Watch Wichita For Free

Truly Dreadful Film

hyped garbage

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Wyatt Earp (1848 – 1929)is probably the most famous lawmaker from the old west. He appears in this 1955 film.Earp is most famous for the "Gunfight at the OK Corral", made famous in novels and films. Earp was first featured in the 1923 "Wild Bill Hickok" where he was played by Bert Lindley. Earp himself worked behind the scenes with his buddy William Hart (who played Hickok). He appeared again in "Frontier Marshall" (1934) based on the novel of the same name. George O'Brien played Earp. John Ford produced the first notable film about Earp, called "My Darling Clementine" (1946) which many people consider a great film. Henry Fonda played Earp and Victor Mature played a wonderful coughing Doc Holiday. The "Wyatt Earp" TV series (1955 – 61) had Hugh O'Brian as Earp. The series gave birth to the 1957 film "Gunfight at OK Corral" with Burt Lancaster as Earp. John Sturges directed this film and re-visited the era with "Hour of the Gun" (1967) with James Garner (Earp), Jason Robards (Doc) and Robert Ryan (Ike Clanton).In the 1990s, "Tombstone" (1993) and "Wyatt Earp" (1994) gave us more intense portraits. In Tombstone, we have Kurt Russell as Earp and in "Wyatt Earp" Kevin Costner.For my tastes, the best Earp was Hugh O'Brien on the TV series, followed by Kurt Russell ("Tombstone") whom I think was the more realistic Earp. Joel McCrea does a really poor job as Earp. McCrea was a great Western actor and he was terrific in "Ride the High Country". But he adds nothing to the Earp legend in this one.

The award-winning Golden Globe western for Best Outdoor Drama in 1956, "Wichita" reunited "Cat People" director Jacques Tourneur and leading man Joel McCrea for the third and final time. Previously, they teamed up to make the exceptional "Stars in My Crown" (1950) and "Stranger on Horseback" (1955). Although Tourneur won more kudos for his quiet little horror movies with Val Lewton, the Parisian native was no stranger to horse operas. In addition to his Joel McCrea westerns, he helmed "Canyon Passage" with Dana Andrews and "Great Day in the Morning" with Robert Stack. "Wichita" is a standard-issue, town-taming oater with McCrea cast as Wyatt Earp before he acquired his reputation as a lawman. Incidentally, when McCrea made this western, his portrayal of Earp was the tenth time that this famous badge-totter had been depicted. Prolific scenarist Dan Ullman, who also penned the screenplay for another McCrea sagebrusher "The Gunfight at Dodge City," would later reunite with Tourneur on "Great Day in the Morning." Ullman covered all the tropes in this wild and woolly western about cowboys herding cattle into a new railroad town and then blowing off with pent-up aggression as well as their pay on liquor and women. This western marked another collaboration between producer Walter Mirisch who had produced "The Gunfight at Dodge City" as well as "Fort Massacre" with McCrea. Mirisch assembled a first-rate cast that included several seasoned western actors, among them Jack Elam, Robert J. Wilke, Edgar Buchanan, Walter Coy, I. Stanford Jolly, John Smith, and Peter Graves.Wyatt Earp (Joel McCrea of "The Virginian") rides into the wide-open cattle town on the inauguration of its first herd. In no time, he makes a reputation for himself when he foils a bank robbery and arouses the interest of the wealthiest townspeople. They marvel at his ability to handle a six-shooter without killing anybody and promptly offer him a badge that a lesser man is wearing. Politely but firmly, Wyatt turns them down until the drunken cowhands start shooting the town up and accidentally kill an innocent five-year old standing at an open window and watching their shenanigans. Town mayor Andrew Hope (Carl Benton Reid of "Escape from Fort Bravo") swears Earp in as marshal and our hero marches into the dark street armed with his six-gun and a long- barreled shotgun. He arrests the cowboys and herds them off to jail with the help of a local newspaper reporter, Bat Masterson (Keith Larson of "Last of the Badmen"), who later signs on to become his deputy before Earp's brothers Morgan (Peter Graves of "The Five-Man Army" and James (John Smith of TV's "Laramie") ride into town. Despite their repeated efforts to hire Wyatt and his general reluctance to accept the badge, the town wheels are pleased with his performance. Those halcyon days are short-lived after Wyatt issues a town proclamation that guns cannot be worn in town. Railroad entrepreneur Sam McCoy (Walter McCoy of "The Searchers") objects to this ordinance and others like fear like he does that Wyatt has doomed Wichita. When the cattlemen get wind of this law, the town big-wigs worry that they will divert their herds elsewhere and prosperity will be a thing of the past. For a while, Wyatt drives a wedge between them. The mayor refuses to fire him, while the others plot to drive him out."Wichita" is an above-average western with sturdy production values and good performances.

