truth and fiction at the ok corral part three

(...the last mile in my search for historicity in Hollywood's portrayals of the beloved American legend...)

Wyatt Earp (1994. dir: Lawrence Kasdan): Costner's Earp, following so closely on the heels of 1993's widely-beloved Tombstone, is over-long, over-serious hagiography, way too bloated for its own britches, and it certainly slammed the door shut on any credibility either Kasdan or Costner still enjoyed among the viewing public. A slow trudge on a treadmill of fetid mediocrity, it chooses the (factual) premature death of Earp's first wife as the thing that made him The Man He Became, and the story becomes not about Wyatt Earp but about Hollywood cliché and its continual settling for simplistic answers to complex questions. Kasdan's big mistake is made at the outset in choosing to cover several decades of Earp's life, rather than focusing on one or two important moments and thereby revealing the man, and his result is a ponderous and unending meander. And to be clear, many of the episodes he gets wrong are through reliance on Stuart Lake's legend-spinning ("largely fictional," according to Amazon) Frontier Marshall, such as the "largely fictional" attempted assassination of Wyatt during an Eddie Foy performance, which is where Kasdan whimsically has Earp catching his first glimpse of his future sweetheart Josie.

The central issue for Costner and Kasdan seems to be: how do we make this half-bad, half-dark-hearted guy into a hero for today’s audience? And the only answer they can find is to make him a Hollywood-"normal", high-spirited kid who is poisoned by tragedy, which makes in turn for a long and absolutely predictable Hollywood-Western boyhood overseen by iron-jawed but fiercely-loving Pa Gene Hackman mouthing nothing but platitudes. The only interesting scene in this interminable early section is when the boy witnesses his first gunfight, a wonderfully true gunfight, awkward and ungainly, both fellows flailing and missing the first shot at close range and winding up writhing in agony. The rest of it you can fast-forward through until Costner has a moustache, which is when the interest is upped a tad, although the interesting bits are still thin and sparsely-located and bedraggled when you find them.

You have to sit through blatant (and, worse, badly-told) lies, like this bit: Wyatt is teaching the young Masterson brothers to be lawmen (ridiculous; he was their peer, not their mentor). They are trying to talk the guns away from a pair of drunkards when Wyatt loses patience and buffaloes the men into unconsciousness to disarm them. The Mastersons protest his methods until they see that one of the men had the gun in his hand, and so everyone apologizes to the vindicated Wyatt. The scene as told truthfully would have showed us a Wyatt who didn't give a rat's ass about whether that smokewagon was skinned or no; an Earp rarely hesitated to knock a fellow unconscious if he thought he was in the right, and rarely did he pause to wonder if he was. (Here's a detail they DID get right, and it films extraordinarily well: Ed Masterson's clothes were indeed set on fire when he took his death-wound because of the close proximity of the shot. Wyatt, though, wasn't in Dodge at the time, but was summoned back a month or so later.)

There is one reason to watch this movie. They got one big thing right, a thing which has never been captured before or since, and that is Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday. Much as everyone wants to believe in the veracity of Val Kilmer's charming, handsome and witty Tombstone Doc, this one is the real mccoy.

A shiver of recognition will travel down your spine when Quaid's Holliday first offers his hand to Wyatt, daring the lawman to accept his friendship. Later, when we watch this twisted, Georgia-drawling (and a true Georgia drawl differs from the generic-southern softness of speech most give him), evil-faced gambler sit down on a barstool, peering with earnestness, intelligence, and just a hint of defensive malevolence into Wyatt's face, it's like looking on a revenant risen up from the pages of history. Also perfect are the way his genteel garments drape over his emaciated frame as if on a wire hanger, the passionate hate-games he plays with malicious joy against Kate, and his unswerving courage, which springs clearly from a complete disregard for the value of life, his own and others', which in turn (or so historians, almost to a human, have always romantically assumed) arises from a perpetual awareness of the presence of Death, lingering constantly at his shoulder. This Doc is nobody's chosen companion. In life, nobody liked the man, even Wyatt's brothers, nobody except Wyatt, who, for all his shadiness, held to an iron-clad code of loyalty.

