We’re going on another sidetrack today, but you know, it fits with the title. Anyway, I can tell you for sure that the fine people at Disney consider Tombstone to count, even though it was released through Hollywood Pictures. When I was a senior in high school, my mother started taking us to the Gene Autry Museum of the American West. We saw an exhibit there about the history of the Disney Western; the two are more intimately associated than most people realize, I suspect. And we wended our way through Zorro and Davy Crockett and Frontierland and so forth, and at the very end, when we were discussing the then-modern Western, there were a handful of stills from Tombstone, a movie my friends and I had just gotten into. I may have made a happy chirp.
The year is 1879. Three of the Earp brothers move to the mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, where they hope to get rich. Wyatt (Kurt Russell) had been a lawman, but his plan now was to get in on the burgeoning Tombstone service industry; money was, after all, better in saloons and gambling than in mining or law enforcement. Also in Tombstone is Wyatt’s friend John “Doc” Holliday (Val Kilmer), once a dentist of good Southern family but now a tubercular gambler in a relationship with a sometime prostitute, Hungarian immigrant Mária Katalin “Big Nose Kate” Horony (Joanna Pacula).
Wyatt and his brothers, Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), settle in running the faro game at the Oriental. They’re doing well; as with later casino games, the odds are on the house to win. Unfortunately, they fall afoul of the local gang, the Cowboys. Their leader, “Curly Bill” Brocius (Powers Boothe), accidentally kills Marshal Fred White (Harry Carey, Jr.), and circumstances lead to Wyatt becoming town marshal in his stead. Which then leads to the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which leads to what has gone down in history as the Earp Vendetta Ride.
This kind of movie is why Hollywood Pictures—and Touchstone, and one or two others—existed for Disney. The goal was to have studios that would release the more mature programming, stuff they didn’t believe could or should be released with the Disney name on it. I’ve always heard that it stemmed from “Walt wouldn’t want us to,” but I think there is also a distinct aspect of “because expectations.” If it’s got the Disney name on it, people assume it’s for kids. And goodness but this isn’t for kids.
It is, however, a quality picture. When it was new, or relatively so, a group of my friends referred to it as “the good Wyatt Earp movie,” as contrasted with Wyatt Earp. They both have excellent casts, goodness knows, and Wyatt Earp is the one with the Oscar nomination (for cinematography; it lost to Legends of the Fall), but Wyatt Earp drags, which Tombstone never does. The movie is 130 minutes—making it a whole hour shorter than Wyatt Earp. It also has a considerably narrower focus, as it only covers about two years, give or take, and makes it seem like even less than that.
I mean, there’s a lot of story in those two years, and the movie’s depiction of it is not, let us say, a hundred percent accurate. Though at least some of the dialogue comes directly from trial testimony in the aftermath of the gunfight, but part of the problem is that what happened depends on whom you ask, and the version we base most of our knowledge on is, alas, Wyatt’s own. Because, you know, that’s in no way likely to be self-serving!
It’s not Kevin Costner’s fault that Kurt Russell and Wyatt Earp are historical doppelgangers. These pop up every now and again; there’s a movie where Stellan Skarsgård plays Goya, and I’m completely okay with it because, seriously, look at a picture of Goya. By that standard, Kurt Russell was going to be the better Earp. However, I also think he’s just better in the role. He’s a better actor than he’s generally given credit for. I also feel that this movie puts a lot more effort into the minor roles; the “wow, that’s good casting” runs out a lot more quickly on Wyatt Earp.
So okay, I turned seventeen in 1993, and my Gods but Val Kilmer was gorgeous in this. He looked like he’d been dead for six months already and was still gorgeous. And if Val Kilmer isn’t your type, there’s Dana Delaney, Jason Priestley, Billy Zane, John Corbett, and on and on. My goodness but this cast is attractive—and it’s not just attractive but talented.
It seems to have been an open secret that, after original director Kevin Jarre was fired, Kurt Russell took over. George P. Cosmatos was brought in, but no one seems to dispute that he was director in name only. This is incredibly impressive if you note that Russell has no directing credits. This was a complicated movie. Cosmatos says the moustaches and the lightning were real, but that still leaves a ton to be choreographed and an enormous cast to come together. Even if they let Billy Bob Thornton ad lib his part, you still have to get everything else right.
Tombstone is one of those movies that I’ve seen probably dozens of times and still haul out to watch now and again, one that I’ll finish watching if I encounter it while someone else watches it. I’m not inclined toward viewings on cable, because seriously, swearing and shooting and things, but it’s well-filmed and well-acted and eminently quotable. And in fact, we know some of the lines to be authentic; I went downstairs from that exhibit to the museum’s diorama of the gunfight, and Doc told Frank McLaury that he was a daisy if he did.