The way director Frank Perry and screenwriter Pete Hamill must have figured it, if George Custer could go from a hero to a villain after the impact of one movie - Arthur Penn's Little Big Man - then they could similarly destroy the lofty reputation of Wyatt Earp with a degrading film portrait. Here's their problem: Little Big Man, however fair or unfair it is to Custer, is terrific film-making from beginning to end. Not so this utter disaster of an attempt to make a revisionist western of the type so popular in the early seventies, when the youth movement and hippie era allowed for nasty portraits of the military and the police on screen, just so long as they were set back in a period of history so that no one around today would get too offended. Harris Yulin is a lackluster Earp, who with Doc Holliday (Stacy Keach) and Kate Fisher/Elder (Fay Dunaway) head for Tombstone. In this version, they don't go there to provide true law in the best sense but to use the law to make money. There certainly is a certain amount of truth in that, but the film errs by trying to offer a corrective to the mythic Earp and Company and so, to alleviate all the whitewashing, paints them dirty colors instead. The people who like this movie are the ones who believe that anything 'negative' is also 'realistic,' which doesn't happen to be the case. In this anti-Earp diatribe, history is rewritten even more ludicrously than it was in the pro-Earp films that preceded and followed this one. "Hello, Bones" Kate says to Doc; "Hello, bitch," he replies. Think that's clever? If you do, this film's for you. On the other hand, if you want to see an absolutely brilliant revisionist film about law and order in the west, check out Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, made about the same time, and a truly great film that achieves what Doc tries and fails to do. The O.K. Corral gunfight has never bee so totally misrepresented as it is here, even though the attitude of the filmmakers is that "we're telling you the truth for the first time." They simply replace positive lies with negative ones. Another historical gaff: The Tombstone Epitaph is portrayed (along with its editor John Clum) as being anti-Earp, when they were pro-Earp; the Nugget, another paper, was the anti-Earp one.
