"AND HELL'S COMING WITH ME":
WYATT EARP ENCOUNTERS
THE COLD WAR
by
David Drysdale
B. A., University of Victoria, 2003

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
in
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
March 2006

© David Drysdale, 2006

1^1

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11
ABSTRACT
W yatt Earp has been depicted in print and on film num erous times since his
most infamous exploits in Dodge City, Kansas and Tombstone, Arizona in the late
nineteenth century. However, such depictions are hardly uniform. Rather, Wyatt
Earp has proven to be a particularly mercurial figure; at times, he is a noble paragon
of virtue, and others, a corrupt authoritarian. This thesis analyzes depictions of
W yatt Earp in five Cold War film s—My Darling Clementine (1946), Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral (1957), Hour o f the Gun (1967), Doc (1971), and Tombstone (1993) —in terms

of their shifting depictions of W yatt Earp, arguing that Earp serves as a figure
through which American audiences are able to deal w ith particular historical
anxieties borne out their nation's foreign policy w ith regard to the Cold War.

I ll

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract

11

Table of Contents

111

Acknowledgment

IV

Chapter One

"If Everything Isn't Black and White,
I Say 'W hy the Hell Not?"':
Theorizing the W estern

Chapter Two

The Significance of W yatt Earp
in American History

19

Chapter Three

Red Dawn: My Darling Clementine,
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and the
Anxiety of Influence

33

Chapter Four

"Indochina was Dodge City":
Hour of the Gun, Doc, and the
Demoralization of W yatt Earp

61

Chapter Five

"The Last Charge of W yatt Earp
and His Immortals": Tombstone,
Popular Memory, and the New
World Order

78

Conclusion

95

Works Cited

98

IV

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To satisfactorily list every person who assisted in the development of this thesis
w ould be an undertaking at least as considerable as the project itself. In short, I
w ould like to thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their guidance, support,
and infinite patience.

1. "If Everything Isn't Black and White, I Say 'W hy the
Hell Not?"': Theorizing the W estern

On August 12 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his paper "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History" at a session of the American
Historical Association in Chicago, at the World Columbian Exhibition. In his paper
Turner articulated his now-famous "frontier thesis": the idea that the frontier
experience is w hat defined America and Americans. According to Turner, the
frontier was the space at which the European colonist became an American. Turner
argued, "the peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been
compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people . . .
developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic conditions of
the frontier and into the complexity of city life" (2). For Turner, the American
character was created by "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of the American settlement westward" (2). The frontier
experience, according to Turner, is peculiar to America, which is set apart from
Europe by the virtues the frontier instills in its people. America, Turner argued, was
continually reborn at the line where "civilization" met "savagery"; the frontier was a
crucible in which the Americans and their nation were forged time and time again.
But the Columbian Exhibition is not significant to scholars for Turner's
presentation alone, as influential as it has been. For, while Turner was rum inating
on the American frontier experience, elsewhere in Chicago equally significant
cultural events were taking place. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, replete with

daring rescues, runaw ay stagecoaches, and fancy gunplay, presented a far more
romantic vision of the West than Turner's paper suggested. Bill Cody's
presentation, as mythological as it may have been, has become ingrained in
American culture as the epitome of the "Wild West." Meanwhile, other visitors to
the Exhibition turned out to see Thomas Edison demonstrate his new invention, the
Kinetoscope. With Edison's invention, "m oving pictures" became a viable m edium
of information exchange.
Neither Turner, Cody, nor Edison could have realized it, but the World
Columbian Exhibition presented a unique convergence of events that would
influence the way Americans w ould view their past and themselves for generations
to come. Indeed, the chance intersection of these events foreshadowed the
emergence of a cultural phenomenon that w ould develop into a particularly
American set of myths; the W estern film. The W estern would borrow Turner's
conceptions of the West and American identity and fuse them with the aesthetics of
Cody, and then transmit this combination through Edison's new medium, creating a
film genre that American audiences could use, if unconsciously, to examine their
own historical and contemporary culture.
Since the time of Turner, Cody, and Edison, the W estern film has developed
into one of the most enduring and popular genres in American cinema. Only ten
years elapsed between Edison's Kinetoscope demonstration and the production of
Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, considered by some to be the first true
W estern film (Wright 5). Westerns have been a part of American film culture ever

since. Though the popularity of the genre has waxed and waned, western films
have never vanished completely; indeed, it seems as though whenever scholars and
critics begin to draft elegies for the genre, the Western immediately makes a
resurgence. For example, Anthony Lejeune's 1989 lamentation that the num ber of
W esterns appearing on screen was dwindling and the few that did appear
"[possessed] qualities incompatible w ith the traditional form" (23) was followed by
Dances loith Wolves, (1990), a major box office success and the first W estern to win the

Academy Award for Best Picture since Cimarron (1931). Only two years later, Clint
Eastwood's Unforgiven repeated the feat. Similarly, in 2004 Gary H oppenstand
wrote in The Journal o f Popular Culture that the W estern was all but dead and that
filmmakers had to "trick" audiences into seeing W estern films by fusing the genre
w ith another (3). H oppenstand's comments were followed by the premiere of the
HBO series Deadwood, which became an instant popular and critical success in spite
of its clear generic alignment, as well as the film Brokehack Mountain (2005), which
received num erous accolades as well as eight Academy Award nominations
The W estern's enduring popularity and significance in American culture can
be attributed to its role as a unique American myth. Various scholars, including
Slotkin, Wright, and Parks have commented in great detail on the W estern's mythic
status and, while their arguments are certainly enlightening and valid, their analyses
miss the polysémie nature of the genre, which is a major contributor to its success.
Indeed, while the W estern is a mythic genre, it is not through this alone that the
genre maintains its relevance. Rather, it is through the combination of the W estern's

role as a foundation m yth of the United States and its polysémie encounter w ith
American history that the Western survives. The W estern addresses American birth
and growth but does not do so in a way that is necessarily trium phal or repentant.
Instead the W estern acts as w hat Newcomb and Hirsch have referred to as a
"cultural forum" in which a variety of points of view are expressed. The cultural
forum model is complemented by the W estern's role as a "bad faith" narrative, as
described by Forrest G. Robinson in his essay "The New Historicism and the Old
West."i The W estern does not offer a solitary vision of America's past or future.
Instead, the genre serves as a liminal space in which its apparently progressive
historical narrative is tem pered by a subtextual acknowledgment of anxietyinducing contemporary circumstances.
Analyzing w hat is meant by "the W estern as myth" can be problematic.
Traditionally, scholars of the Western have focused on a concept of m yth that
emphasizes the W estern's status as a constructed narrative that communicates some
meaning to society. Rita Parks has argued that a "m yth . . . refers to . . . a metaphoric
depiction of hum an experience" (14). According to Parks, m yth serves to articulate
certain ideas and concepts that are beyond the ability of standard hum an language
to address. Consequently, mythical discourses rely on "archetypal elements —

^ Robinson's term is similar to Sartre's concept of mauvaise foi in that both involve
self-deception. However, Sartre's bad faith supposes that the subject conceives him
or herself as an object in order to justify certain attitudes and actions. For Sartre,
someone engages in bad faith in order to transfer guilt onto some supposedly
uncontrollable aspect of the character; in Robinson, the "bad faith narrative" is also a
means of comfort but is rather faith in a positive quality of the society at large rather
than a controlling component to one's personality.

patterns of character, action, or structure that have recurred in verbal and visual
storytelling since ancient times" (14). The "archetypal elements" contain a m eaning
beyond w hat they literally depict and translate abstract experiences or thoughts that
are difficult to clearly express into concepts that are more readily understandable
and communicable for a society and its members.
Parks' concept of m yth as a means of communicating w ithin a society is
similar to the approach adopted by Will W right in Six Guns and Society.'^ W right
argues that myths are simply "communication[s] from a society to its members"
(16). W right emphasizes that myths, like any other language, m ust necessarily have
rules of grammar and diction in order to be understood. The rules roughly
correspond to the archetypes referred to by Parks. The myth, for Wright,
communicates "the social concepts and attitudes determined by the history and
institutions of a society" (16). Thus, the m yth is a means of integration,
communicating a socializing message that contributes to the development of a more
ordered and unified society.
This idea is articulated and modified by Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation.
Slotkin agrees with W right's suggestion that myths serve as socializing agents,
arguing that myths symbolize "the society's ideology" and "[dramatize] its moral
consciousness" (5). For Slotkin, as for Wright, m yth serves a hegemonic purpose as
a means to disseminate social ideology. However, Slotkin rejects Parks' notion of

2 W right's approach is largely based on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. For a
discussion of W right's approach in relation to Lévi-Strauss' work, see the appendix
of Six Guns and Society.

m yth being based on universal archetypes. Rather, Slotkin suggests that the
development of a particular society's m yth is entirely based on that society's history:
m yth is shaped by "historical contingencies rather than archetypes generated by
either 'the nature of things' or 'the nature of language'" (8). Though he rejects the
notion of any monomythical archetypes that arose from "hum an nature," Slotkin
does recognize that mythm aking is an organic process within a society, through
which a given society develops its own language of myth. Thus, like Parks and
Wright, Slotkin essentially argues that m yth functions as an abstract form of
communication that bears special significance for a society. Slotkin writes that
"through frequent retellings and deployments as a source of interpretive metaphors,
the original mythic story is increasingly conventionalized until it is reduced to a
deeply encoded and resonant set of symbols, 'icons,' 'keywords,' or historical
clichés" (5). These icons and clichés are roughly analogous to Parks' archetypes,
though derived from a different source.
Westerns are able to fit this role as a cultural carrier of m yth by virtue of their
nature as popular generic texts. In contemporary North American society, popular
genre texts, whether the Western, the space opera, or the Harlequin-style romance,
seem to be the texts that exemplify the qualities of myth as suggested by Slotkin,
Wright, and Parks. As John Cawelti argues in The Six-Gun Mystique, "a popular
form, like the Western, may encompass a num ber of standard plots. Indeed, one
im portant reason for the continued use of a formula is its very ability to change and
develop in response to the changing interests of audiences" (52). Cawelti argues

7

that due to the heterogeneous nature of contemporary cultures, the role of primary
distributor of social thought and values has fallen to the mass media (59).
Furthermore, Cawelti suggests, formulaic expressions of mass media —like the
W estern film —play a particularly essential role in the mass media:
Formula stories seem to be the one way in which the individuals in a
culture act out certain unconscious or repressed needs, or express in an
overt and symbolic fashion certain latent motives which they then
m ust give expression to, but cannot face openly. (60)
The W estern film is an appropriate example of Cawelti's formula story. The
Western, as most generic "formula texts," is often analyzed in terms of the strict
formulas to which they adhere. Many scholars have examined the W estern in terms
of these structures. In his study of the most popular W estern films released between
1950 and 1970, Will Wright, for example, has identified several strict Western plot
structures, including "the classical plot," "the professional plot," and "the
transitional Western." Cawelti, meanwhile, paraphrases Western pulp w riter Frank
Gruber's identification of seven essential W estern plots (61). The structure of
W estern films is reminiscent of the structure attributed to classical myths by scholars
such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. Thus, the formulaic nature of
generic popular texts is ideal for the transmission of myth; indeed, formulaic texts
such as the W estern play a similar role in contemporary American culture as myths
of gods and heroes might have played in the cultures that produced those tales.

Cawelti's suggestion that generic texts act as a m edium in which a culture's
"unconscious or repressed needs" are expressed is also supported by the cultural
forum model of television proposed by Newcomb and Hirsch. Newcomb and
Hirsch cite Fishe and Hartley's argum ent that that television fulfills a "bardic
function" in contemporary societies (564), adding that in this capacity television
presents the audience w ith "a multiplicity of meanings" that focus on "our most
prevalent concerns, or deepest dilemmas" (564). Newcomb and Hirsch posit that
television functions as a "cultural forum," presenting a polysémie narrative that
allows the "multiplicity of meanings" to engage in a dialogue w ith one another and
w ith the audience. A variety of messages and m eanings can be extrapolated from
the televisual text, allowing audience members to encounter not only their own
points-of-view but also contradictory perspectives, perm itting an essential, if
unconscious, exchange of ideas and information. The polysémie nature of television
does not provide any resolution to the televisual forum debate, and thus no
dom inant ideology emerges. As Newcomb and Hirsch put it, "television does not
present firm ideological conclusions —despite its formal conclusions —so much as it
comments on ideological problems" (565 - 6; emphasis original).

