Tarnishing the Tin Star: Wyatt Earp

Wyatt Earp (1994)

“All you can kiss my rebel d---!” Doc Holliday

Wyatt Earp is one of those larger-than-life characters that has been the subject of almost innumerable movies ever since the motion picture camera was invented.

I first got acquainted with Wyatt Earp from the 50s TV series starring Hugh O’Brian and quickly graduated to the Stuart N. Lake biography of the legendary lawman obtained from my local library. From these sources I got the impression that Wyatt Earp was a stern but honest lawman whose most famous exploit was the celebrated “Gunfight at the OK Corral.” He lived many more years after that famous engagement (and probably never had to buy another drink), dying in Lost Angeles in 1929.

It was fated that Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp would appear in the wake of 1993’s Tombstone, a much better film in my view.

While Tombstone retold the tale with style and taut pacing, Wyatt Earp is an unfocused, overlong view with forgettable characters and a hollow core represented by a phoned in performance from Kevin Costner. You can’t tell whether Costner believes in his character or even cares.

Wyatt was a family man - in fact, at least half the characters in the movie have the surname Earp - but his three brothers and wives/girlfriends are so poorly limned it is difficult to keep them straight, although the women do lend an air of authenticity with their endless complaining. Thus, the film’s t-h-r-e-e h-o-u-r running time does not seem warranted nor keep you involved with trying to figure out what Lawrence Kasdan was trying to say, if indeed there was anything to his screenplay.

Probably the best feature of Wyatt Earp was Dennis Quaid’s performance as the colorful Doc Holliday, a drunken dentist who drilled more men than teeth; and a man dying of consumption or what we today know as tuberculosis. Quaid is quite good as Holliday, but even his high quality rendition is overshadowed by Val Kilmer’s portrait in Tombstone. Quaid does deliver a couple of colorful lines, the best of which I used to open this article.

Photography and lighting was top notch, while direction and editing were sub par. There is nowhere near enough material to stretch this story to the epic length of 190 minutes, yet writer/director Lawrence Kasdan did this, to the film’s detriment. The score, by James Newton Howard, is excellent and along with Dennis Quaid’s performance and the nice cinematography is all I can find laudable about “Wyatt Earp.”

The Warner Bros Two Disk Special Edition DVD contains a pristine version of the 190 minute color movie in 2.40:1 theatrical format. The special features include a couple of short featurettes, eleven deleted scenes, subtitles, and language choices.

If you’d like to see a movie about Wyatt Earp, I’d recommend any of the following before this movie:

My Darling Clementine
Gunfight at the OK Corral (my personal pick as the best)
Hour of the Gun
Tombstone

Enjoy a good movie today, and thanks for stopping by!