morgan (Paxton) soon follows suit, and then, almost kicking and screaming in reluctance to wear the badge again, Wyatt (Russell) joins in. In an interesting revelation, Wyatt tells his brothers that his experience in actually killing is far less than his reputation would lead one to believe, and that he loathes having had to do it. And he doesn’t like the idea of doing it again. But he puts his gun- and badge- back on anyway, determined to bring order to the town. One is tempted to say law and order, but the line between what is legal and illegal in Tombstone has become so blurred that it is difficult to find. Especially for Wyatt, whose memories seem to haunt him.

This all leads, of course, to the fabled Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which is filmed in an almost mythic manner, with a burning building in the background, as the fire burns in the hearts of the Earps (along with Doc Holliday) and their adversaries, the Cowboys. The Earps prevail in the gunfight, of course, but it would seem that they have won but a pyrrhic victory, for the triumph is costly and leads to further bloodshed. One Earp brother is maimed and another is killed. All through this time, we can see Wyatt changing from the man who once wanted peace, back into a man of violence (resonances of Shane?) With each act of violence a deeper and deeper desire seems to grow in Wyatt to absolutely annihilate the Cowboys with the most extreme prejudice. And try he does. The moral questions abound.

Yet toward the end, even the now deadly Wyatt realizes that he, even with all his motivation and skill, with must ultimately confront the Cowboys’ superior piece’ de resistance, as it were, the monstrously deadly…Johnny Ringo. And yet here, in one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie, an almost sort of deux ex machina moment occurs, and Wyatt is saved by the improbable force of loyalty. This is a powerful event in the movie, for in a thousand other conventional Westerns the “hero” conquers all, even in a movie like High Noon. But not here. Even the most skillful person, it seems, needs those, like ghosts, who appear out of nowhere to help in the final moment of truth. Kind of, if you will, like Real Life.

From there, the movie heads to its inevitable ending, with two final uplifting vignettes. One is with Wyatt and Doc, in a scene that sticks as with glue in the memory, when Wyatt tell his old and loyal friend, simply, “Thanks…for always bein’ there…” What a commentary on the connection between two friends who have shared heaven and hell together. And have somehow, blundering through it all, come out on the other side.

The final vignette shows Wyatt and Josephine united, finally, with that clean slate Wyatt has been seeking all along, their worries over, joining in a dance in the snow. The movie concludes with Robert Michum’s dry, laconic voiceover telling us where the story of Wyatt and Josephine eventually led. Michum’s last line, perhaps as an offhanded tribute to the film industry, connects the historical Wyatt Earp to the legend-making craft of Western movies.

The film has many of Hollywood’s most skillful actors in it, and in a way it is a sort of nostalgic tip-of-the-hat to all American Westerns. Even Charleton Heston has a cameo in it, and there are nods a-plenty in various scene constructions to everyone from Alan Ladd to Clint Eastwood to John Wayne and many others. And yet it brings some new dimensions to the art-form. There are heroic homosexuals. The women, some of them anyway, are by no means wallflowers swooning for the heroes. And the protagonist does not win every battle, at least mano-a’-mano in the middle of main street at high noon. The main love interest of Wyatt is a bad girl. And the violence is a little over-the-top in places.

Does it have flaws? Yes. At times the pace lags, the dialogue is flat, and there are logical disconnects. It covers a lot of ground, perhaps too much at times, and the sub-plots often threaten to get in the way of the main story. It is not as simple and direct or even as noble as many Westerns. And there are occasional lapses into off-tone silliness, such as the epitaph on a tombstone one sees at one point.

But even with all the loose ends and flaws, there is something very compelling about the movie that brings many viewers back to watch it again and again. Is it Val Kilmer’s performance as the hilariously enigmatic Doc Holliday? Is it Kurt Russell’s quiet rage which boils over, transforming him into a man on a mission in a fight to the death as an almost archetypal warrior, an angel of death? Or is it simply seeing all those fine actors working through their roles together. And lest I forget, is it the stirring musical score beneath it all? Whatever it is, I know people who don’t like other Westerns, but they like this one. On the other hand I do like Westerns, and if I had to choose one among a handful to keep for all time, this one would qualify.

Lastly, I will say this about it as well. The best movies I see are the ones whose lines of dialogue I find myself committing to memory. Movies like Casablanca and even The Princess Bride affect me that way. Many the lines in Tombstone I find memorable in that way as well, and that little litmus test tells me it is a good movie. For me anyway. If you have never seen it, you may share that experience with me and many others.

Five Stars/*****