The cultural forum model is complemented by Forrest G. Robinson's concept
of "bad faith," which similarly echoes Cawelti's argument. In "the N ew Historicism
and the Old West," Robinson suggests that in the most popular texts, there are often
m ultiple available readings that may appear to be contradictory. Robinson argues
that this netw ork of meanings often takes the form of an explicit and trium phal

surface narrative that is countered by a more subtle, subversive counternarrative
(78). The dom inant narrative serves to comfort the audience w ith an adulating story
and thus allows the audience to safely address uncomfortable cultural issues —
Robinson specifically mentions issues of gender and race —in a way that minimizes
the tear of reprisal that addressing the subjects openly might entail. Thus, Robinson
argues, the society —which is burdened by guilt through its members' roles as selfidentified enfranchised citizens —may encounter and psychologically come to terms
w ith various injustices ingrained in itself.
Though neither Newcomb and Hirsch nor Robinson are specifically
addressing film w ith their arguments, their theses are certainly relevent to a
discussion of films. Like Newcomb and Hirsch's television programs, films —
especially those of the mass-market, "Hollywood" variety —are the product not of a
single auteur but instead a group of people ranging from writers to producers to
directors to marketers. Thus, the filmed text is a collective creation that avoids
representing the ideology of any single mind. Furthermore, the mythic aspects of
film are suggested by the ritualistic nature of viewing a film. Films can be viewed in
theatres w ith large groups of people, and such a group engagement, combined w ith
a following discussion of a film's merits or deficiencies as well as consumption of
related materials from film reviews to merchandise, suggests that for many people
the viewing of a film is far from passive entertainment. Additionally, film audiences
actively support films directly through the purchase of tickets or rentals, and filmgoing often plays a role in other hum an rituals, such as courtship.

10

However, this is not to say that all popular generic texts are dealing w ith the
same social anxieties. Rather, texts of a particular genre are especially apt for the
discussion of certain social anxieties. These issues are encoded into the genre of the
text: the peculiar trappings of one genre suggest to the audience that it is a space in
w hich one social problem can be examined. The shifts in generic elements signal
shifts of language. The spy story, for example, might be best suited to discuss issues
of privacy by virtue of the genre's typical narrative involving concealed information
and privacy as well as the power associated w ith such things. W hen audience
members recognize the narrative as a spy story, they are able to prepare themselves,
unconsciously or not, for such a discursive shift and then are capable of entering the
cultural forum debate that the text will present to them.
W hen discussing the Western, John Cawelti points to the genre's "historical
setting" and "thematic emphasis on the establishment of law and order, and its
resolution of the conflict between civilization and savagery on the frontier" as
indicators that the W estern is "a kind of foundation myth" (100). Cawelti compares
the W estern film to American Independence Day celebrations, but suggests that,
unlike a July 4* celebration which "has no room for dramatic conflict and ambiguity
of values, the W estern is able to explore not only w hat was gained, but w hat was
lost" (100). Cawelti, further suggesting the cultural forum and bad faith models,
argues that the W estern succeeds due to its confrontation w ith essential American
social conflicts, but in particular, issues of faith:

11

By creating a marginal hero whose style of behavior and mode of life
identified him w ith those individuals and groups who, like the
cowboy, belonged to a class that was rapidly becoming obsolete
through social progress, these writers created a hero whose
predicam ent reflected ambiguities of these ideals. (105)
The ideals Cawelti refers to are concepts such as manifest destiny and the "special
historical mission of the country" (103), both of which are central to American self­
conception and Exceptionalism.
Garry Watson, in his analysis of Cawelti's work, suggests that w hat Cawelti is
truly pointing at is that the W estern is a depiction of sacrifice. According to Watson,
"the western is the genre that typically dramatizes a sacrificial crisis, the violent
resolution of which founds or refounds a community or nation" (1). This analysis
alludes to both Frederick Jackson Turner's notion that the American nation is forged
anew at the frontier and Richard Slotkin's titular phrase "regeneration through
violence." The Western, as these argum ents suggest, sanctifies the use of violence as
a foundation of community, but also depicts the troubling nature of such a
foundational narrative.
However, an identification of the W estern as a narrative of faith and sacrifice
is rather broad. One m ust also consider the historical setting of the Western. Both
Rita Parks and John Lenihan have argued for a consideration of setting in any
attem pt to define w hat is meant by "Western" (Parks 27; Lenihan 12). Lenihan
argues that the setting is a crucial part of W estern iconography, and should "suggest

12

the trans-Mississippi West from the Civil War to the turn of the century" (12).
Lenihan goes on to articulate his idea that a key component of the W estern is its
dichotomous setting, or the inherent contrast between the land "that both threatened
the pioneer society and promised future greatness" and the beginnings of
civilization "that promised hum an fulfillment if immediate dangers could be met"
(12). Lenihan's observation of the W estern's prim ary dichotomy —the contrast
between "civilization" and "the land" —is similar to aspects of the genre identified
by W right and Slotkin (14). Furthermore, this opposition is not only expressed
through the setting. The binarism is also expressed through characterizations and
representations of m orality in Westerns. Many W esterns feature the opposition of
the citizenry of the frontier town and some form of Other, w hether Native
American, lawless, anarchic bandit gangs, or rapacious businessmen run amok.
W ith such a variety of generic conventions as suggested by Lenihan, Slotkin,
Wright, and others, settling on a single definition of "Western" is difficult at best.
Emphasizing a geographical setting is unsatisfactory, as even the definition of w hat
constitutes "the West" is a matter of debate. Indeed, Lenihan's insistence that the
genre depicts "the trans-Mississippi West" is far too limiting and omits texts that are
foundational to the genre, such as James Fenimore Cooper's frontier romances, not
to mention the Westerns of other nations, including the Ned Kelly stories of
Australia. On the other hand, a definition based on a fixed time period is also too
limiting; it is entirely conceivable to see a W estern set in contemporary times or even
in the future. A reliance on a plot-based definition is also insufficient; in spite of the

13

identifications of "essential plots" by W right and others, some texts that are most
assuredly W esterns fall outside of their rather rigid prescriptivism. Rather, the
definition should be somewhat conceptual. The Western, then, is, broadly defined, a
popular genre that depicts the conflict between forces of the wilderness —figurative
or literal—and forces of incorporation—whether pioneers, ranchers, soldiers, or
businesspeople—in a historical frontier setting.
However, the true generic essence of the Western is not located in such binary
oppositions. Rather, it is found in the genre's concern w ith the liminal state between
the dichotomies. The W estern offers its audience a third, liminal space between the
two opposing camps of civilization and wilderness. Furthermore, the gunfighter
hero is not a "savage" Other as represented by cattle rustlers or American Indians,
but neither is he as civilized as the schoolmarm for w hom he m ust make the frontier
safe. Thus, the W estern and its heroes serve as spaces wherein the varying
idealizations of the wild country and civilization can be placed in dialogue with
each other. In this respect, the W estern fulfills a function similar to that of the
pastoral as described by Leo Marx. For Marx, the American pastoral setting is rural
and has been touched by hum an influence, but maintains an idealized vision of
nature. The hum an touch allows the audience of the American pastoral to subm it to
the myth of American progressivism while still addressing w hat is lost through
industrial expansion (49). Marx links the pastoral to the essential m yth of American
origins and its emphasis on the redemptive possibility of "virgin land" (49).
Ultimately, Marx suggests, the pastoral's status as a middle ground between the

14

urban and the wild make it an ideal space in which a particular American audience
is able to acknowledge the positive qualities of progressivism while expressing a
deep anxiety about w hat has been lost in the march toward American capitalism
(40).

The W estern fulfills a nearly identical purpose, to the point where it is
attractive to refer to the genre as the popular form of American pastoralism. Like
the pastoral setting described by Marx, the Western exists in a state of "in­
betweenness" —the W estern town has experienced the influence of progressive
development but is still removed from the industrial "civilized" cities of the East.
The W estern tow n carries w ith it all the potential that the myth of American
Progressivism w ould offer; however, the town is simultaneously threatened by the
encroaching civilization and the capitalism that it involves, w hether through a
monopolizing cattle baron or unscrupulous railroad developers. Similarly, the
W estern town presents a natural environment that has been "im proved" by settlers.
The townsfolk are putting the previously unused resources to good use, and some
mode of law, if somewhat rudimentary, has accompanied property rights.
Nevertheless, the tow n still survives only under the threat of violence from some
unpredictable force that civilization and its laws are incapable of handling on their
own.
Therefore, m any of Marx's additional argum ents concerning the pastoral can
be applied to the Western. Marx especially emphasizes the pastoral's role as a
location of dissension, identifying the genre as one that is consistently used as a

15

symbol by dissident minorities. The pastoral is especially well-suited for this
purpose because of its status as a liminal genre, and the genre's characters provide
excellent fodder for issues of anxiety due to their status as liminal figures w ho exist
in a stage between civilization and savagery. The W estern performs a similar
function: the precarious position of the W estern town between the progressive East
and the wild makes it an ideal location for dialogues of social anxiety. The
W estern's status as a historical genre, however, lends it a special significance that the
pastoral cannot carry: it emphasizes the W estern's role as a foundational tale as well
as one that, even moreso than the pastoral, carries the burden of the failure of the
Progressive myth, as well as rem inding its audience of the cost of the sacrifice that
w ent into its realization.
As Slotkin writes, "the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or
displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it has been the
means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic policy, an everexpanding economy, and a phenomenonally dynamic and progressive civilization"
(10). He adds, "the original ideological task of the [Western] Myth was to explain
and justify the establishment of American colonies" (10). Certainly this is true; the
W estern can, as Coyne says, " [sanctify] territorial expansion [and justify]
dispossession of the Indian" (3). However, it w ould be glib to suggest that the
W estern deals only w ith American expansion w estw ard across the N orth American
continent and the related subjugation of Native American peoples. The timing of
the genre's peak in popularity problematizes this argument, which did not take

16

place during a period of explicit colonization of aboriginal people but rather during
a time of ideological colonialism at the height of the Cold War. Slotkin does offer
some explanation for this, suggesting that after World War 11 the W estern's
ideological task had changed to provide a mythic explanation for "radical economic
grow th[,]. . . [the United States'] emergence as a powerful nation and . . . [a]
distinctively American approach to modernization" (10). However, this argum ent
contradicts common perceptions regarding the function of the W estern m yth prior
to W orld War 11. The Western never abandoned its colonial concern; it merely
transformed it. The elements that the W estern purportedly accounted for as Coyne
and Slotkin see it are all the result of American imperialism after World W ar 11, and
America's emergence as a superpow er and economic titan corresponds w ith the
rising popularity of the W estern from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. The territorial
expansion that the W estern in this period alludes to, then, is not merely expansion
westward, but also expansion to the south and to the east. The W estern is concerned
not only w ith the birth and rebirth of the American in North America, but also
worldwide. Indeed, the story of the W estern is not necessarily limited to dealing
w ith wagon trains moving to California or silver rushes in Arizona, but may also be
about helicopters landing in Vietnam and Coca Cola becoming a popular soft drink
in China or other more recent expressions of colonialism or imperialism. Thus, it is
no surprise that the W estern's popularity peaked at the height of the Cold War; the
genre's emphasis on binary oppositions was ideal for a nation that sought to portray
the w orld as a battlefield between diametrically opposed ideologies. The Native

17

Americans, m isunderstood by many Americans, became an ideal Other onto which
the perceived differences between the United States and its Com munist foes could
be projected.
However, given the polysémie nature of the Western, arguing w ith such
absolutism is dangerous. Indeed, it should not be suggested that a colonial reading
of the W estern is the only available interpretation. However, given the genre's
explicit concerns w ith history and American expansion, it is fair to suggest that
colonialism is a dom inant allegorical concern of the Western. The Western does not
seek to "sanctify" colonialism, as Slotkin or Coyne m ight argue. Rather, through its
status as a liminal myth, the genre merely seeks to address colonialism as but one of
its multiple concerns. As Newcomb and Hirsch have suggested, a popular text such
as the Western film does not provide any definitive ideological statement; rather, the
genre presents a multiplicity of meanings through which its American audience is
able to encounter various perspectives on American colonialism. Indeed, if the
genre seems trium phal—if it seems to justify violent displacement of the Other and
forceful interventionism abroad —it is only to fulfill Robinson's bad faith principle.
The text m ust accommodate multiple viewpoints and provide its audience w ith a
safe place in which to encounter ideas that may be objectionable or subversive
alongside the adulation of the foundation and regeneration of the nation in violence.
If the sacrifice presented in the W estern is celebrated, it is also m ourned through its
recognition that the growth of the nation was irrigated w ith the blood of the
innocent.

18

In the following thesis, 1 will examine a num ber of Westerns in terms of the
ways they encounter the United States' shifting position in foreign affairs during the
Cold War. However, the following interpretations should not be understood as
being the only available reading of the subjects. Indeed, as per the cultural forum
model, the films that will be examined—My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the OK
Corral, Hour of the Gun, Doc, and Tombstone—constitute expressions of a variety of

discourses. W hat follows, then, is a reading of w hat 1 believe to be one of the
dom inant concerns of these films, and the W yatt Earp myth general, insofar as it
functions during the Cold War.

19

2. The Significance of W yatt Earp in American History

The challenge of any study of the W estern genre is that the concept of the
"Western" is manifold and mercurial. As Philip French has eloquently written.
The W estern is a great grab bag, a hungry cuckoo of a genre, a
voracious bastard of a form, open equally to visionaries and
opportunists, ready to seize anything that's in the thin air from
juvenile delinquency to ecology. (24)
Thus, the problem for the scholar who seeks to explore the genre is how to best
approach this "hungry cuckoo" that is capable of ingesting such a variety of themes
and subjects. One cannot attem pt to examine the entire body of W estern film and
expect to arrive at a singular conclusion. Instead, it is preferable to identify a
particular trait, plot device, or character and explore how the single item functions
w ithin the genre. In this manner, it becomes possible to see general trends in the
treatm ent of W estern subjects that may be elusive w ith other m ethods of limiting
sources. For example. Will W right's examination of the genre in Six Guns and Society
that includes only those Westerns that topped the box office during his period of
focus is problematic for m any analytical purposes.^ One issue that arises from
W right's selection is the fact that w hat contributed to a film's popularity is often
difficult to locate and, indeed, may be located outside of the film text itself. As
Coyne points out in his discussion of W right's method, "One always needs to be

However, his delineation is appropriate for his own study.