I missed the beginning but enjoyed what I saw of this film. McCrae is Wyatt Earp, hired by the city fathers to clean up the wild town of Wichita, Kansas. He begins by prohibiting the wearing of guns in the town limits. It gives the city fathers second thoughts because, after all, a cow poke is not a cow poke without an instrument to kill, and Wichita wants the cow pokes to visit and spend their dollars in the saloon and other facilities.Wyatt is joined by his brothers, Morgan and Virgil, and they arrest the most corrupt of the town fathers who, mistaking their identities, tries to hire them to kill Wyatt.Lloyd Bridges is on hand for a final shoot out. Vera Miles is stunning in the way that only a beauty contest winner from a prairie state can be stunning. What do they feed their young girls in Oklahoma -- peaches, corn, and cream? Miles' father objects to the pairing of McCrae and Vera. "You know why, don't you Wyatt?" "Yes, I do." They're talking about the likelihood of Earp's being shot down on the streets, but Dad might have harboring somewhere in the back of his preconscious the realization that McCrae is about one hundred years Miles' senior. McCrae was aging by this time and following the trajectory of other fading actors by appearing in inexpensive Westerns. Even the urbane Ray Milland could be found in boots. But McCrae seems to have been a genuinely nice guy, so he's acceptable in the role. It was directed efficiently but without poetry by Jacques Tourneur, of all people. The script leaves the some of the heavies just enough humanity to raise this above the usual Manichean Western that divides people into pure good and pure evil.It's ironic that the audience watching this on television will root for, and applaud, Wyatt Earp in his attempt to bring peace to the town by forbidding the wearing of guns -- ironic because the most powerful gun lobby in Washington has just successfully argued that the best way to prevent regular shoot outs like Wichita's is to arm everyone with guns, including school teachers.

jacques tourneur, of Cat People fame, might seem an unlikely candidate to helm an above average B+ western. But that was the case in 1955 with Wichita, about the early days of Wyatt Earp. Some liberties with the facts are taken, including the notion that Earp had never worn a badge before he arrived in the Texas cowtown. In fact, Earp was the marshal of Ellsworth, Kansas in 1875 and was wooed away by the larger Wichita - even as Dodge City would then talk him into moving there. Many incidents in this film actually took place in Ellsworth, as the two towns are 'collapsed' into one another. That aside, the film is fine - whether individual things we see happened in one town or the other, the point is that the savvy screenplay conveys a strong understanding of the politics in such a city, and with no simple good guys in white hats or badguys in black ones, we realize that Earp had more problem with greedy townspeople than with outlaws. Bat Masterson (whom he actually knew from buffalo hunting days) becomes a deputy though he really wants to be a newspaperman, and while that had not yet occurred to him, Bat would, after leaving the rest, become a famous sportwriter in New York. One terrific sequence involves the attempt of a corrupt businessman to hire a pair of gunmen to kill Wyatt, though they turn out to be two of his brothers, and this incident really did take place. Joel McCrea makes a sturdy Earp (he later played Bat in gunfight at dodge city), and Keith Larson is fine as the young Bat. Great title song, by the way, by Tex Ritter. As to the upper level of B westerns in the fifties, they really don't get much better than this.