AND THE WINNER:

Tombstone: (1993. dir: George P. Cosmatos) ...with hands down, is the most historically accurate. The gunfight itself, in particular, is scrupulously researched and revivified, with near-perfect lines and timing but with an added piece of comedy for Kilmer.

The things it got wrong were done for the shape of the story. The biggest (announced in voiceover by Robert Mitchum) is making the "cowboys" into an organized gang with a leader (Curly Bill) and, God help us, an Outfit: a red sash, always worn, so that Wyatt and his boys when on the war-path don't have to face the moral ambiguity of shooting an innocent man. The search for vengeance after the maiming of Virgil and the killing of Morgan is, in fact, the loosest bit in its verisimilitude, but that's because the real story isn't story-shaped. And Tombstone, for all its flaws and virtues, is a rollicking good story.

There is no possible way to watch it and not love Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday, and there's enough of the real Doc in there (the torment, the coughing, the poker, the dying words, the pretension to gentility, even some of the lines: "You're a daisy if you do,") to make it just feasible... but not really, I'm sorry to say. Way too much charm and sex appeal. His final showdown with Johnny Ringo is one of the movie's great scenes, but, oddly enough, Johnny Ringo's death was actually far more interesting and mysterious than even this movie makes out.

(This has nothing to do with accuracy, but this movie has some great, great lines, and here are a few of them:

To Wyatt: "I never met a rich man who didn't have a guilty conscience."
Wyatt: "I already got a guilty conscience. I may as well have the money, too."

Wyatt: "You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"

Billy Clanton: "You're so drunk you're probably seeing double."
Doc: "I've got two guns, one for each of you.")

There are some great characterizations. Flawed as they are, I love Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo and I love watching Powers Boothe have fun (when does he ever get to do that?) as Curly Bill. Stephen Lang, that wonderful and underrated actor, has no flaws, not a single moment of flaw, as Ike Clanton. His line deliveries are perfect; he even looks like the old daguerrotypes.

There are authentic, tiny details they got right, like the terrible, overdone maquillage painting the corpses on display under a sign that read, "Murdered in the streets of Tombstone." Curly Bill's shooting of Marshall White is a wonderful depiction, and Curly Bill's own death is accurate enough, although Wyatt's heroism is played up to giant-sized. The bulk of the love story between Wyatt and his Josie is stupid schmaltz, but even there they play with bits of truth: at one point she is shown in Fly's Photography Studio having a portrait made which is very similar to a semi-nude which for many years passed as Josie's until it was recently discredited. Although she wasn't actually there during the shootout, the filmmakers are correct that the studio was right next to the action and that Sheriff Behan took cover there, followed by Ike Clanton.

**********

In summation:

Bat Masterson is reported (by Stuart Lake, so it might easily be so much malarkey) to have said, "The real story of the Old West can never be told, unless Wyatt Earp will tell what he knows, and Wyatt will not talk."

Wyatt himself was quoted by Adela Rogers St. John, late in life and after dipping into some Shakespeare, "That fellow Hamlet was a talkative man. He wouldn't have lasted long in Kansas."

Stuart Lake ventured out to corner the man himself and came away with a book full of rubbish, opening the floor to debate about why the arch-luminary of the Wild West would go to all the trouble to lie, or, anyhow, to allow the lies to be published.

Never mind. Cinephiles know why. As the man says, "Print the legend."

a knife-thrower, unruly satanists, and cuban rebels

the Girl on the Bridge: (2000. dir: Patrice Leconte) This is a romantic fantasy for men suffering midlife crisis. Sex, for which Gabor (Daniel Auteuil, mesmerizing as always) seems to have lost the knack, is replaced by the throwing of knives at a nubile, writhing, highly-sexed and much younger woman who eventually forgoes her emotionally unsatisfying but passionately constant sex life in order to devote herself to life as his pin-cushion. The girl in question is played with oh-so-French-innocent-but-really-not charm by pop-star/actress/WAG Vanessa Paradis.

Calling it a venture in Style-over-Substance is misleading in two ways: first, it suggests there is some substance in it to be overshadowed, and secondly, the style is accomplished so gorgeously and with such charm that to many, the cotton-candy-melt-in-your-mouth emptiness at its core will surely not matter. In some slight, unpretentious way, it pretends to be an examination of the wily workings of Luck as a force in our lives, but, with an insouciant, Gallic wave of the hand, it does not really care. (Its single "insight": "Find your soul-mate; there you will find your luck.")