20

aware of the possibility that a very high popularity may reflect the influences of
factors which are not necessarily a result of the genre itself" (8). While W right
argues that the films he examines were popular because they articulated certain
mythical elements that their audience craved, he ignores the existence of the
Hollywood star system and differences in m arketing between films. Additionally,
an approach such as W right's forces the scholar to ask only w hy a film is popular,
w ithout addressing why another is not. In contrast, employing an approach to the
genre that examines a particular aspect of the genre provides the scholar w ith a
fixed variable that may be examined diachronically in light of issues related to
context, filmography, or any other approach that the scholar believes will be
illuminating.
With this in mind, I will continue my examination of the use of the Western
as a cultural forum through the analysis of one figure —W yatt Earp —and his role in
the event that has contributed most to his infamy: the so-called "Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral." The story of W yatt Earp and the gunfight has been translated to film
many times, but it gained particular currency with American audiences in the years
after World War II. W yatt was an ideal locus for the cultural forum because, above
all, he embodied conflict. Through Wyatt Earp, m ultiple conflicting ideologies and
discourses could be projected onto the screen, perm itting the audiences to
simultaneously engage in the bad faith narrative of American Progressivism and
"uplifting" colonialism while encountering troubling issues of authority and
morality. Specifically, I will examine the way W yatt Earp fulfills this role in five

21

films: M y Darling Clementine (1946); Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); Hour o f the Gun
(1967); Doc (1971); and Tombstone (1993)d A study of these films will not only trace
the mercurial nature of fictional translations of a historical figure, but will also
provide insight into shifting American attitudes tow ard the nation's role in the
world, particularly in regard to imperialism and colonialism.
W yatt Earp is a figure in the W estern mythological pantheon^ that is
particularly resonant in American culture. His legend has become indelibly etched
into American popular memory, in spite of the fact that over one hundred years
have passed since he undertook his most famous exploits. The story of his career
and references to it still manifest themselves throughout American culture,
sometimes in unexpected places: people still talk about "getting out of Dodge"; an
episode of the television series The Simpsons features a car lot nam ed the "O.K. Car­
rai"; and foreign officials have criticized the United States for exhibiting a "Wyatt
Earp attitude" in foreign relations (Barra, Inventing 6). Earp has also appeared in
video games —Tombstone 1882 (2003) offers a player the opportunity to "claim [his or
her] fortune in the boomtown of Tombstone as part of the Earps or Clantons" —as
well as in novels, comic books, and, of course, films. A cursory search on the
4 Conspicuous by its absence is W yatt Earp (1994). 1 have consciously omitted this
film from my study as its plot subordinates the Gunfight at the OK Corral and the
vendetta ride to being mere chapters in the larger story of W yatt's life. The other
films in my study all center either on the Gunfight or its aftermath; by shifting its
focus, W yatt Earp develops a different intertextual resonance that eliminates the
polarized ideological conflict that is of utmost significance in the other films and to
the Cold War.
5 By "W estern mythological pantheon," I m ean simply figures from American
frontier history who are better known for the deeds and characterizations attributed
to them through fiction than for their historical reality.

22

Internet Movie Database yields twenty-nine films that feature a character nam ed

"W yatt Earp," and these results do not include the countless characters that have
been inspired by his legend or films that have borrowed plots from W yatt's life and
legend. As Allen Barra argues, "the streetfight in Tombstone touched something in
America's collective unconscious. W henever showdowns or confrontations are
thought to be epic, Americans will always refer to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral"
{Inventing 398).

Clearly, W yatt Earp's story is im portant to American culture. However, there
is no consistent portrayal of W yatt Earp. In one film W yatt may be an American
W estern incarnation of a noble cavalier, righting injustices and winning the love of
the fair schoolmarm. In others he may be quite the opposite, possessing qualities
that qualify him as little more than a bully. The contrasts between some portrayals
is striking; one need only compare the upright, moralistic W yatt in My Darling
Clementine to the sadistic m adm an in Doc to wonder if the films are based on the

same historical figure. However, this adaptability and malleability is, in fact,
possibly the most accurate part of any portrayal of W yatt Earp.
Nineteenth-century accounts of W yatt Earp are equally antithetical as later
adaptations of his story. From very early on, accounts of W yatt's life were coloured
by partisan rhetoric. The most readily apparent examples are contemporary
newspaper accounts of "gunfight at the O.K Corral," or, as it was know n prior to the
release of the film of that name, the gunfight in the streets of Tombstone. The shoot­
out, which pitted Wyatt, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and his friend John H enry

23

"Doc" Holliday against Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy
Claiborne, left three—all from the Clanton side —dead, and only W yatt walked away
untouched by gunfire.
The coverage of the event by the Tombstone newspapers could not have been
more polarized. The Tombstone Epitaph sided w ith the Earps and Doc Holliday. Not
long after the shootout, John Clum, editor of the Epitaph, wrote that
the feeling among the best class of our citizens is that the Marshal
[Virgil Earp] was entirely justified in his efforts to disarm these men,
and that being fired upon they had to defend themselves, which they
did most bravely. So long as our peace officers make effort to preserve
the peace and put dow n highway robbery—which the Earp brothers
have done, having engaged in the pursuit and capture, where capture
[has] been made, of every gang of stage robbers in the country —they
will have the support of all good citizens, (qtd. in Tefertiller 125).
The Daily Nugget, meanwhile, noted the overwhelming turnout for the funerals of

Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers, reporting that it was "the largest [funeral]
ever witnessed in Tombstone" (qtd. in Tefertiller 126). Indeed, the funeral was
considerable enough to prom pt Tombstone resident Clara Brown to write that "a
stranger . . . w ould have thought that some person esteemed by the entire camp was
being conveyed to his final resting place" (qtd. in Tefertiller 126). In the aftermath of
the gunfight and funeral, the discrepancies between various reports of the gunfight
became increasingly stark. On November 3,1881, the Arizona Star painted the

24

gunfight as a clear-cut case of murder, suggesting that "it is claimed by m any that
the killing of the McLowrys [sic] and Clanton was cold-blooded and prem editated"
and corroborating the claim by reporting that "w hen the shooting occurred the boys
who were killed were preparing to leave Tombstone; two of them were unarm ed
and . . . showed no disposition whatever to quarrel or create a public disturbance"
(qtd. in Tefertiller 132). After the Earps and Holliday were put on trial and
ultimately vindicated by Judge Wells Spicer, who attested that he could "attach no
criminality" to the Earps' actions (qtd. in Tefertiller 52), Spicer was discredited by
various parties and rum ours of judicial bias turned public opinion against the Earps
(Tefertiller 157).
The apparent cause of these conflicting accounts is political and personal
partisanship. Richard Maxwell Brown argues that "In Cochise County, the
incorporating trend was spearheaded by a Tombstone faction of m ining industry
entrepreneurs and engineers and their allies among the tow n's business and
professional elite. Resisting them were the 'Cowboys' of rural Cochise County.
Among the members of the incorporating faction was W yatt Earp" (66). Tombstone
was a town deeply divided along ideological lines, and the newspapers were no
better. The two newspapers —the Epitaph and the Daily Nugget—ie\l on either side of
the gulf between the county's Republicans and Democrats. The Epitaph was the
Republican voice in Tombstone, and so favoured the Earps' side in the conflict.
Furthermore, editor John Clum was a personal friend of Wyatt. The Daily Nugget,
on the other hand, was aligned w ith the Democrats and carried some grudge against

25

the Earp family, possibly arising from W yatt's political struggles against Democrat
John Behan over the Cochise County sheriff's office.
Other available primary sources relating to the conflict are equally
problematic. George Parson's diary, an invaluable source of information on daily
life in Tombstone, is coloured by Parson's friendship and obvious allegiance to
W yatt Earp. Other accounts of the feud, however, are no more reliable; those
involved in the conflict had long memories, and even decades after the gunfight
they had strong emotional reactions to the parties involved. Frank W aters' account
of the events, which he claimed he had based on conversations w ith Virgil Earp's
wife Allie, clearly project Allie Earp's dislike of her brother-in-law, to the point that
Allen Barra was compelled to wryly suggest that W aters' book I Married Virgil Earp
w ould have been more aptly titled I Married Virgil Earp —But I hated W yatt Even More
than I Loved Virgil (Inventing 234). Of course, the book that is supposedly based on

W yatt's own statements is no better. Stuart M. Lake's W yatt Earp: Frontier Marshal is
a lionizing biography of W yatt and positions its subject in mythic terms, to the
extent that Lake bestows upon Wyatt his own Excalibur —the "Buntline Special," a
Colt Revolver w ith an extended twelve-inch barrel. Lake later adm itted that the
material in the book that he originally claimed was based on a series of interviews
he conducted w ith W yatt was largely fabricated, but it was too late: Frontier Marshal
had become the biography that w ould have the greatest influence on Earp scholars
and filmmakers. Subsequent Earp debunkers all respond to Lake's adulatory text on

26

some level, and for many the biography has become the w orst kind of fictionm asquer ading-as-history.
Perhaps as a result, subsequent historiography that deals w ith W yatt Earp
has fared no better. All historians w ho wish to study W yatt are forced to work in
the shadow of these questionable primary sources. W orking w ith accounts like
those published in the Epitaph, the Daily Nugget, Frontier Marshal and I Married W yatt
Earp, it is no surprise that few serious academic biographies of Wyatt Earp of any

notable quality have emerged. Rather, the majority of the available biographies fall
victim to the polarization of the primary sources. Even those that are well
researched and capably argued m ust deal w ith the conundrum of these conflicting
and often completely contradictory reports and assess how best to deal with them.
If there is any privileging of one source over another, a particular image of Wyatt
Earp may emerge that is a far cry from the complexities of the actual m an and the
events in which he actually participated.
Still, by analyzing such conflicting accounts and considering the sources of
such disputes, it is possible to glean from the historical evidence some information
that will be useful for a study of explicitly fictional accounts of W yatt Earp. Richard
Maxwell Brown has examined the conflict in Tombstone as a struggle between
forces of urban incorporation, represented by Earp and his Republican allies, and
rural pastoralism, represented by the Democratic 'Cowboys' (69). Earp, "as a
Northerner reared in a Unionist family . .. reflected and adhered to the social ideal
of the Republican party in Gilded-Age America: an allegiance to conservative values

27

and enterprising capitalism" (Brown 66). Brown identifies W yatt as a "glorified
gunfighter," one of those "historically significant figures" who "were violent
protagonists in the great social, economic, and cultural conflicts that rocked the West
in the late nineteenth century" (40). Brown's glorified gunfighters were often
"strongly partisan" and were "players in a social dram a in which conservative
forces consolidated authority in the West in the interest of property, order, and law"
(40). The divide between the Republicans and the Democrats w as exacerbated by
the economic stratification in the county. Brown goes on to argue that the gunfight
in the streets of Tombstone was an "outgrowth of the highly conflicted social,
economic, and political situation in Cochise County and its county seat. Tombstone"
(67).

