Why Johnny Ringo, you look like somebody just walked over your grave...

I spent a lot of time sitting with my father on Saturday afternoons, watching “Six-Gun Saturday” programming on Ted Turner’s Superstation 17 when I was a kid. If it wasn’t college football season, of course. If Larry Munson wasn’t calling a game, we were watching Randolph Scott, Joel McRae, Jimmy Stewart, or, the Big Dog, John Wayne managing to get ten shots out of a revolver and wiping out the black hats.

I know it’s a major stereotype, guys loving Westerns, but, hey, it’s in my blood. If there’s a horse, a bad guy, and a saloon fight in it, I will watch it. One of my go-to cures for a case of insomnia is to throw Rio Bravo into my Blu Ray player, not because it will bore me to sleep, but because I can recite every line of it. It’s like counting sheep.

So, as I was planning out my links for the first few weeks of this, I noticed, several times, where I could throw in a good Western. But, it almost seemed too easy. Every actor of the last fifty years has done at least one Western. As I was writing up my entry for Band of the Hand, something occurred to me - Stephen Lang is IN one of my freakin’ favorite Westerns!

It throws my whole plan out of whack, but I will gladly plot a new course on my way back to Mr. Romero, just so I can spend some time talking about Tombstone.

The story is one of the classic Western plots. Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) has cleaned up Dodge City and has moved on to Tombstone, Arizona with his brothers, Virgil (the legendary Sam Elliott) and Morgan (the late, great Bill Paxton). The Earps and their wives plan on settling in Tombstone. Wyatt has had it with  being a peace officer and just wants to find his pot of gold in the West. They quickly take over a saloon and a faro game and start raking in the money. Wyatt’s old friend/nemesis Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer, who has never been as good since as he is in this movie) is also in town, gambling and trying not to die of tuberculosis.

But Tombstone, as a town, is not all beer and skittles. A group of cutthroat outlaws known as The Cowboys own the town. They rob, rape, steal, kill, and maraud anything and everything they want to, and the local sheriff could care less. He just wants to wear a badge and act important. He looks the other way, and The Cowboys let him wear his star. The local marshal tries his best, but he’s an old gunslinger, just looking for some peace and quiet in his old age. Well, when the leader of The Cowboys, Curly Bill Brocius (Powers Boothe), kills the marshal while severely jacked up on opium, the town leaders come to Wyatt to take over the job. Wyatt tells them no. But his brother Virgil has other plans. Virgil wants to settle down for good in Tombstone, and he wants a safe place for his family and the rest of the citizens to live in. He takes the job. Wyatt goes ballistic, but soon finds out that Morgan has also signed on as a deputy marshal. Wyatt has no choice – he wants to support his brothers, so he reluctantly takes a badge.

The Earps start cleaning up Tombstone, but The Cowboys are less than thrilled by this. When they issue an ultimatum to the Earps, to get out of town or meet them at the O.K. Corrall and settle it once and for all, the Earps, with Doc Holliday joining them, accept the challenge. Many Cowboys die, all but one, actually – Ike Clanton, played by the above-mentioned Stephen Lang. The rest of The Cowboys take their revenge – late one night, they gun down Morgan while he is playing pool, and shoot Virgil so bad, he loses the use of one arm.

And, well, let’s just say, Wyatt goes on a killing spree, wearing the badge of a U.S. Marshal, but being as unlawful as he wants to. I’ll leave it at that…

If I were to start telling you how much I love this movie, this post would be longer than five other posts combined. So let me try to be brief… yeah, right…

I have already spoken about my man-crush of sorts when it comes to Kurt Russell. What he lacks in great hair here is more than made up by his INCREDIBLE mustache and his “I will kill you with a look, but I’d rather use a shotgun” persona. His Wyatt could care less about being subtle in the first half of the movie, and, in the last half, he just could care less, period. He has one thought in his head – rid the world of The Cowboys by any means necessary. Shooting them once might work, shooting them ten times is better.

Sam Elliott is just… damn… Sam Elliott. One of my “bucket list” items is to have Sam Elliott read Larry MacMurty’s Lonesome Dove out loud to me, cover to cover. His voice is far from beautiful, but, damn, it resonates like a fine violin, if that violin had been aged in a tobacco barn, then moved to the Jack Daniels’ distillery and soaked in a barrel of Jack’s finest bourbon for eleven years. Bill Paxton is always great to watch in a movie, bless his soul. Paxton went full-bore with every role he played, no matter what.

But they ain’t all there is to see in this movie, believe me. Val Kilmer plays Doc Holliday like Doc should have always been played. He’s constantly drunk, damn near falling-over dead, sarcastic as hell, but ready to kill a man for looking at him the wrong way. His enemy of choice in this is Johnny Ringo, played by Michael Biehn. Biehn has  played characters before that were, shall we say, a little.. off. In Tombstone, his Johnny Ringo is a whole other kind of crazy. His eyes radiate a psychotic haze that is just scary as hell. If you ran into this guy in the streets, you would wet your pants and cry for momma before you even thought about running away. Ringo’s  kind of crazy is perfectly described by Doc in a few lines of dialogue that I would, well, let’s just say I would kiss screenwriter Kevin Jarre on the mouth just for putting them on paper. I’m gonna put them here as they appear in the script and let them say it plain:

Wyatt : What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?

Doc : A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.

Wyatt : What does he need?

Doc : Revenge.

Wyatt: For what?

Doc : Bein’ born.


In that one small exchange, Ringo’s whole existence is described, and it is a frightening revelation.

There is also the final scene between Doc and Ringo, when they face off for the last time. It is a thing of pure beauty, this scene. One of the images, of Doc smoking a cigarette while he talks to Ringo, is fascinating, and it was made so by an accidental gust of breeze during the take. Holliday speaks, and he takes the cigarette out of his mouth, exhaling smoke. The breeze takes the smoke and swirls it around his head, almost forming a halo of sorts. It’s a beautiful accident that makes the scene all the more brilliant to watch.

There are so many other outstanding supporting actors in this movie, it’s almost like a who’s who of acting. Harry Carey, Jr makes one of his last appearances in films as old Marshal Fred White. Dana Delaney is an actress in a traveling troupe that becomes Wyatt’s lover. Dana Wheeler-Nicholson plays Wyatt’s laudanum-addicted wife, Mattie. Billy Zane is the head of the acting troupe. The great Michael Rooker plays Sherman McMasters, one of The Cowboys who defects to become one of Wyatt’s men after The Cowboys make an attack on the Earp wives. John Corbett, who will forever be in my head as “Chris at KBEAR” from Northern Exposure, is one of The Cowboys, and, of all people, Jason Priestly plays another Cowboy, one who may or may not have a crush on Billy Zane’s character.

If you have not seen Tombstone because it’s “just another Western,” you have missed a true gem of a movie, Western or not. If cowboy movies are not your thing, see Tombstone to watch the performances. If you love Westerns, Tombstone is one of the best you will see. Pop some corn, sit back, and let this movie take you back to the days of your youth, when every kid had a holster and a capgun, and every sunset was something to ride off into…