For a truly fascinating examination of the vagaries of fortune, I highly recommend Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intacto from around the same time.

Drive Angry: (2011. dir: Patrick Lussier) I tend to enjoy Nicolas Cage when he's being droll, turning away when he gets serious. If I'm going to watch him as an action hero, he's damn well going to be returning from the dead with a demon-accountant on his trail, looking to save his infant grand-daughter from Satanists who want to sacrifice her at the next full moon. And, hey! Here's that movie!

It's got beautiful old muscle cars, all of which get utterly destroyed, and it's got the silliest violence you'll ever see, including one protracted shoot-out that happens DURING a similarly protracted sex act. Strangely, it's also got stand-up performances: Amber Heard, for one, is very good as the formidable side-kick. William Fichtner and Billy Burke are kind of brilliant as, respectively, the Hellish Accountant and the Evil Satanist Cult-Leader (who, in an inspired choice, talks with a Cajun accent, which always makes an evil cult-leader sexier). Tom Atkins is on hand for a few scenes, too, as the cop in over his head.

Outside of that, it's a lot of explosions and gratuitous maimings and bare-legged sexy girls.

*SPOILER ALERT*

We Were Strangers: (1949. dir: John Huston) It might have been an examination of how well-intentioned rebels descend into the same evils as the fascist regimes they fight, and Huston does dip a toe or two into those interesting and muddy waters. On the whole, though, it is far too respectful of its subject to be successful as a movie, its subject being Cuban rebels fighting a burgeoning dictatorship in the pre-Castro '30s. The acting is good: John Garfield, Jennifer Jones, Pedro Armendariz, Gilbert Roland, and the dark, noir-chiaroscuro lighting is terrific. The script is only fair-to-middlin', and in the end, takes itself too seriously. These poor kids spend the whole movie digging a tunnel into a graveyard and kill a well-loved national figure in order to pull a Guy Fawkes at the funeral, taking the President and the whole cabinet, too, only to find the funeral is moved to a different city and the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. The most interesting roads the film might have trodden are the ones it did not; the road it did take ends in predictable machine-gun fire and a sappy Tom-Joadish speech forced on poor Jennifer Jones which sounds very much like it was written by Barton Fink.

Movie trivia time: They say that Lee Harvey Oswald watched it some six weeks before the fateful day in Dallas. They also say that Huston's first choice for the female lead, a Cuban girl named "China" Valdez for her "slanted eyes", was allegedly the unknown starlet Marilyn Monroe, whom he would cast more aptly in his next film, the Asphalt Jungle.

an inter-dimensional drug, an opium-addled goth extravaganza, and a surreal adventure in theodicy

John Dies at the End: (2012. dir: Don Coscarelli) In tribute to Coscarelli (mastermind behind that low-budget and eternal adolescent cult-classic Phantasm, as well as the unclassifiable Elvis v. the Undead joy of Bubba Ho-tep), this feels like the work of a much younger man, with its restless energy, libido, and shameless humor. The plot is better unfolded than told; I will say only that at its basis is a drug which will take you travelling in another concurrently-existing dimension, and, subsequently, dark and sometimes funny complications ensue.

Here's the catch: every single thing this movie does well (which are many, and some are excellent) is balanced by a failure, so that, in the end, it is very nearly a wash. For every good performance (and some are excellent: Rob Mayes as the eponymous John, Tai Bennett as the enigmatic Jamaican drug-dealer Robert Marley, Jonny Weston as the milk-white faux-homeboy Justin), there is a weak or failed counterpart. The story rose up from a graphic novel which in turn came from a web serial, and it seems Coscarelli has pruned and reshaped it into a more tractable but still fantastic and unpredictable tale. It follows a pleasantly dream-like, picaresque, drug-inspired logic which resembles that at the heart of some of Cronenberg's finest, maybe Naked Lunch or eXistenZ.

Although it's not an unmitigated success by any standard, neither was Phantasm, really, and I suspect this one will grasp hold of the imagination of adolescent boys in much the same way that one did. No, strike that: not in the same way. Phantasm took hold via the creep factor: the way the Tall Man walked will be forever recurring in the nightmares of a generation. This one will capture adolescent boys in the way that WD Richter's the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai did, shamelessly glorifying their most fundamental comic book daydreams.