W yatt Earp's significance to American popular culture in the years following
W orld War II is appropriate, then, given his status as a figure for incorporation and
capitalism. Stanley Corkin has argued that after World War II
the United States needed to expand its economy endlessly, constantly
incorporating more nations into the global system. If we look back to
the late nineteenth century we can see roots of this strategy in the
w estw ard expansion of the nation; in short, Arizona in the late
nineteenth century played a role in the U.S. national economy similar
to that played by Saudi Arabia in the m id twentieth century. (37)
Both regions are peripheral to the seat of power, but offer the potential for great
economic growth through the mining of silver, in Arizona's case, or through the

28

drilling oil in the Middle East. American interests sought to secure and incorporate
both regions in order to achieve greater financial security. Thus, Corkin clearly
draw s a link between the historical Wyatt Earp and the American situation in the
early years of the Cold War, explaining at least in part the repeated usage of the
figure. Corkin's argum ent suggests that American audiences created a link between
the conflict in Cochise County and American involvement abroad, and, as a result,
W yatt Earp films were reflective of the international stage. W yatt represented
America; in viewing him on screen, the audience was taking part in a trium phal
narrative about the spread of American capital abroad. Luhr, meanwhile, has
emphasized issues of class in the Earp narratives: "The Earp-Clanton conflict often
takes on the iconographie coloring of a class war, w ith the Earp faction represented
as four dignified m en in frock coats and the Clantons as a roughly dressed, surly
mob gathered in a dark cabin by their malevolent old father" (39).
Luhr has also noted that Wyatt Earp "represents a certain phase in the
development of the frontier hero," noting a shift in the structure of the genre that is
typified in the W yatt Earp narrative: "Prior to [Wyatt Earp] and his type, many
American frontier heroes drew a significant part of their identity from their relations
w ith other races" (39). W ith the daw n of the Cold War, the essential binarism of the
Western hero and villain shifted from being one of race to one of ideology. The
dichotomy was not draw n between Euro-American / Indian any longer but rather
between capitalist / socialist. Cohen adds, "With the emergence of the Iron Curtain

29

as part of international discourse, [Wyatt] had come to represent the Cold W arriors
who held the line against the enemies of democracy" (207).
However, as Cohen has argued, "for those in our society who reject
government action that interferes w ith individual freedom, the symbolism of w hat
happened is different. They see the law enforcers not as representatives of the
public good, but as oppressors" (205). For this segment of the audience, the Earp
films offered a tale that was not adulatory of the American nation but instead
presented its faults. Luhr notes the shifting depiction of W yatt and his friends,
commenting that by the 1970s, "Earp's suit and the Clanton's rough work clothes
m ade him less appealing and them less repulsive, at least to counterculture
sympathizers" (40).
Clearly there are multiple available readings of the W yatt Earp story. As
Cohen suggests, "That the gunfight at the O.K. Corral can embody such opposing
views goes a long way in explaining why the incident remains a vital presence"
(204). The gunfight behind the OK Corral was itself a conflict of ideologies, between
the Democratic values of the Cowboys and the Republican aims of the Earps and
their allies. Cohen argues that "the seeming clarity of the shoot-out at the O.K.
Corral has become a ready and justifying symbol, notably in the government
quashing threats to law and order" (204 - 5). But it is far too simplistic to say that
W yatt Earp only represented forces of incorporation and progressivism while the
Cowboys were a catch-all group for Communists, counterculturists, or anti-

30

capitalists. The W yatt Earp story is m uch more complicated than the black and
white issue painted by Cohen and others.
Indeed, W yatt Earp himself was not simply a Republican businessman.
Richard Maxwell Brown identifies a conflict w ithin Earp between his status as a
conservative and his role as a "rounder" (67) who enjoyed gambling, drinking, and
other W estern saloon-fare. These characteristics were opposed by his Republican
desire to consolidate towns into the American capitalist system. W yatt himself is a
conflicted character who does not fully subscribe to a single ideology. Furthermore,
W yatt's role as the idealized law m an is compromised by his "vendetta ride,"
W yatt's campaign after the O.K. Corral to eliminate the whole of the cowboy gang,
w hom he blamed for the death of his younger brother Morgan and the maiming of
his elder brother, Virgil. Though the vendetta ride is rarely depicted in film —Hour
o f the Gun was the first to do so —the intertextual connection between the filmic

W yatt Earp and the historical W yatt Earp necessarily alludes not only to the
integration of Tombstone into American commerce through the "just war" that
resulted in the gunfight behind the O.K. Corral, but also the aftermath of that event,
in which W yatt's power and authority were pushed to excess in the name of
personal vengeance.
Finally, the conclusion that W yatt Earp represents a positive good in
American culture, even in the 1940s and 1950s, is complicated by the fact that Wyatt
is the agent through whom the rural ideal will be destroyed. While the W estern
certainly suggests the m yth of progressivism —that the incorporation and eventual

31

industrialization of the town and its growth into the city is an im provem ent—the
genre is ultimately akin to Leo Marx's conception of the American pastoral. The
W estern champions economic expansion while simultaneously elegizing the way of
life that it is replacing. Part and parcel of this is the sense that the older way of life
that W yatt Earp is replacing is, in fact, better than the one he heralds in. In the
Western, the incorporation of the town represents not only an influx of capital, but
also the death of an age of heroism (REF —Brown?). The archetypal gunfighter hero
rarely stays in the town he has civilized as there is no further need for his heroism;
W yatt Earp is no exception.
Ultimately, the story of W yatt Earp, w hether historical or fictional, is one of
conflict. Initially there is the ideological conflict between the Republican Earp and
the Democratic Cowboys, as well as Wyatt Earp's internal struggle between his
"rounder" inclinations and his drive to be a successful businessman. There is the
additional conflict between the rule of law as represented by the supposedly "good"
w ar that should have ended behind the O.K. Corral and the one that did not, but
culminated in W yatt Earp's "vendetta ride." Finally, there is the schism between the
competing ideals of American progressivism and the American concept of the
idealized frontier. These competing ideologies are all essential to the story of W yatt
Earp in any of its incarnations, and, indeed, are the source of its endurance and
popularity. The story of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp presents its audience w ith an
ideal cultural forum to explore these competing ideologies: the audience is able to
participate in the pleasing, trium phal narrative of the progression of American

32

capitalism while engaging in their guilt regarding w hat is lost in its name.
Additionally, the legend of Tombstone offers special significance to an American
audience in the Cold War. Tombstone's embroilment in a war of ideology where
class distinctions were param ount bore striking familiarity for Americans who were
being faced w ith an Iron Curtain and a divided world. Tombstone offered them not
only a location upon which to focus their anxiety regarding the direction of America
at a time of renewed economic prosperity but also a forum in which their fears
regarding power, violence, and authority could be set into discourse with one
another.

33

3. Red Dawn: My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the O.K.
Corral, and the Anxiety of Influence

The first two W yatt Earp films to appear during the Cold War were My
Darling Clementine and Hour o f the Gun. Both of these films were major prestige

pictures for their respective studios, and each featured a num ber of major
Hollywood stars of the time. More significantly, both My Darling Clementine and
Gunfight at the OK Corral depict a version of W yatt Earp that is overwhelmingly

positive. The W yatt Earp in these films is most akin to the marshal from Stuart
Lake's book and embodies the W estern lawman ideal: he is honest, honourable, and
seeks to dispel the agents of chaos from Tombstone in order to make the town safe
for the people who live there. However, in spite of these idealistic depictions of
W yatt Earp, both films contain subtle but significant undercurrents that underm ine
the trium phal surface narrative. While there is undoubtedly a trium phal aspect to
both of these films that sanctifies and glorifies the United States' position in the post­
w ar order, both stories develop a discourse of anxiety regarding the very same
subject. In the case of My Darling Clementine, the overt narrative that suggests the
foundation of a community m ade safe by W yatt Earp is tem pered by a contradictory
narrative that betrays an overwhelming discomfort with the obligations of power
and the abandonm ent of isolationism. In Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the impetus for
the social anxiety has shifted focus to examine the means of such power, m editating

34

on the contemporary foreign policy discourses of containment, massive retaliation
and Eisenhower's "New Look" diplomacy.
At the time of the release of John Ford's My Darling Clementine in December
1946, the American public was in the throes of a dramatic shift in its governm ent's
approach to foreign policy. In spite of movements tow ard internationalism prior to
W orld War 1 with the establishment of the Samoan protectorate, annexation of
Hawaii, possession of the Philippines, and the Roosevelt Corollary, the inter-war
years had been, for the United States, a period of w hat historian William G. Carleton
term ed "pathological isolation" (18). W ith World War II, such isolationism no
longer seemed possible for the United States. The w ar had precipitated American
involvement in world affairs even prior to America's entry into the actual fighting:
the nation had expanded its navy, loaned money to China, placed embargoes on
steel and iron not destined for Britain or the W estern hemisphere, and enacted the
Lend-Lease Act. American involvement deepened significantly w ith the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon the United States took a lead role in wartime decision­
m aking and adopted the goal of shaping the "ideological world of the future"
through international cooperation (Carleton 38). Even with the Axis defeated, there
was small chance that the United States w ould be able to return to insularity. The
balance of power system, which had long shielded the United States from the
necessity of taking an active role in international issues, had been drastically altered,
w ith the United States occupying a m uch more significant position (Almond 13);
additionally, military technology developed in the early 1940s —particularly the

35

atomic bom b—had "transformed w ar from a limited to an unlim ited risk" (Almond
14).
In spite of the United States' ascendancy and decisive role in the victory over
the Axis, such a shift in the world order did not result in the optimism and
confidence commonly attributed to the 1950s by popular culture. Rather, the
opposite was true. Carleton notes that this "revolution in foreign policy" was
"difficult for most Americans to grasp" (90). Involvement in world affairs to such a
degree was a m arked sea change for an American public that had been fed the
rhetoric of the interwar years that prom oted isolationism. For years, Americans had
been told that involvement in organizations such as the League of Nations would
result in the United States' hand being forced to inserting itself in obligations that
served no interest of America. Now, the nation was in a position where it was, by
virtue of the postwar power structure, a part of m ost international negotiations,
w ithout an option to extract itself.
However, Americans were further troubled by the enigmatic role of the
Soviet Union in the w orld's power structure (Carleton 44). Though the nations were
still technically allies, the Soviet Union was a nation w ith very different values than
the United States. Furthermore, Russia had a considerable force left in Eastern
Europe at the end of the war. To make matters worst, in the rest of Europe,
collectivism and Communism were catching on in more and more countries in the
face of postwar economic uncertainty —even the old powers of Britain and France.

36

In Britain, the Labour Party rose to power, while the French government
nationalized a num ber of utilities.
In the years immediately following World War 11, an increasing num ber of
conflicts began to arise between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United
States was troubled by the Soviet Union's failure to participate in United Nationsm andated program s such as UNESCO and the trusteeship system, and was
additionally concerned by Russia's use of its Security Council veto over the Iran
dispute in 1946. Atomic weapons were another sticking point between the powers;
as long as the United States was the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the world,
the Soviet Union argued passionately for the destruction and ban of all atomic
armaments. The United States, meanwhile, supported the Baruch Plan to create an
independent body that w ould have control over all world nuclear supplies as well
as the mining of uranium and plutonium (Carleton 131). The events in Korea in
1945 and 1946 also contributed to a sense of anxiety. At the end of 1945, the United
States and the Soviet Union had agreed to put Korea under provisional trusteeship,
controlled by a joint effort of these two nations as well as Britain and Nationalist
China. The Korean Communists had accepted this proposal, but the United States
balked, instead proposing free elections. The two nations could not agree on w hat
should be done. After the United States proposed free elections, Russia w ent before
the United Nations to request the withdrawal of all troops, a proposal that the
United States feared w ould lead to civil war.

37

During this period, the suspicious attitude toward Communism entered the
public discourse more and more frequently. The Truman Administration's foreign
policy toward the Soviet Union was a major issue of the m idterm elections in 1946.
Republican politicians, led by John Foster Dulles, focused their rhetoric on accusing
Trum an of being "soft on communism." On October 25 1945, Republican candidates
Karl M undt and Francis Bolton wrote that the president was "lacking on the side of
firmness" (qtd. in Woods and Jones 100) and called for a more confrontational stance
tow ard the Soviets. A December 1945 proposal of a loan to Britain was met with
clamorous opposition; Republican Jesse Sumner accused the Administration of
advancing the cause of socialism in Britain by funding the "Labour Party's social
experiments" (Woods and Jones 122). By March 1946, polls were reporting that
seventy-one percent of Americans were opposed to Soviet foreign affairs policies,
while sixty percent believed that the United States was too soft on Russia (Woods
and Jones 117). Perhaps more strikingly, another poll, conducted by the American
Institute of Public Opinion the National Opinion Research Center, found that
between March 1945 and September 1946, the percentage of Americans anticipating
the United States to be at w ar within the next twenty-five years ballooned from
thirty-eight percent to sixty-two percent (Almond 90). In March 1946, the num ber of
people expecting w ar w ithin ten years sat at forty-nine percent. In July 1946, Fortune
reported that fifty percent of a national sample believed that Russia was out to
dominate the w orld (Almond 95), a position echoed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who

38

believed that the Soviets had "a commitment to w orld revolution and a renewed
determination to underm ine capitalism" (Woods and Jones 128).
With such alarmism so prevalent in the national discourse, it should not be
surprising that similar anxieties manifested themselves in cultural productions of
the time. Yet, most critics who have analyzed films like My Darling Clementine have
instead focused on the film's trium phal quality. Stanley Corkin, Richard Slotkin,
and others have focused their analyses on the ways in which My Darling Clementine
champions and mythologizes the United States' new role in the world. However,
such a reading is confounded by the film's sub-textual acknowledgment of the
worrisome aspects of this role. In particular, these readings have emphasized My
Darling Clementine as a story about the arrival of "civilization" in Tombstone. I will

argue, however, that instead of W yatt Earp integrating Tombstone into the Eastern
order, it is rather Tombstone that integrates W yatt Earp into its already extant order.
Thus, My Darling Clementine offers a narrative that allegorizes the United States'
entry onto the world stage, replete w ith the anxieties that this circumstance entails.
This is not to say that the trium phalist readings of My Darling Clementine are invalid;
instead, the competing available readings are complementary, each contributing to
the film's function as a cultural forum.
Stanley Gorkin's position on My Darling Clementine emphasizes American
foreign policy's turn toward economic imperialism. Corkin argues that after World
W ar II, American policy ceased to be defined "simply by the goal of occupying
contiguous lands but also by the imperative of reordering them according to a

