Tombstone (1993) Review

Wyatt Earp arrives in a silver boom town with his brothers, intending to make money and stop being a lawman. A group of men calling themselves the Cowboys, wearing red sashes, already run the county. The 9 is for a Western that works as an ensemble picture instead of a duel. The film is stuffed with faces, most of them doing character work in a handful of scenes, and it moves fast enough that the crowding reads as a town instead of as clutter.

This movie is a blast. It’s quotable and crowded with faces I’m happy to see, and Val Kilmer walks off with every scene he’s in. Few Westerns are this much fun through the first half, and my one real quarrel is with what comes after the gunfight. The point I withhold is the last half hour, where the vendetta ride becomes a series of encounters without much shape. The film has already had its climax and knows it.

Kilmer Is the Whole Film

Doc Holliday is dying of tuberculosis, is drunk for most of the running time, and is the most alert person in every room he enters. Kilmer plays the performance as a performance. Doc is a Southern gentleman doing an impression of a Southern gentleman, deploying manners as a weapon, switching to Latin to insult a man who understands it, and enjoying every exchange because he knows exactly how much time he has. The precision is what elevates it. He plays the illness continuously and never emphasizes it. There’s a slight breathlessness under the drawl, a hand that steadies itself on furniture, and it never becomes the subject of a scene until the film has no more use for him.

The friendship is the film’s real spine. Doc’s answer when asked why he’s riding into certain death for Earp is that Wyatt is his friend, and when told he’s other friends, he says he doesn’t. That exchange is why the film outlasts every other version of this story.

I think that exchange is the best thing Kilmer ever did. He delivers it so lightly that it hurts, and it’s the moment that turns a good Western into one I care about.

Dana Delany and Dana Wheeler-Nicholson get less room than they should, and the film is honest enough about Mattie’s laudanum addiction to make Wyatt’s abandonment of her cost something. It’s a thread the picture raises properly and then leaves behind. That’s the price of an ensemble this size moving at this speed, and it’s the one place where the fired writer and the compressed schedule are both visible in the same handful of scenes, and the film simply moves on to the next thing.

The Production Fell Apart and It Worked

Kevin Jarre wrote the screenplay and was hired to direct it. He was removed about a month into production, reportedly over pace and an unwillingness to cut his own script.

George Cosmatos took over and is the credited director. Kurt Russell has since said publicly that he directed the film himself, giving Cosmatos shot lists each night, an arrangement he says was agreed to keep the production intact. Cosmatos isn’t alive to give his account.

Whatever the truth of that, the picture bears the marks of a script written by somebody who loved the period and a shoot that had to move fast. The dialogue is enormously stylized, full of formal nineteenth century construction, and the coverage is efficient and unfussy.

Jarre’s cast is the other legacy. He assembled an extraordinary bench of character actors, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Stephen Lang, Michael Rooker, Billy Bob Thornton in a single scene, and the film’s depth comes from somebody good playing every small part.

Michael Biehn deserves particular credit for Ringo. He’s the only Cowboy the film treats as dangerous instead of merely violent, he handles a revolver with a showman’s precision, and he’s given an interior life in about four lines. Doc describes him as a man with a great empty hole in the middle of him, and Biehn plays exactly that and never once explains it.

The Dialogue Is Doing Period Work

Almost every famous line in this film is a formal construction that nobody would say today. Jarre wrote toward how people in the 1880s wrote. That isn’t how films usually render the period. Characters use complete sentences, subordinate clauses and elaborate courtesy, and the threat sits inside the politeness. Ringo and Doc’s first exchange is entirely in Latin, and neither man translates for anybody. The film trusts an audience to understand from tone that two men have just agreed to kill each other, and the confidence makes it thrilling instead of obscure.

I grin through that whole scene. Two men trading Latin while the room waits to see who draws is the kind of swagger I wish more Westerns had the nerve to try.

The result is a Western that people quote constantly. That’s rare. Most quotable films are comedies, and this one manages it with a formal tone nobody speaks in, because the lines are constructed to be delivered instead of to sound overheard.

The Gunfight Is Thirty Seconds

The confrontation at the O.K. Corral arrives about halfway through and lasts roughly the length of the real thing. That’s to say almost no time at all. The staging is close, confused and ugly. Men stand within a few feet of each other in a narrow lot, most of the shooting is at conversational distance, and it’s over before anybody has done anything heroic. That accuracy is a real choice. The mythology of the event is a duel between good and evil, and the film stages it as a botched arrest at point-blank range that leaves three men dead and two Earps wounded. Everything afterward is the consequence. That’s the more interesting half historically and the weaker half dramatically. The vendetta ride is a series of ambushes without the shape the first half had, and the film loses me a little there. I’d have trimmed that stretch hard and gotten to Doc’s last scenes sooner.

The attack on Morgan is the exception and it’s the turn the whole film rests on. Russell has spent an hour playing a man determined not to be a lawman, and the film takes his brothers apart in a pool hall and on a street, and what follows is a version of Wyatt Earp with nothing left to protect. The shift is sudden and completely earned.

Why It Beat the Other One

Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp arrived six months later with a bigger budget, a longer running time and a serious biographical intention, and it was a commercial failure while this one made about fifty-six million dollars on twenty-five.

The difference is scope. Costner’s film is a life. This one is an incident, with a town, an ensemble and a friendship, and it never pretends to explain Wyatt Earp to anybody. Russell’s Earp is also the correct choice for that shape. He plays a competent man who wants to be left alone and becomes frightening only when everything has been taken from him, and he cedes the screen to Kilmer without any visible struggle. That’s a producer’s decision as much as an actor’s.

Russell gets too little credit for this, in my view. Handing a film to your co-star without a fight is harder than it looks, and his quiet, stubborn Earp is what gives Kilmer’s Doc room to shine.

Thirty years on it plays constantly on television, people who have never watched it start to finish quote it, and it’s the version of this story most Americans carry. That’s what happens when a film is enjoyable instead of important.

Should you watch Tombstone?

Yes, and watch it for Kilmer. It’s a 9 because the first half is close to perfect, and Doc Holliday, dying on his feet, riding out beside the only friend he has is the finest thing anybody has done with this material. It isn’t a 10 because the vendetta ride wanders once the gunfight is over, and the last half hour sags enough that I can’t pretend it doesn’t.

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