The great critical and commercial success of "Dances with Wolves" and "Unforgiven" in the early nineties led many, myself included, to hope that a great revival of the cinematic Western might be on the way. Although those hopes have largely been disappointed, the genre is in better health now than it was in the eighties and there have been a number of good examples. "Wyatt Earp" is one of them.
Earp has been the hero of several Westerns, and those that I have seen (I have not seen either John Sturges's "Hour of the Gun" or the more recent "Tombstone") have concentrated either on events in Tombstone ("My Darling Clementine", "Gunfight at the OK Corral") or on those in Dodge City ("Dodge City" itself, which offered a fictionalised version of the Earp story). "Wyatt Earp", however, is an attempt at a filmed biography which gives us its hero's entire life story, starting with his boyhood in Illinois. Most of the first hour or so is taken up with Earp's life before he became a lawman; the famous gunfight, about two-thirds of the way through the film's three hours, only takes up about a couple of minutes of the action.
The advantage of showing us the hero's early life is that this allows us to understand many of the facets of his character. Perhaps the most important incident in the film is the tragically early death of his young first wife Urilla; Earp's grief at her death turns him from a quiet, studious young man with an ambition to become a lawyer into a lawless desperado. Facing a death-sentence in Arkansas for horse-stealing (evidently still a capital crime in America in the 1870s, long after it had ceased to be one in Britain), Earp is rescued by his father's intervention and flees to the West as a fugitive from justice. His later career as a lawman is interpreted as an effort to make amends for this youthful foray into lawlessness. Another aspect of his character brought out in these early scenes is the importance to him of family ties. He and his brothers Morgan and Virgil later make a formidable team, with stronger emotional ties to one another than to the women in their lives.
In an earlier age, Earp would probably have been portrayed as a clean-cut hero, the brave man in the white hat cleaning up the wild frontier, but in the revisionist nineties such an approach seemed too simplistic and the film offers us something closer to a "warts and all" portrayal. Apart from the horse-stealing incident, Earp is sacked from his job as Sheriff of Dodge City because his methods of law enforcement seem excessively harsh even by Wild West standards, and much of the film is taken up with details of his loveless sexual relationship with the prostitute Mattie Blaylock. There is, however, a limit to the film's revisionism. As with many biopics, the film-makers have selected episodes from their subject's life in order to form a coherent narrative to illustrate a particular viewpoint. In this case the narrative seems to be that of a wild young man who matures into a legendary hero of the West, and any historical details which do not fit in are ignored. For example, the film does not explore the suggestion made by some historians that the Gunfight had less to do with law enforcement than with a feud between the Earp family and their Clanton rivals over control of Tombstone's businesses. On the other hand, the film is sometimes harder on Earp than the historical record might warrant. In reality, there is considerable doubt about whether he was actually guilty of horse-stealing; in the film his guilt is quite apparent.
"Wyatt Earp"'s main weakness is its great length. It is clearly aiming to repeat the success of Kevin Costner's other epic Western of the nineties, "Dances with Wolves", but does not have that film's staying power, and at times can seem too slow-moving. Costner's acting is not quite as compelling as in the earlier film, but he is still very watchable, and this is one of his better films, much better than, say, "The Bodyguard" or the embarrassingly bad "Waterworld". There is a good cameo from Gene Hackman as Earp's father, but the best contribution is probably from Dennis Quaid as the tubercular Doc Holliday, spitting out defiance of the world in his Southern drawl in between his bouts of coughing.
Despite its occasional longueurs, in its latter stages (which deal with the post-Gunfight spiral of revenge between the Earp and Clanton gangs, with Wyatt's happy second marriage to the beautiful Josie and with his final promotion to legendary status) the film achieves a similar epic grandeur to that of "Dances with Wolves", aided by those familiar features of the large-scale Western, sweeping photography of the scenery and a stirring musical score. One of the better modern Westerns. 7/10
Earp has been the hero of several Westerns, and those that I have seen (I have not seen either John Sturges's "Hour of the Gun" or the more recent "Tombstone") have concentrated either on events in Tombstone ("My Darling Clementine", "Gunfight at the OK Corral") or on those in Dodge City ("Dodge City" itself, which offered a fictionalised version of the Earp story). "Wyatt Earp", however, is an attempt at a filmed biography which gives us its hero's entire life story, starting with his boyhood in Illinois. Most of the first hour or so is taken up with Earp's life before he became a lawman; the famous gunfight, about two-thirds of the way through the film's three hours, only takes up about a couple of minutes of the action.
The advantage of showing us the hero's early life is that this allows us to understand many of the facets of his character. Perhaps the most important incident in the film is the tragically early death of his young first wife Urilla; Earp's grief at her death turns him from a quiet, studious young man with an ambition to become a lawyer into a lawless desperado. Facing a death-sentence in Arkansas for horse-stealing (evidently still a capital crime in America in the 1870s, long after it had ceased to be one in Britain), Earp is rescued by his father's intervention and flees to the West as a fugitive from justice. His later career as a lawman is interpreted as an effort to make amends for this youthful foray into lawlessness. Another aspect of his character brought out in these early scenes is the importance to him of family ties. He and his brothers Morgan and Virgil later make a formidable team, with stronger emotional ties to one another than to the women in their lives.
In an earlier age, Earp would probably have been portrayed as a clean-cut hero, the brave man in the white hat cleaning up the wild frontier, but in the revisionist nineties such an approach seemed too simplistic and the film offers us something closer to a "warts and all" portrayal. Apart from the horse-stealing incident, Earp is sacked from his job as Sheriff of Dodge City because his methods of law enforcement seem excessively harsh even by Wild West standards, and much of the film is taken up with details of his loveless sexual relationship with the prostitute Mattie Blaylock. There is, however, a limit to the film's revisionism. As with many biopics, the film-makers have selected episodes from their subject's life in order to form a coherent narrative to illustrate a particular viewpoint. In this case the narrative seems to be that of a wild young man who matures into a legendary hero of the West, and any historical details which do not fit in are ignored. For example, the film does not explore the suggestion made by some historians that the Gunfight had less to do with law enforcement than with a feud between the Earp family and their Clanton rivals over control of Tombstone's businesses. On the other hand, the film is sometimes harder on Earp than the historical record might warrant. In reality, there is considerable doubt about whether he was actually guilty of horse-stealing; in the film his guilt is quite apparent.
"Wyatt Earp"'s main weakness is its great length. It is clearly aiming to repeat the success of Kevin Costner's other epic Western of the nineties, "Dances with Wolves", but does not have that film's staying power, and at times can seem too slow-moving. Costner's acting is not quite as compelling as in the earlier film, but he is still very watchable, and this is one of his better films, much better than, say, "The Bodyguard" or the embarrassingly bad "Waterworld". There is a good cameo from Gene Hackman as Earp's father, but the best contribution is probably from Dennis Quaid as the tubercular Doc Holliday, spitting out defiance of the world in his Southern drawl in between his bouts of coughing.
Despite its occasional longueurs, in its latter stages (which deal with the post-Gunfight spiral of revenge between the Earp and Clanton gangs, with Wyatt's happy second marriage to the beautiful Josie and with his final promotion to legendary status) the film achieves a similar epic grandeur to that of "Dances with Wolves", aided by those familiar features of the large-scale Western, sweeping photography of the scenery and a stirring musical score. One of the better modern Westerns. 7/10