39

distinctly U.S. vision of society" (10). The goal of such endeavours was not to
merely access the resources of other nations and regions but also to ideologically
convert their inhabitants to the American way of life, thus creating an optimal
location for trade relations. Corkin argues that "Westerns played some role in this
cultural shift as they reflected it. [Westerns] articulated the necessity of engaged
heroes who morally ensure the role of right" (10). This assertion provides the basis
for Gorkin's ultimate argum ent that Westerns in the early Cold W ar period —
including My Darling Clementine —are parables of the spread of American values and
ideologies, a dissemination that ultimately results in the creation of new free
markets for American commerce. However, Gorkin's argum ent that these films are
unabashed exhortations for the spread of American capitalism assumes that such
discourses are rendered unproblematically. While Gorkin's reading of the texts is
certainly valid and indeed may be the most readily available close reading of the
film, his interpretation glosses over several im portant aspects.
John Ford's My Darling Clementine was the first W yatt Earp film to appear in
the wake of World War II. The film was a prestige picture, and Ford cast
Hollywood star Henry Fonda, who had previously portrayed American folk heroes
Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad, in the role of W yatt Earp. My Darling Clementine is
loosely based on Stuart Lake's W yatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, but departs drastically
from that text. An additional source of Ford's version of the W yatt Earp m yth was
W yatt Earp himself; Ford claimed to have m et Earp during Earp's time in
Hollywood and the director based his version of the climactic gunfight on Earp's

40

ow n account of the event. The film followed a general trend that had developed in
Ford's filmmaking whereby the director "often used the rural community to act as a
microcosm embodying the tradition and the plain moral values of the pioneering life
in nineteenth-century America" (Bohnke 48). Corkin notes that
Ford was apparently draw n to seize the opportunity that the [Western]
genre afforded for social commentary that did not necessarily fall
distinctly into categories of left and right. That is, Westerns allowed
the politically complex director to explore ideas that more
contemporary plots w ould have m ade politically controversial. (17)
It is likely, however, that Ford himself w ould have likely vehemently denied that
any such decision consciously took place, as he had been cited by those who knew
him, including some of the cast and crew of My Darling Clementine, as being resistant
to interpretations of his films as anything more than just films.
In spite of Ford's expected protests. My Darling Clementine is most frequently
read as an apology for American progressivism that champions the United States'
new role as a world super power. In this reading Tombstone is a synecdoche for the
world, and W yatt Earp for America; his expulsion of Tombstone's undesirable
elements is analogous to the United States freeing the w orld from undemocratic and
anti-capitalist elements. In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin argues that My Darling
Clementine is a classic example of the town-tamer W estern in which "social injustice

is imposed by powerful criminals; the hero m ust defeat them and thus em power the
'decent folks' who bring progress to the Frontier" (379).

41

Stanley Gorkin's convincing reading of M y Darling Clementine in Cowboys as
Cold Warriors is perhaps the most exemplary instance of the progressive reading of

the film. According to Corkin, M y Darling Clementine "[tells] of the moment when
the peripheral territories that either were or about to become a part of the political
sphere of the United States actively embrace their destiny" (32). Corkin adds that
the film encourages "a view of the United States that allows for acts of empire or
hegemony to be seen as the expression of a rational and moral imperative that will
ensure progress and promote the development of civilization" (29). Corkin also
suggests that My Darling Clementine serves a purpose similar to w hat Richard
Slotkin details in Gunfighter Nation, whereby the W estern film uses a mythic past to
lend mythic resonance to contemporary events, allowing the audience to
comprehend and justify events that may otherwise be considered extreme, alarming,
or even confusing:
W hen considered within [its] historical context as [an early version] of
the postwar Western, [My Darling Clementine] articulate[s] a means of
understanding the phenomenon of general assent to the extremes of
Cold W ar ideology and government policy. (28)
Corkin especially emphasizes the economic aspects of this reading; as previously
mentioned, he connects the American necessity to continually expand its economic
influence w ith westward expansion and identifies continuity between frontier
Arizona and the oil-rich nations of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Thus,
for Slotkin and Corkin and most other critics who have examined My Darling

42

Clementine, the film is a trium phal narrative communicating and justifying to its

audience the necessity of American imperialism by portraying such hegemony in
abstraction, allegorizing American economic expansion through a narrative
featuring a legendary national hero.
This allegorical reading is undoubtedly convincing. Indeed, M y Darling
Clementine does function as a narrative that celebrates the ascendant American state

and its global economic and political power. However, a close reading of the film
reveals an alternate counter-discourse that underm ines a reading of My Darling
Clementine as a laudatory narrative. A num ber of aspects of the text instead suggest

the anxiety that dom inated political discourse of the time. Primary among these is
the fact that W yatt Earp does little to integrate Tombstone into the eastern
"civilized" order; the town appears to be attaining this stage on its own. Rather, it is
W yatt Earp who becomes integrated into Tombstone's social order.
Initially, My Darling Clementine establishes a clear connection to the American
public anxiety that the nation's new role as a super power will involve it in conflicts
that may bear no relation to the interests of the United States. In the film, W yatt
Earp and his brothers are draw n into a feud w ith the Clanton family by pure
happenstance: the Earps are passing near Tombstone w ith their herd of cattle and
encounter Old Man Clanton and his sons, who offer to buy the cattle. W yatt Earp
refuses, and that evening visits Tombstone with his brothers M organ and Virgil,
leaving young James behind to watch over the herd. W yatt Earp is almost
immediately draw n into a conflict that he has no interest in: his visit to the

43

barbershop is interrupted by shooting and shouting from a nearby saloon, where a
drunken m an is causing trouble. W hen the marshal refuses to intervene because he
is not paid enough, W yatt Earp feels morally obligated to pu t himself in danger to
deal w ith the problem. After W yatt expels the drunkard Charlie from the saloon
and chastises the town for "selling liquor to Indians" he is asked to accept the nowvacant position of marshal. W yatt refuses and returns to his camp to find that his
cattle have been rustled and his brother James has been shot in the back. At this
point, W yatt accepts the position of marshal and assigns Morgan and Virgil as
deputies in order to avenge his brother's death. The Clanton family is, of course,
behind James' murder.
These events emphasize the obligations that power carries w ith it. Wyatt
Earp has no interest in becoming involved in Tombstone's troubles, but he is forced
into battle simply due to his presence in Tombstone. If Tombstone is indeed a
microcosm for the w orld and W yatt Earp a synecdoche for America, W yatt Earp's
arrival in Tombstone is a symbol for the United States' entry into world politics from
its interwar period of isolation. Significantly, W yatt Earp is forced into his
involvement in Tombstone's local affairs. His economic strength—represented by
his herd of cattle —makes him a target for the "undesirable elements" of Tombstone
in the form of the Clanton gang. He is a victim of his own power. Following this
initial problem, he is further pulled into Tombstone's world through the inability of
the existing authority to handle the tow n's problems, creating an analog w ith the
shifting balance of power in the world following W orld War II. Suddenly, W yatt is

44

the head of a new order in Tombstone and quickly ascends to a position of power
and influence in Tombstone.
However, W yatt Earp does not, in fact, bring order to Tombstone. Aside
from his expulsion of Charlie from the saloon early in the film, there is little to
suggest that the town is in any sort of trouble. Nor is there any indication that
integration into the order of the East—or, in Slotkin and Gorkin's terms, the
American economic o rd er—will benefit the community. In fact, there is a num ber of
symbols of civilization in Tombstone already. One of these is the chair that Wyatt
sits in to have his shave during his first night in Tombstone. The barber proudly
tells W yatt Earp that the chair came from Chicago, but admits that he does not know
how to w ork it after the chair throws W yatt onto the floor. This event emphasizes
that civilization—and commerce —is already present in Tombstone. However, the
civilization is imperfect. While the barber's admission that he does not know how to
work the chair implies that Tombstone is the deficient party in the relationship, it is
nevertheless W yatt who is expelled from the chair, suggesting an incompatibility
between Tombstone, W yatt Earp, and eastern commerce. This tension is developed
to appeal to the anxiety of the film's American audience, which, while pleased w ith
post-war American affluence, is uncertain about the implications of such influence.
A second example of civilization's arrival in Tombstone prior to W yatt Earp's
appearance is the presence of the actor Granville Thorndyke. Thorndyke is
immediately identified as a drunkard as he stumbles in to Doc Holliday's saloon.
He accepts an escort to the Birdcage Theater where a throng of row dy citizens

45

awaits his much-anticipated performance, but still manages to get waylaid by the
Clanton family w ho force him to perform under duress until W yatt Earp and Doc
Holliday intervene. Nevertheless, Thorndyke is able to recite most of H am let's "To
be or not to be" soliloquy, and w hen he is unable to remember the w ords —he claims
it is because it has been "such a long time" —Doc Holliday completes his
performance. Thorndyke's characterization as a pom pous Shakespearean identifies
him w ith British high culture, and, by extension, established civilization. Clearly,
civilization has already established some presence in Tombstone. Although
Thorndyke's expression of civilization is hardly ideal —he is unable to complete his
recitation of w hat is perhaps the most famous speech in Shakespeare's oeuvre, and
he is characterized as a drunken buffoon—significantly it is a Tombstone institution.
Doc Holliday, who is capable of completing the monologue.
The final significant expression of civilization in Tombstone is the foundation
of the First Church of Tombstone. Though the church is not completed at the close
of the film, the parishioners are able to celebrate the advent of religion into their
town. The arrival of Christianity in Tombstone signals its integration into the
civilized world. However, the creation of the church has little to do w ith the actions
of W yatt Earp. Indeed, the Earps seem oblivious to the existence of any sort of
religion in Tombstone. Their experience w ith religion seems limited to camp
meetings. W hen the congregation of the First Church of Tombstone parades past en
route to the site where the church is being constructed, Virgil comments, "If we
w asn't in this territory, Td swear we were back home on a Sunday morning." His

46

brothers agree, but the head of the church group corrects him, insulted by the notion
that the gathering is a camp meeting. Interestingly, the Earps are identified w ith a
folksier, more informal, and more rustic expression of religion than the one the
Tombstone citizens have built on their own. The Ear p's conception of religion is in
fact less "civilized" than the one represented by the population of Tombstone.
But, the meeting of the parishioners is not significant only for its contrast
concerning civilized religion. The m eeting of the First Church of Tombstone also
represents the moment of W yatt Earp's complete integration into the community of
Tombstone. After the procession passes by the Earp brothers, M organ and Virgil
speculate that they should go visit James' grave. W yatt agrees, but as he is waiting
for his brothers, he is approached by Clementine Carter, who asks him if he will
accompany her to the church service. W yatt's agreement represents his conscious
decision to forsake his past life and fiis family in favour of greater integration into
the community of Tombstone: he has rejected his brothers and his past in favour of
participating in a community foundation event. Furthermore, it is Tombstone that
m ust accept Wyatt, not W yatt who m ust accept Tombstone. Tfiis acceptance is best
symbolized by his dance w ith Clementine: as they dance, the church leader calls on
the congregation to "Make room for the marshal and his girl." The parishioners
move aside and form a circle around W yatt and Clementine, signaling their ultimate
adoption by the community of Tombstone. W yatt's decision to participate in the
community rather than attending to his familial obligation is but the final step in a
larger process in the narrative of My Darling Clementine. W yatt is morally obligated

47

to enter the community through the violence of the Clanton family, but ultimately
elects to m aintain his presence there by choice. Indeed, the plotline featuring his
vengeance is all but abandoned for most of the film, shifting instead to the
relationships between Wyatt, Doc, and Clementine.
However, the community that W yatt has entered is not perfect. Eventually
he m ust deal w ith the Clanton family, and he does, at the cost of another brother's
life. The world that Wyatt has become integrated into is a violent one, and is further
complicated by the presence of Doc Holliday in Tombstone. Doc Holliday is, if
anything, an even better representative of civilization than the Earp brothers. While
Ford has, in My Darling Clementine, ignored the Earps' northern upbringing, he
deliberately shifts Doc Holliday's origin from the aristocratic south to Boston,
Massachusetts. Boston's history and role in the American Revolution creates an
additional analogue between Holliday and the United States as an ideal. Yet,
Holliday has all but rejected civilization, leaving the nurse and schoolmarm
Clementine for the Mexican dance hall girl Chihuahua and, at one point, smashing
his medical diploma w ith a bottle and derisively scoffing at his former name,
"Doctor John Holliday." Holliday's presence seems to suggest that the "civilization"
that is being brought to Tombstone by the easterners is fractured.
Ultimately, My Darling Clementine recounts not the integration of Tombstone
into the American system, but instead the integration of the American system into
Tombstone. Allegorically, the film tells the story of the United States' ascendance to
power after World W ar 11. However, this power is not w ithout its perils. W yatt

48

Earp is draw n into battle w ith the Clanton family, at the cost of two of his brothers.
The Clantons, ruled by their autocratic patriarch, represent Soviet Russia in relation
to the Earps' America. My Darling Clementine thus becomes a tale reflecting the
anxieties of American audiences related to the United States' newfound dominance
of the balance of power and the obligations that such authority m ight carry w ith it.
For decades, politicians and pundits had told Americans that involvement in
international organizations like the League of Nations w ould force the United States'
hand in foreign affairs, and now the nation found itself in a position where it was
facing a rival that was being portrayed as an ideological enemy bent on world
domination. The fear of being draw n into a war, m ade all the more frightening by
the existence of atomic weaponry, weighed heavily on American m inds as it
circulated in the discourse of politicians, especially leading up to the m idterm
election of 1946. My Darling Clementine offered a cultural forum reflecting both sides
of the argument: W yatt's success against the Clanton family and reciprocated love
for Clementine support the trium phal reading of Slotkin and Corkin; however, the
counter-narrative of W yatt Earp's integration into Tombstone's community
challenges the progressive allegory. Thus, My Darling Clementine fulfills Robinson's
bad faith principle by providing a forum wherein such competing discourses are
offered so that the audience may address its anxieties while being lauded for its
society's successes.
By the time Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was released in 1957, such anxieties had
been amplified. Russian rearm am ent and nuclear capabilities intensified American

