Not necessarily the best movies ever made, but these are twenty of my favorites, in no particular order.  Each post for the next twenty days will feature a brief discussion of one film (though one or two days will have multiple posts to make up for absences).

Post 17: Wyatt Earp (1994 dir. Lawrence Kasdan)

It begins moments before the OK Corral, travels back to his boyhood in Illinois, moves forward through time detailing his life, then finally circles back to that moment when Wyatt (Kevin Costner) made the choice to take a walk down the streets of Tombstone, AZ with his brothers and Doc Holliday (Dennis Quaid in a brilliant performance), staying true to history with his simple quiet words, “Let’s go.”

The movie moves beyond the OK Corral and into Wyatt’s vengeance-filled ride against those who were going to harm his family. It ends with his prospecting days, but I would have liked to have seen him walking the backlots of early Hollywood, as he did, consulting on early westerns. Earp’s life was complex, dark, troubled, romantic, violent, and difficult to understand especially sometimes his choice in friends. It’s those layers of Earp which this film gets absolutely right.

But it probably is also why the film does not endure as much as films like My Darling Clementine (1946), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), and Tombstone (1993). Cinematic western heroes typically are archetypes, more universal and whose motives are easier to understand. This film provides a more character-driven look at a man whose life is usually only shown in relation to his participation in one gunfight. To be fair, that gunfight is the most famous in western history but it is only a few seconds of his life.

I have been fascinated with Wyatt Earp’s life since I was a little boy. Many biographies, documentaries, and interviews try to get to the core of what motivated him. It is difficult to say what his character spine really was, especially in relation to his friendship with John Holliday. The beauty of this film is in its desire to provide a comprehensive and epic look at the life of one of the most famous of North American Old West legends.

Maybe its goal is its chief failing in that the legend is far more entertaining than the history. But Earp did not exist in order to become legendary, he was just a man making choices and living his life. And when it comes to this movie, which is not a failure at all, I appreciate the history, the truth. More than any of the other pictures from this twenty day challenge, this one is a deeply personal one for me. It is a flawed but very good, very thoughtful, very well-made film. It is a true favorite of mine.