Watched Sunday night the 244th version of the Wyatt Earp story I have seen in my lifetime: "Hour of the Gun," a 1967 western that begins with the shootout at the OK Corral and sees through Earp's vengeance on the bad guys.
I'm hardly a judge of cinematography, but the whole film looked washed-out, and not in an artistic way. James Garner (as Wyatt Earp) might as well have been cardboard and the entire movie lacked any sort of character development — only Jason Robards (as Doc Holliday) and Robert Ryan (as Ike Clanton) managed to develop any sort of personality.
Really the movie felt as if we had joined in on a long-running TV show halfway through the season. Still, it seems this movie is where the men behind "Tombstone" took their post-shootout cues; many scenes are strikingly familiar — though certainly not the Hollywood love interest part that threatened to turn "Tombstone" into a chick flick. No, "Hour of the Gun" had not a single speaking role for any woman. If not for a few glimpses of women in the background, one might think that Arizona was a lonely place indeed.
And in this one, Ryan's Ike Clanton was the brains behind the operation, while Curly Bill Brocius (a young Jon Voight) was the drunken lackey.
Anyway, "Hour of the Gun" does not make my yet-to-be-constructed list of Westerns that need to be seen. And I'm thinking that I have seen quite enough of the Wyatt Earp saga for at least a decade or more.
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Among my Christmas gifts were two albums: "Live at the Philharmonic" by Kris Kristofferson and "What I Like About Texas: Greatest Hits" by Gary P. Nunn.
The first album I had on cassette a decade ago, the second was a CD stolen from me when our house was broken into in 2003. Listening to the both while driving to Austin on Dec. 26 was like a reunion with old friends.
Kristofferson's album (and you have to like live albums to like this one) is a fantastic mix of wry and painfully dead-on sarcasm ("Jesus Was a Capricorn," "The Law is for the Protection of the People"), old-school hits ("Sunday Morning Coming Down," "Me and Bobby McGee") and drunken obnoxiousness ("Out of Mind, Out of Sight" and his cover of Haggard's "Okie from Muscogee.")
Nunn's album is just a good time in a CD case. I mean, just listen to the opening track. You find me a Texan who doesn't smile reflexively upon hearing the first 10 seconds of "What I Like About Texas" and I'll show you a Texan with his ass caught in a bear trap. The rest of the album is just the soundtrack to all the good times I had between 1994 and 2002: "Think I'll Go to Mexico," "Roadtrip," "Guadalupe Days," "My Kind of Day on Padre" and, of course, "Terlingua Sky," among them.
I hadn't heard either album in a half-dozen years when I listened to them again last week. But I still knew every word.
Don't know if you read it, but McMurtry's "Telegraph Days" talks a lot about the Earps, and not in a positive way. It's not McMurtry's best by any means, but it does have some interesting viewpoints.
Posted by: Sandy | January 06, 2009 at 05:01 PM