49

fears that the nation's position of power w ould compromise national security, w ith
the additional threat of incredible destruction as a result of a nuclear w ar rather than
conventional war. Moreover, conflicts had been arising across the world that
seemed to confirm that America's fate was to involve itself in foreign w ars that
seemed to have little direct relevance for Americans living in the United States. The
rules of w ar had become blurred. No longer was w ar fought on a battlefield oceans
away. Rather, American rhetoricians emphasized an ideological threat that worked
through "infiltration and intimidation" (NSC-68 VII). The Eisenhower
adm inistration's "New Look" approach to foreign policy aggravated American
angst as John Foster Dulles and others advocated a policy of "massive retaliation" —
a strategy that advocated a massive arms race as a form of deterrence. As the Soviet
Union developed its own atomic weapons program and worked on perfecting inter­
continental ballistic missiles, the possibility of a nuclear w ar hitting American soil
became a very real threat. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral provided a forum wherein
these fears could be placed in currency w ith the prevailing discourse of the
Eisenhower administration, which suggested that a massive build-up of atomic
armaments was an effective deterrent to the outbreak of nuclear war.
After campaigning against the Democratic Party's perceived "soft" stance
tow ard Communism, Eisenhower's Republican administration was obligated to
adopt a new approach. To this end, the Republicans took the terms of the NSC-68
and NSC 162/2 documents to heart. NSC-68 articulated a Manichean approach to
foreign policy: on one side, there was the United States and its allies, and on the

50

other, the Soviet bloc (Brands 32). The Soviet Union was characterized by "a new
fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its elaborate authority
over the rest of the world" (NSC-68 1). The document additionally suggested that
Soviet designs called "for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the
machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet
w orld and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and
controlled from the Kremlin" (NSC-68 111). Furthermore, NSC-68 emphasized the
Soviet capability to render devastating damage to the United States: "The Kremlin's
possession of atomic weapons puts new power behind its design, and increases the
jeopardy to our system" (NSC-68 Vll). As H. W. Brands notes, "For the first time in
American history, an enemy would possess the capacity to strike quickly and
devastatingly at America's industrial resources and population. Previous military
technology had allowed America the luxury of waiting until w ars became imminent,
or had begun, before mobilizing" (33).
NSC 162/2, released in 1953, elaborated on such notions and emphasized the
purported Soviet plan for world domination. "The basic Soviet objectives," the
document noted, "continue to be consolidation and expansion of their own sphere of
power and eventual domination of the non-communist world" (2). NSC 162/2 also
expressed alarm over the Soviets' recent development of hydrogen weapons and
conventional military build up: "The USSR has sufficient bombs and aircraft, using
one-way missions, to inflict serious damage on the United States, especially by
surprise attack. The USSR soon may have the capability of dealing a crippling blow

51

to our industrial base and our continued ability to prosecute a w a r . . . . W ithin the
next two years, the Soviet bloc is not expected to increase the size of its forces, but
will strengthen them w ith improved equipm ent and training and the larger atomic
stockpile" (2). The National Security Council recommended that, in response, the
United States develop " [a] strong military posture, w ith emphasis on the capability
of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive power" (5). Furthermore, NSC
162/2 advocated American involvement in nations that were not already aligned
w ith the United States, as "their vast manpower, their essential raw materials and
their potential for growth are such that their absorption w ithin the Soviet system
w ould greatly, perhaps decisively, alter the world balance of power to [American]
detriment" (13). The document continued to speak in economic terms, prom oting
economic grow th as a foundation for defense development and security, while
advocating that the nation "m aintain retaliatory power sufficient to insure [sic]
unacceptable damage to the Soviet system should the USSR resort to general war,
and prove that the free w orld can prosper despite Soviet pressures, or if for any
reason Soviet stability and influence are reduced" (24) and "take feasible political
economic, propaganda and covert measures designed to create and exploit
troublesome problems for the USSR" (25).
Though these documents were initially classified, they entered the public
m ind through the rhetoric of several people involved w ith the Trum an and
Eisenhower administrations, most notably Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles.
D uring the 1950 cam paign season, Acheson, responding to Republican accusations

52

of a weak position toward the Soviets, delivered speeches that emphasized "the
Soviet enemy as an expansionist imperialist state that relied on 'threats, infiltration,
planned chaos, despair, and contusion'" (Carey 661), and Neinsweek followed w ith
speculation that Congress had been m ulling over the option of preventative war.
Americans responded by indicating their support tor an increased military build-up.
During the 1950 m idterm elections, some seventy percent of respondents in a Gallup
Poll said that they supported raising taxes to fund the military, leaving the poll
takers to comment that "Rarely has the Institute in its fifteen years of m easuring
public opinion found such heavy majorities expressing a willingness to pay more
taxes tor any public purpose" (qtd. in Carey 672).
After the defeat of the Democrats in the 1952 presidential election, the
Republicans continued their strong anti-Communist rhetoric. In a response to an
interviewer on April 7,1954, Eisenhower sought to explain the importance of
Southeast Asia to American interests through an articulation of the "dom ino
theory," arguing that the loss of any nations in the region from the American sphere
of interest w ould result in a "falling domino principle" (LaFeber 96) that w ould
force Japan "tow ard the Communist areas" tor trade (97). Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles advanced another depiction of the imperialistic machinations of the
Soviet Union on June 30,1954, in a speech explaining American involvement in
Guatemala. Dulles suggested that the events in Guatemala "expose[dj the evil
purpose of the Kremlin to destroy the inter-American system, and [tested] the ability
of the American states to maintain the peaceful integrity of this hemisphere" (118).

53

This speech came six months after Dulles had told a New York audience that
massive retaliation was the only course of action that could result in peaceful
liberation from their oppressors. Dulles stated that the President and his advisors
had agreed "to depend upon a great capacity to retaliate, by means and at places of
our choosing . . . . reinforced by the striking power of a strategic air force based on
internationally agreed positions" (Dulles, "Speech in New York" 169 - 70). The logic
of the administration, as forwarded by Dulles, was that the threat of such massive
retaliation w ould keep the increasingly powerful Soviet state in check.
Thus, the American mind was being bom barded by images of a tyrannical
enemy that could only be stopped through a massive buildup of arms that, it
seemed, w ould inevitably lead to war. John E. Mueller's sum m ary of Cold War
opinion polls notes that American belief that a third world w ar was imm inent
peaked with the outbreak of w ar in Korea, but arose again in the m id 1950s (303).^
In 1955, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted that a
nuclear w ar would result in "death and destruction on a scale almost beyond
knowing and certainly beyond any sensibility to shock and horror that m en have so
far experienced" (qtd. in Brands 65). This dire w arning was followed by the
development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the realization that were such
technology also in Soviet hands, the Communists w ould be able to strike, leaving
only fifteen minutes warning.

^ The polls that Mueller cites were discontinued after 1963 and were not conducted
in 1958 - 59.

54

Such was the climate when John Sturges released Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Americans were being bom barded by threats of an expanding enemy that seemed
bent on their destruction while being told that the only way to deter such an enemy
was to stockpile weapons w ith the capability of destruction on an unprecedented
scale —weapons that their enemies also possessed. This anxiety was coupled w ith
the fallout from a sense of paranoia that rose from the McCarthy hearings and Alger
Hiss trial. Americans were beset from all sides by fear and mistrust. W hether the
threats were realistic or exaggerated, the mid-1950s developed a culture of fear.
Such disquiet is developed as an alternate allegorical discourse in Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral. The primary narrative, like My Darling Clementine's, deals with the

arrival of law in Tombstone in 1882, culminating in the titular battle. However, an
analysis of sub-textual elements reveals the text's function as a cultural forum where
the narrative that champions American m ight is tempered by a fear of
powerlessness in the face of an enemy that is equipped to render great destruction
on the nation.
Gorkin's reading of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Coiohoys as Cold Warriors
focuses on the film's discourse of containment. Corkin draw s attention to the
emphasis of borders and lines in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, such as the "dead line"
in Dodge City: "In no other W estern that I know of is there such an obsession w ith
delineating a proper sphere of behavior and influence. In Dodge, guns may not be
w orn above the 'dead line,' a geographical distinction symbolizing the zone of
anarchy versus that of law and order" (173). Corkin links this to an economic

55

reading of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, suggesting that the threat of the Clantons is not
to "civilization," as he argued it was in My Darling Clementine, but rather to
economic ethics. The Clantons are cattle rustlers, but Sturges's Tombstone is a welldeveloped city. The problem with the Clantons, then, is that they are limiting the
ability of good business people in Tombstone to compete on an even footing with
the rustlers, representing an illegal infringement on free markets. This circumstance
is linked to complaints of business interests in the 1950s that m anufacturers from
communist nations used slave labour and ignored copyright law, actions that
limited the ability of western concerns to compete (167).
W yatt Earp, Corkin argues, represents American authority in such a world.
W yatt's task is to police this region and prevent the spread of influences like the
Clantons. Corkin notes that W yatt moves about the west freely w ith little concern
for jurisdiction (173); in this light, the entire west becomes a microcosm for the
world after the Korean War. The various levels of development of the cities W yatt
visits, from backwater Griffin, Texas to the relatively cosmopolitan Dodge City, are
analogous to the various regions in which containment policy w ould involve the
United States. As Corkin notes,
[cjontainment did not necessarily m ean reining in the nations that
formed the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. It also meant constraining
or thw arting nationalist or leftist initiatives all over the world, whether
in Asia, W estern Europe, or Africa. This might take the form of
thw arting Arab nationalists in the Middle East, countering the

56

nonaligned India with a U.S.-supported Pakistan, or infiltrating leftist
organizations in Western Europe. (168)
Gorkin's reading hinges on his depiction of W yatt's authority and range as
being unproblematic. Indeed, there is little in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to suggest
that W yatt's movement is morally or ethically wrong. Nobody questions his
authority, and he is ready, willing, and able to cross geographic and legal
boundaries in order to perform his role as a peace officer. Rather, w hat is troubling
in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the overall ineffectuality of this policy. Ultimately,
the policy of containment as enacted by W yatt Earp fails. Ostensibly, in the theatre
of contemporary politics, the goal of both the containment policy and the New Look
diplomacy was to prevent an outbreak of w ar between the Soviet Union and the
United States. However, W yatt Earp is unable to prevent a "hot" conflict, as
represented in the film by the climactic gunfight. The gunfight results not because
of any deficiency in Wyatt, but rather through the inadequacies of the containment
system and the alliances that it necessitates. The result is an outbreak of a prolonged
gun battle, which realizes the fears of Americans who had been inundated w ith the
rhetoric of the N ew Look and massive retaliation.
Throughout Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, W yatt Earp is loath to utilize violence,
instead preferring to talk his way out of troublesome situations. He is not a pacifist;
he will resort to violence when necessary, whether it be "buffaloing" a m an w ith the
butt of his gun or looking for deputies who can handle a firearm to assist him in the
apprehension of Luke Short. However, above all, W yatt Earp prefers to rely on his

57

potential for violence to overcome obstacles. This is best illustrated through his
handling of Shanghai Pierce's invasion of the church social in Dodge City. Despite
facing overwhelming numbers, W yatt is able to overcome his foes by targeting their
leader. Pierce, confident in his superiority, asks W yatt to shoot it out. Wyatt,
however, cleverly replies, "Go ahead, but you get it first, Shanghai." In this scene,
W yatt succinctly articulates the policy of massive retaliation; though in a long,
draw n-out war, the United States m ight not survive, it can, as Dulles put it, "depend
upon a great capacity to retaliate" (Dulles, "Speech in New York" 169). In this
instance, the ploy works, thanks in part to Doc Holliday keeping his own gun on the
mercenary Johnny Ringo, whom Pierce had hired to help him eliminate Earp.
Whenever W yatt ventures out of the relative safety of his home community of
Dodge City, however, he is routinely compromised, as H ubert I. Cohen puts it, by
"misplaced trust" (210). The audience's first encounter w ith W yatt is w hen he is
learning from his former friend and fellow lawman Cotton Wilson that Ike Clanton
and Johnny Ringo have been allowed to ride through Griffin, Texas, w ithout being
held, as W yatt had asked. Furthermore, in Wyatt's initial m eeting with Doc
Holliday, he is cheated again when he promises Doc information about Ed Bailey in
exchange for the whereabouts of Clanton and Ringo. Doc accepts W yatt's
information but then reminds W yatt that he never agreed to an exchange. W yatt's
inability to rely on other people in the film is perhaps most poignantly expressed
tow ard the end of the film when, in a gesture alluding to High Noon, W yatt casts
dow n his badge in disgust. Over time, W yatt becomes decreasingly confident in his

