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A pellucid compression of Wyatt Earp's saga, a serious yarn composed almost fully of gags. The boomtown amid Arizona mesas, Tombstone, a kaleidoscopic montage gives its origin while an early line has the split of civilization and savagery: "What is it, a baby or a shooting?" The black hat (John Carradine) liquors up a henchman to create a ruckus at a rival's saloon, disarming the sot is a job for the former Union scout grousing from the balcony, "just a visitor tryin' to get some sleep." (Boetticher's future man of granite, Randolph Scott is here quite an animated Earp.) The dance-hall spitfire (Binnie Barnes) assists at cheating and gets dunked in a trough for her trouble, she sics Doc Holliday (Cesar Romero) on the new lawman only to find them chummily comparing six-shooters at the bar. Her peppery swagger contrasts with the demure diligence of the gunslinger's estranged sweetheart (Nancy Kelly). "She means life to him." "What am I, a funeral?" Allan Dwan doesn't allow any of it to harden into myth, his backlot community continually bubbles with motion and humor even during collisions of order and violence. (Playing his own father, Eddie Foy Jr. does a jig at gunpoint that culminates with a kick to the scoundrel's chin.) Romero's Holliday is its saturnine soul, racing the Reaper while reminded of words from Julius Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their death, the brave but once." The genre's planes pulled together for a child's makeshift surgery and shot apart at the O.K. Corral, un western exemplaire as Bazin would say. A graveyard view as the distant stagecoach rides away, "this dump's gettin' too tame for me." Ford follows majestically, though the deeper affinity is with Tourneur (Wichita). With Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Edward Norris, Joe Sawyer, Chris-Pin Martin, Dell Henderson, Harry Hayden, and Charles Stevens. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |