gsbltd Oh, where to beign? FIrstly: I'm born/raised in Wichita KS so I know the old girl pretty well. Even still visit "Old Cowtown" on the banks of the "Little Ar-Kansas River"... which is amazingly framed by a nonexistant mountain range! Note that phonetic pronunciation because it's just one of the many inaccuracies this old Technicolor chestnut promulgates. Typically, a character in the film calls it the "Ar-kan-saw" River. But those are the least of the offenses as this movie steadfastly portrays that thug-with-a-badge Wyatt Earp as a reticent, conquering hero. Truth is he was nothing of the kind, let alone Marshall of my hometown! Earp was just a patrolman in the seedy worehouse district of Delano, which was just on the other side of the river from "respectable" Wichita. Today Delano is filled with botiques, but in 1888 it was filthy and crawling with rats an stray dogs.. in fact, young Wyatt honed his pistol skills by shooting mongrels for the palty bounty the city offered... money he would later gamble away playing Faro at a local table. He was also himself once arrested for disorderly conduct. Earp was a piece of work, all right! In constrast, his buddy Bat Masterson was a decent lawman and one of the few who would live to tell about his wild days on the Kansas prairies - he retired writing a sports column for a NY newspaper. But Wyatt Earp still had an infamous career ahead, including the disgrace that was the OK Corral and his subsequent vigilantism as he and his merrry band roamed the countryside to murder those who were already exonerated in court of law. Earp finished his days as a respected advisor to Hollywood silent films where he perpetuated the myth of white-hatted good guys. Appropriartely -in real life- Wyatt Earp always wore a black one. But the mythical legacy he left behind was still a strong one as this turgid potboiler demonstrates.

Spikeopath Wichita is directed by Jacques Tourneur and written by Daniel B. Ullman. It stars Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchannan, Lloyd Bridges and Keith Larsen. It's filmed in Cinemascope/Technicolor with cinematography by Harold Lipstein and music by Hans J. Salter.Wichita is an origin story, that of one Wyatt Earp (McCrea), the story is set before he gets to Dodge City, where apparently some famous gunfight occurred. From a narrative stand point it's a town tamer story, Earp arrives in a newly thriving Wichita, at this point he's a hunter of buffalo only. But as the cowboys converge on the town, and things turn very dark, Earp - a bastion of good and just righteousness - finds it impossible to continue in turning down the town superior's offers of becoming the town Marshal.It's one of those Western movies that made Western movie fans become Western movie fans. A film you would have watched as a youngster and just bought totally into the good guy against the baddies central core. Of course as youngsters we wouldn't have cared a jot about thematics such as capitalism ruling over common sense, or metaphysical leanings ticking away, all while a genius director is composing shots and frames of great distinction. Hell! Even the intelligence and maturity in the writing would have escaped us, the dark passages merely incidents of no great concern...Wichita is damn fine film making. OK! It isn't wall to wall action. Sure there is a good round of knuckles, a bit of trench warfare and the standard shoot-outs, but these are just conduits to smart and compelling human drama, richly performed by McCrea (brilliantly cast) and company. Tourneur, Ullman and Lipstein make sure there is no waste on the page or via location framing, the costuming authentic and pleasing, and of course the story itself, the set up of the iconic man himself, is as compelling as it is splendidly entertaining.It be a traditional Western for the traditional Western fan. Nice! 8/10

kenjha Wyatt Earp cleans up the title town after it's overrun by rowdy cattlemen. Made nine years after "My Darling Clementine," the definitive film about Earp, this standard oater focuses on the legendary gunman's early career. McCrea would have been well suited to the role except that he was 50 when this film was made and was much too old to be playing Earp as a young man starting his career as a frontier lawman. It also looks a bit creepy when he is romancing the lovely Miles, who was young enough to have played his daughter. Earp is assisted here by Bat Masterson, a role McCrea himself played a few years later in "The Gunfight at Dodge City."

dougbrode 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.