58

abilities. As Cohen has noted, the night before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral his
calm exterior has been abandoned;
W hereas Ford's Wyatt carries out his revenge with steely resolve,
Sturges's W yatt shows his fear the night before the fight. He seeks out
the unconscious Doc Holliday and pleads, "Doc, wake up. I need you."
This from the m an who heretofore has been unflappable, the epitome
of justice and law, and who has felt invulnerable. Evidence of the
latter is shown early in the film w hen W yatt walked up to a drunk
cowboy who had a gun pointed at W yatt's chest and talked him into
handing it over. (210-11).
Thus, W yatt's reliance on deterrence through reputation and alliances w ith other
parties has resulted in the collapse of W yatt's earlier status as the omniscient
authority. Instead, he is reduced to a mere m an like any other, who is now beholden
to his alliance w ith Doc Holliday to stay alive.
But W yatt's alliances, reputation, and tactical skills are not enough to keep
him out of a battle w ith the Clantons. While his methods may have worked with
less significant enemies, from the drunk cowboy Cohen mentions to Shanghai
Pierce, they fail against the Clantons. Though he is able to talk his way out of tense
situations w ith the gang on a num ber of occasions, they are ultimately spoiling for a
fight and kill W yatt's brother James. At this stage, W yatt abandons any pretense
that he is fighting for some moral imperative, and, as the Clantons had planned, falls
into a personal fight. When Doc admonishes him that he is dooming himself by

59

fighting Ike Clanton's way, W yatt retorts, "To hell with logic. That's my brother
lying there."
Ultimately, W yatt's strategy of deterrence through his reputation and
diplomacy fails. As the audience knows from the beginning, the gun battle is
inevitable. Sturges directs the gunfight so that it is long and draw n out, and strategy
wins the day. Nevertheless, it is a bloody fight. Virgil Earp is shot in the leg, and
every Clanton to a m an is killed. The epic battle at the end of the film allegorizes the
outbreak of the hot w ar that so m any Americans feared. The policies of massive
retaliation and containment failed. W yatt is unable to scare the Clantons into ceasing
their transgressions, and he is unable to avoid an arm ed conflict through force of
personality alone. Earp wins the day, but it is again at the cost of his brother and,
possibly. Doc Elolliday, who rose from w hat may have been his death bed to help
his friend. In Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the policies of massive retaliation and
containment are unable to avoid the inevitable conflict that m ust arise between the
two oppositional forces. W yatt's force of personality only carries him so far.
Thus, both My Darling Clementine and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral present
trium phal narratives that apparently sanctify America's new role as a superpower.
In My Darling Clementine, W yatt Earp ostensibly eliminates the undesirable elements
in Tombstone and makes the town safe for people like Clementine Carter, in an
allegory about the rise of the American superpower and its potential to combat
totalitarianism in the w orld and make the world free for the spread of American
commerce and progressivism. Eleven years later, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral also has

60

W yatt Earp ridding Tombstone of transgressors and seems to argue for the policy of
containment. However, both narratives are tem pered by a veiled anxiety. In M y
Darling Clementine, a close analysis suggests that the film is not only dealing w ith the

integration of foreign markets into an American sphere of influence, but that it is
also addressing the American shift from isolationism to internationalism which
leads inexorably toward conflict with its ideological enemy, the Soviet Union. In
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the adoption of policies such as containment and massive

retaliation, as exemplified by W yatt Earp, ultimately fail. These films both reflect
and speak to the American attitude in the 1940s and 1950s that a hot war was
inevitable and articulate the anxiety that American policy w ould be unable to avoid
such a conflict; thus the films function as cultural forums where these themes are
hidden beneath the surface "bad faith" narrative in order to make them more
palatable for their audiences.

61

4. "Indochina was Dodge City":
Hour o f the Gun, Doc, and the Demoralization

of W yatt Earp

Prior to the 1960s, depictions of W yatt Earp on film had been largely positive.
In spite of the subtle critiques of American foreign policy that were based on
criticisms of certain aspects of W yatt's character, the dom inant narrative in films like
My Darling Clementine and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral presented W yatt as an
admirable figure, if only superficially. However, by the late 1960s, the filmic
character of W yatt Earp changed drastically. As the United States became
increasingly embroiled in external conflicts and, in particular, the Vietnam War, the
darker side of the historical W yatt Earp became more popular fodder for
filmmakers. Filmmakers began to emphasize some of the more problematic aspects
of W yatt Earp, painting him as an obsessive bully, and, in some cases, a wholly evil
monomaniac. There were two major films released between the time the American
role in Vietnam shifted from an "advisory" one and the adoption of Nixon's policy
of "Vietnamization": Hour of the Gun (1967) and Doc (1971). Though both films
adopted a counter-cultural reckoning of institutional American heroes, they did so
in very different ways. In Hour o f the Gun, John Sturges appended the W yatt Earp
story he began w ith Gunfight at the O.K. Corral by presenting the first filmic depiction
of W yatt's "vendetta ride," a series of events that problematized W yatt's search for
justice by turning it into a case of personal vengeance. Meanhile, Doc abandoned

62

any pretense of grey m orality by presenting a Wyatt Earp w ho is completely corrupt
and undoubtedly the villain of the piece. In doing so, each film offered a critique of
the American foreign policy by presenting W yatt Earp as a synecdoche of the United
States.
The mid- to late-1960s were m arked by increased American involvement in
Vietnam. Between the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964 and April 1965, the
American approach to Vietnam shifted drastically. In previous years, Americans
had been present in Vietnam only as "advisors"; however, by 1965, American troops
were facing direct fire from Vietcong forces. Prior to 1965, John McNaughton, a
trusted advisor of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had declared that
American intentions in Vietnam were "to permit the people of South Vietnam to
enjoy a better, freer way of life"(qtd. in Farber 142). But, by 1965, M cNaughton
recognized that the goal of the operation in Vietnam had shifted "to avoid a
hum iliating U.S. defeat" (qtd. in Farber 143). American forces implemented a
concentrated bombing cam paign in mid-1965 and began attempts to rally
international support, w ith only limited success. A tally of American num bers in
Vietnam reveals the astounding rate of the escalation. In 1961, the Americans had
deployed some 3200 "advisors" to Vietnam; by 1963 this num ber had increased to
16,300; and, in 1964, there were 23,300 advisors. By 1965, however, the Americans
had 184,300 troops stationed in Vietnam (Farber 146).
In spite of increased American presence in Vietnam, the w ar was not going
well. In 1968, the CIA reported that American forces were able to find and engage

63

Vietcong forces in only one of every hundred attem pts (Farber 147). These
difficulties abroad were exacerbated as the operation began to lose credibility in the
American media. There was a m arked shift in coverage. As David Stiegerwald
observes,
[b]efore late 1967, the typical w ar story detailed the adventures or
m isadventures of American soldiers; similarly, stories about the air
w ar focused on the pilots' skill w ith their high-tech weaponry. The
enemy remained faceless, nameless, and for the most part evil; indeed,
U.S. reporting was dominated by stereotypes about both the Asians
and guerilla fighters. (98)
Prior to 1967, there had been general assent amongst the press to such coverage, in
spite of the occasional troubling report, such as CBS's coverage of marines
destroying the village of Came Ne in August 1965. However, as the futility of the
w ar and the ineffectiveness of American tactics in the jungle became difficult to
ignore, a "credibility gap" developed (Stiegerwald 99). The press began to
legitimize anti-war sentiments through coverage of events such as J. William
Fulbright's rhetoric at the Senate Foreign Relations hearings and some officials
began to disseminate to the press the doubts that existed w ithin the administration
(Stiegerwald 100).
The press's growing dissatisfaction w ith the w ar reflected growing public
discontent with events abroad. The first major anti-war protest occurred in April of
1965, w hen the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a rally at the

64

W ashington m onument. At the protest, SDS president Paul Potter said that "The
incredible w ar in Vietnam has provided the razor . . . that has finally severed the last
vestiges of the illusion that morality and democracy are the guiding principles of
American foreign policy" (qtd. in Farber 138 - 9). Potter's speech articulated a
growing anxiety that American intervention abroad was running contrary to
essential American values. Just as the American ascendancy to power in the 1950s
had caused concern for Americans who had been brought up to view their nation as
an independent actor, the Vietnam War sparked an anxiety that this new America
had departed from the values that American cultural rhetoric had held dear.
After 1965, opposition to the w ar grew. As Farber observes, "Many people, in
a phrase from their time, learned to 'question authority.' They started with their
national leaders but extended their questioning to those who produced the 'news,'
ran their schools, who claimed to teach them about values and morality" (140).
Farber also notes that in the context of the Vietnam war, there was no "patriotic
fervor" to enlist; rather, the primary impetus of those who did join up was to better
their socioeconomic standing or to avoid being drafted (148). The protests soon
moved from being characterized as fringe activities to including academics and
other respected members of society. Some universities held "teach-ins," where
students and their professors could discuss the war. Additionally, num erous church
groups began to involve themselves in the anti-war movement. In 1966, Lutheran
pastor Richard N euhaus founded a group called Clergy and Laymen Concerned

65

about Vietnam, and in 1967, the Neic York Times editorial page had similarly turned
against the w ar (Farber 163). As Stiegerwald notes,
[the opponents of the war] were a widely varied group of citizens,
gathered together in num erous groups and often at odds w ith one
another over strategy and analysis. There was no single leader and no
group dom inated . . . Those w ho flocked into or associated with one or
several of the organizations were just as varied and hailed from all
ranks and areas of American life: clergy, teachers, suburban
housewives, students, union members, country folk. (105)
April rallies in New York and San Francisco drew over a quarter of a million people,
while an October m arch on the Pentagon saw the attendance of 100,000. The
reverberations of the Vietnam experience also directly affected those in power: a
num ber of President Johnson's advisors including George Ball, McGeorge Bundy,
Bill Moyers, and Robert McNamara resigned over the war.
In this climate, John Sturges felt moved to create a sequel to his earlier
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Although in 1962 Sturges had asserted his belief that

"Western characters m ust not be glamorized" and claimed that he "[didn't] go in for
that Stuart Lake baloney" (qtd. in Hutton, "Showdown" 21), there are still strong
elements of the heroic Earp of earlier films in Sturges' sequel. Hour o f the Gun. As
Cohen notes, the audience of this film is trained to sympathize w ith W yatt Earp and
his allies simply because these characters are initially fleshed out far more
completely than their enemies (212). Additionally, this version of W yatt has casting

66

on his side; he is portrayed by James Garner, who had attained some fame for his
portrayal of the likeable Maverick on the television series of the same name (213).
Furthermore, the audience is presented early on w ith the facts that W yatt's brothers
Virgil and M organ have been attacked; Virgil is m aimed and Morgan killed, lending
some credibility to W yatt's desire for justice.
Thus, there is some sense that W yatt's revenge is justified. As he
systematically hunts dow n and kills the Clanton gang, some members of the
audience likely sym pathized w ith W yatt and his quest. Sturges makes it clear that
the audience is supposed to dislike Ike Clanton, and the contrast between the nattily
attired Earps and the rag-tag Clanton family on the film's poster allows the audience
to see in Earp a representation of American authority that was being forced, on the
home front, to deal w ith the anti-establishmentarian behaviour of the anti-war
movement and the counterculture. While m any Americans from m any walks of life
did indeed support the protests, there was anything but public consensus over the
war. Indeed, even as late as 1969, some public opinion polls found that a majority of
Americans felt that protestors were "harmful to American life" for refusing to
support the nation (Earber 167). As Cohen argues, "Sturges might well have
expected that some members of his audience—those who were growing im patient
w ith the radicals in the streets and on college cam puses—w ould align with the
lawmen" (214).
However, these attem pts to lead the audience into identifying w ith W yatt
Earp at the expense of Ike Clanton and his gang generally fail. Rather, the dom inant

67

discourse in the film w ould suggest that Wyatt Earp —and the American
establishment that he represents —is morally problematic. Ultimately, Hour o f the
Gun traces w hat Andrew Paul H utton refers to as W yatt Earp's "moral suicide"

("Showdown" 24). In this reading, W yatt is associated with excessive violence and
abuse of authority.
The first indication that Hour o f the Gun is offering an alternate primary
discourse to those presented in the 1950s depictions of W yatt Earp is that the film
begins —not e n d s—w ith the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The effect of this device is
manifold. On one hand, this shift in structure emphasizes that the physical conflict
itself is not of utm ost significance; rather, the key problem at hand is the moral
issues that the film will present to its audience. As Cohen argues, "the basis for the
confrontation [between Earp and Clanton], it turns out, is a political and economic
struggle: Ike is for 'freedom of the range' and control of this area of the west before
the arrival of other eastern interests, designs that the Earps are not wholly aware of"
(212). Additionally, the structural shift immediately associates W yatt Earp w ith
violence and disregard for legitimate authority: in the opening scenes of the film, the
audience's first glimpses into W yatt's personality are offered by the gunfight itself as
well as his refusal to comply w ith Sheriff Bryan's attempts to arrest him (Cohen 214).
However, perhaps most importantly, the positioning of the gunfight at the
beginning of the film allows Sturges to depict the events that historically occurred
after the gunfight, which had been ignored by previous filmmakers. These events,
often referred to as W yatt Earp's "vendetta ride" or "ride of vengeance," involved