My final word is that I liked it more than it perhaps deserves. I love the riddle which starts it. I love Bark Lee, the dog who saves the world. And I love that when I tell you that John, in fact, does not die at the end, but much earlier in the proceedings, I can say it without a spoiler alert, because truth has many levels, and time is an ocean, not a garden hose.

Dragonwyck: (1946. dir: Joseph L. Mankiewicz) Mankiewicz's maiden voyage in the director's chair was a grand and unapologetic Gothic romp, based on a novel by Anya Seton which was obviously inspired by Sheridan le Fanu as much as the more predictable Brontes. Without giving too much away, a nobleman goes a little mad. Is it with lust for his innocent house-guest? is there something more diabolical at hand? Gene Tierney is the country cousin (in her unfortunately frequent blank-eyed and by-the-numbers persona, alas. In her defence, though, she has to say, "Golly Moses!" several times, and who could overcome that?) and the nobleman is played by a young Vincent Price, so you know where THAT goes. There's some Roderick Usher here, for sure, and when Vincent Price runs mad, he doesn't mess around. The cast is great: Walter Huston and Anne Revere are the girl's strait-laced parents, and Spring Byington is chilling as a twisted maidservant whose sole pleasure is indulging in Schadenfreude at the naif's expense. A very young Jessica Tandy is on hand, too, in a lovely performance in a throwaway role. The glorious black-and-white thunderstorms, and the castle at night, are well worth experiencing, and there are ghosts, and opium, and foul murders, and a doomed and dying aristocratic family standing as metaphor for an outmoded caste system in an increasingly free America. Who can resist?

The Ninth Configuration: (1980. dir: William Peter Blatty) I want so much to like this movie. Obviously a labor of love for writer and director Blatty, post-Exorcist, who based it on his own novel, Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, you can see the strong imagery and theodical leanings which he will continue to hone (or overindulge, depending on your point of view; see my review for my own opinions on the matter) in 1990's Exorcist III: Legion.

There is a wonderful, bold use of the surreal here, the Moonshot with Crucifixion scene being the most obvious example, with its quiet voiceover discussion about the creation of the universe, but it goes further than that, diving right in with the opening credits and the gorgeous, ominous shots of a mist-enshrouded castle with a syrupy country-and-western ballad about San Antone playing over the top of it. It's filled with those great, undervalued character actors from the seventies: Jason Miller, Robert Loggia, Ed Flanders, Neville Brand, Joe Spinell, and many more. Scott Wilson gives a brave performance (as the astronaut who, Blatty said in an interview (1), is the one from the Exorcist who is warned by Regan that he'll "die up there"), and Stacy Keach is downright haunting as the new psychiatrist in charge of the nuthouse.

The premise is untenable, and smacks of the kind of Theatre-of-the-Absurd shenanigans which seem not just outdated but sour-makingly cliche from the modern perspective: "the inmates are running the madhouse" taken to a ridiculous extreme was a favorite trope from the fifties and sixties, when the book was written. There's also some apparent ambition toward the crazy-ironic humor of Catch-22, but it's nowhere near as engaging as the Heller version, and the dialogue between inmates often becomes tedious.

There's a late, climactic bar-fight with sadistic bikers (Steve Sandor (2) and Richard Lynch) which is extreme in its violent humiliation, the kind of scene which seems to have been obligatory in a certain type of '70s movie, possibly originating in Last House on the Left, possibly earlier as some Roger Corman twisted brainchild, but it's there in the Billy Jack and Walking Tall series, among others. This one is grotesquely protracted, but contains enough of the cartoonish that there is almost an innocence to the attackers, and you cannot easily look away.

The ending is both weak and overly prolonged, as are many of the scenes. At its best, it is captivating; at its worst, well-intentioned but leaden and contrived. Still, it is really like nothing else, and each time I watch it, my enjoyment is fuller.

(1) McCabe, Bob. the Exorcist: Out of the Shadows, Omnibus Press, 1999.

(2) Lt. Uhuru's "drill thrall" in "Gamesters of Triskelion" from season two of Star Trek