Review of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp

For my wife when she was a girl, Hugh O'Brien was Wyatt Earp. A cleaner better hero would be hard to find. When he finally killed someone, Wyatt was devastated and the star portrayed it beautifully. Oddly, there is some evidence this was historically accurate. No semi-professional gambling, no failed businesses, no "wives" and yet the staging of the famous Tombstone street fight was, garb apart, among the least inaccurate. Based on Stewart Lake's imaginative biography this series did for the 1950s what Lake's book did for the 1930s: cemented the Legend of Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp for as long as anyone remembers the Old West. Recently (2009) I watched the episodes contained in a boxed set of DVDs and was frankly astonished at Hugh O'Brien's portrayal of Wyatt Earp. There was an edge, a darkness to his Earp that I missed when I was young. O'Brien certainly captures the nobility that Lake's book placed to the fore but the actor also captured very subtly the coldness, the reserve, the calculating quality of the real Earp. I now, half a century after first watching "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp", have belatedly realized what a fine actor Hugh O'Brien was. Thank you, Mr O'Brien!