68

W yatt Earp engaging in a personal extra-legal mission to hunt dow n those w hom he
felt were responsible for acts of violence perpetrated against his brothers Virgil and
Morgan. Though earlier films had utilized Virgil's maiming and M organ's death as
a plot device to justify W yatt's personal stake in the Tombstone gunfight and to
develop the animosity between Earp and the Clanton gang beyond a simple political
feud. Hour o f the Gun attempts to depict these events in a fashion more similar to the
actual events. In doing so, Sturges challenges Earp's status as a representation of
American values and more closely connects him to the Vietnam quagmire.
The actual events of the vendetta ride are complicated by various conflicting
accounts from both sides of the feud. Virgil Earp had been shot in the streets of
Tombstone on December 28,1881, while Morgan was killed on March 18,1882.
According to historian Paula Mitchell Parks, at this point W yatt Earp engaged in a
war that saw him abandon any legal means of justice: "Wyatt Earp looked at his
dead brother, the one intimates called his favourite, and decided that he was tired of
all the political and legal maneuvering. From here on out, he w ould have no regard
for any law but his own" (341). The first salvo in Wyatt Earp's w ar came just days
after the death of Morgan. Wyatt, Doc Holliday, and two others, who have been
inconclusively identified as W arren Earp and Sherman McMasters, were at the
Tucson train depot, ostensibly to see brother Virgil off on the train. Most accounts
have Earp and his allies carrying arms, though Tucson deputy J.W. Evans disagreed.
At the depot, the Earps encountered Ike Clanton and Frank Stilwell, a member of the

69

cowboy g a n g / The Earps killed Stilwell, while Clanton managed to escape. After
this, W yatt Earp and his gang were w anted men. Tombstone sheriff John Behan
soon attem pted to speak to W yatt—presum ably to arrest him —but W yatt refused to
speak to him. Again, accounts of this exchange vary; the Earp-supporting Epitaph
reported that Earp and the others simply walked away from Behan, while according
to the Daily Nugget, Earp drew his gun on the outnum bered sheriff (Marks 349). At
this point, W yatt left town, and Behan formed a posse, comprised mainly of
members of the cowboy gang, including John Ringo and Ike Clanton, to hunt him
down.
On March 22' the second gun battle of the vendetta ride took place in the
South Pass of the Dragoon Mountains. This time the victim was Florentine Cruz.
According to George Goodfellow, who examined the body, Cruz was shot four
times. The fourth shot, Goodfellow believed, "had been received after Cruz died"
(Marks 354). At this point, some began to question Earp's motives and methods.
Pima County Republican sheriff Bob Paul, who Marks notes was believed to have
been a staunch Earp supporter, said that "[t]he so-called Earp gang, or faction if you
please, was composed entirely of gamblers, who preyed upon the cowboys, and at
the same time in order to keep up a shozo of having a legitimate calling, was organized
into a sort of vigilance committee" (qtd. in Marks 354 - 5; emphasis added). Two

7 Like nearly everything else related to the vendetta ride, Stilwell's purpose at the
depot is disputed. Some have him meeting a deputy whom he hoped w ould testify
on his behalf on a stage robbery charge; the Epitaph suggested that he was either sent
there by the cowboys to be killed, trying to get away himself, or seeking to kill the
rem aining Earps (Marks 346).

70

days later, another gunfight took place at either Iron Springs or Mescal Springs,
depending on the source of the information. Once again, accounts of the event
conflict with each other. The Epitaph claimed that six members of Earp's faction had
been am bushed by nine cowboys, numbers that W yatt himself verified in 1896.
However, the Daily Nugget reported that in fact the Earps were forced to retreat after
encountering just four cowboys, and that both sides opened fire simultaneously
(Marks 357). Billy Breakenridge, one of Behan's deputies, later published an account
that claimed that the Cowboys were hiding from the Earps and asserting that W yatt
had instigated the gunplay. Nevertheless, as Marks notes, "[m]ore im portant than
the actual details of the fi ght . . . were the roles of the participants. The Earp party
maintained that it was acting as a duly constituted posse trying to serve warrants on
stage-robbing cowboys and killing one such notorious miscreant [Curly Bill
Brocious] in the process" (359 - 60). However, Marks goes on to point out that "no
stage robbery charge against Curly Bill has ever been uncovered" (360).
Ultimately, W yatt Earp was forced to live on the run. He and his gang hid at
the ranch of cattle baron Henry Hooker for a time, who protected the Earp faction
from Behan's posse, which arrived on March 27* to arrest the fugitives. The conflict
w ent far enough to prom pt presidential attention; on May 3''^, Chester A. Arthur
threatened to place southeastern Arizona under martial law, believing that "it [had]
become impracticable to enforce by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings the
laws of the United States" and invoking his duty to "use the military forces for the
purpose of enforcing . . . the laws" (qtd. in Marks 377). Not long afterward, W yatt's

71

faction rode for Colorado and split up. W yatt was never apprehended for the
m urder of Stilwell, though Doc Holliday was arrested in Denver on May 15*.
Sturges' decision to depict a fictionalization of these events in Hour of the Gun
suggests a radical departure from previous accounts of W yatt Ear p's life. In doing
so, Sturges highlights the moral dilemma that Earp's actions raised. Marks, writing
on contemporary perceptions of the vendetta, observes that
W yatt Earp's adherents at the time depicted him as a fugitive only
because of an unjust legal machinery, a m an earnestly trying to do the
right (i.e. lawful) thing, but forced to hide out and assess his chances of
receiving any kind of justice. His detractors saw him as a
troublemaker whose machinations had caught up w ith him, forcing
him to show his true colors by eluding the legal process. (371)
Parks' canny assessment, and Sturges' decision to depict such a divisive issue, helps
to place Hour o f the Gun w ithin the framework of the cultural forum and bad faith
models. Given W yatt Earp's continuing status as a symbol of the United States and
its foreign policy, W yatt's actions can be read either as an ugly but necessary
campaign for justice, or a morally reprehensible attem pt to advance a personal
agenda —allegorically, combating the rise of Communism in East Asia. Of course.
Hour o f the Gun places its support firmly in the latter camp. As Allen Barra has

argued, "As [Hour of the Gun] progresses, [Wyatt's] ideals are stripped away one by
one until he can no longer deny that his purpose is anything but vengeance"
(Inventing 357). W yatt's means to his end are appropriately troubling, given this

72

reading; he uses a phony bounty to expose the whereabouts of his enemies so he can
kill them himself, and violates international boundaries by chasing Ike Clanton into
Mexico to finish w hat he has started. Thus, given this interpretation as well as Hour
o f the Gun's status as a revisionist sequel to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the film

functions as a space wherein the audience can confront a depreciation of American
ideals. The anxieties that were introduced in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral concerning
the corrupting influence of America's rise to power had come to fruition. As the
audience of Sturges' first take on W yatt Earp feared, America's new position in the
w orld had impelled it to abandon the ideals that formed the foundation of its
culture, allowing it to sink into a new status as a bully who exercised its
international muscle w ith complete disregard of its own professed morals.
Hour o f the Gun was no runaw ay success at the box office. In spite of its star

power, its presentation of the discomforting discourse as its prim ary narrative
undoubtedly troubled many filmgoers. While there is certainly an adulatory
narrative in the film —the audience is, after all, encouraged to despise Ike Clanton
and perhaps choose to sympathize w ith Wyatt Earp if only as the lesser of two
evils—the film stretches the bounds of the bad faith and cultural forum models
nearly to their breaking point. However, the next major Hollywood W yatt Earp
film. Doc, w ould go even further.
By the time Doc was released in 1971, the United States had, if anything,
become even more firmly entrenched in the Vietnam conflict. Richard Nixon was

73

elected in 1968 after campaigning on his policy of "Vietnamization,"^ but in truth
had no practical exit strategy. Instead, Nixon proposed to force negotiations by
escalating American air raid campaigns (Farber 229). Enlistment rates fell as
incidents of desertion rose; additionally, there were an estimated 800 cases of
"fragging" —the shooting of unpopular officers (Farber 230). The strength of the
anti-war movement grew as well and began to involve many returning GIs, some of
whom took to publishing pamphlets condemning the war. In 1967 there had been
just three such underground papers published, but by 1972, the num ber had grown
to nearly 250 (Farber 230). The mainstream press also began to view the anti-war
movement in a different light, and even conservative publications were portraying
the anti-war movement more positively (Slotkin 580). The revelation of the Mylai
massacre by the New York Times and Life magazine in 1969 further galvanized the
nation against the w ar in Vietnam. According to Slotkin, "More than any other
single event, the revelation transformed the terms of the ideological and political
debates on the war, lending authority to the idea that American society was in the
grip of a 'm adness' whose sources might be endemic to our national character"
(581). In 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked. According to Farber, these
documents "detailed the pattern of deception that characterized the presidential
administrations' portrayals of the w ar to the American people" (233). Polls taken in
1968 had suggested that Americans viewed the w ar as a "mistake" (Slotkin 579); by

* Nixon's Vietnamization policy sought to reduce American involvement in the w ar
by increasing the South Vietmanese capability to defend itself against N orth
Vietnam and the Vietcong.

74

1972, a poll suggested that a majority of Americans not only were opposed to the
w ar but viewed it as "immoral" (Farber 259).
W estern films reflected the vehem ent anti-war attitude that was beginning to
dominate the national mind. This period saw the development of films that
depicted w hat Slotkin calls the "demoralization" of the Western. According to
Slotkin, "the negative aspects of the adventure . . . now form[ed] the center of the
narrative and suggest[ed] an implicit rejection of the ideological projects that
motivated counterinsurgency" (592). For Slotkin, the "guiding myth" of the
W estern had, in the 1960s and 1970s, been called into question, and the chaotic
America of this period was unable to renew its belief in this m yth (626). Michael
Coyne similarly argues that the Vietnam War sounded the death knell of the
Western myth. The genre, Coyne suggests, had died with American optimism and
had been replaced by dark Vietnam narratives as the w ar replaced the W estern
experience as the "m ost resonant" American historical experience (191). The films of
the 1970 no longer mythicized the nation's Western heroes; rather they depicted
figures such as W yatt Earp as personifications of the worst aspects of the American
establishment.
Though Slotkin cites Sam Peckinpah's bloody film The Wild Bunch as the
exemplum of this trend. Doc provides w hat is possibly an even more overt case of
the demonization of the W estern hero and the "demoralization" of the Western. The
poster for the film proclaimed that "on a good day, [Wyatt Earp] might pistol-whip
a drunk, shoot an unarm ed man, bribe a politician, and get paid off by an outlaw.

75

He was a U.S. Marshal" (Hutton, "Showdown" 24). This W yatt Earp is a "selfrighteous, hypocritical sadist with a delightfully Nixonian vision of law that is
totally self-serving" (Hutton, "Showdown" 24). In this film, the Cowboys are clearly
meant to be analogous w ith the Vietcong. They are helpless before the
overwhelmingly superior firepower of W yatt and his gang. In addition, the long
hair of the Cowboy gang connects them to the hippie movement. The screenwriter,
Pete Hamill, m ade explicit the connection between this portrayal of W yatt Earp and
his own experience in Vietnam:
I w ent to Vietnam in 1966, and it was evident to almost everyone
except the military that the w ar was wrong, but that we were
continuing to fight because of some peculiar notions of national macho
pride, self-righteousness, and the missionary spirit. I started to realize
that w ithin Lyndon Johnson there was a western unspooling. In that
western the w orld was broken dow n into White Hats and Black Hats.
Indochina w as Dodge City, and the Americans were some collective
version of W yatt Earp. (qtd. in Hutton, "Showdown" 24)
Thus, in Doc, W yatt Earp becomes the symbol of American authoritarianism
abroad. He represents the most profane excesses of American foreign policy in the
early 1970s. Doc's W yatt is emasculated through his latent homosexuality as well as
his impotence in a fistfight w ith Ike Clanton. He has ceased to be the robust model
of American masculinity. W yatt's ruthlessness is a product of his unrequited
feelings for Doc Holliday, and through this presentation. Doc serves a scathing

76

critique of the United States that suggests the country has completely lost its way.
As Wyatt, the synecdoche for contemporary America, is completely stripped of
American ideals of masculinity, so too is the United States stripped of any admirable
qualities for the film 's audience (Cohen 214-5).
Doc offers no subtle counter-narrative; its attention to these angst-inducing

issues is explicit and unrelenting. Thus, the film fails to support the bad faith and
cultural forum models. However, in doing so, the film becomes the exception that
proves the rule. Indeed, the more vilified W yatt becomes, the less successful the
film becomes. Doc is a case in point. Of all the films, it fared by far the poorest at
the box office, and is nearly universally disparaged by critics. H utton notes that
"Doc was a total failure at the box office," in contrast to "[f]ilms such as My Darling
Clementine and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral [which] w on great public acceptance, both

at the time of their release and since in television rebroadcasts and on videotape"
("Showdown" 25). By refusing to conceal its discourse of moral outrage beneath a
counter-discourse. Doc offended its audience's sensibilities; it offered no comfort in
the face of its onslaught against W yatt Earp and the Vietnam War. Instead, the film
forced its American audience to gaze directly into a mirror that highlighted only the
nation's most disturbing qualities, a visage that was not an appealing one for
filmgoers.
Both Hour of the Gun and Doc presented its audiences w ith an alternate take
on the W yatt Earp legend. Hour of the Gun's depiction of the vendetta ride and the
film 's status as a sequel to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral served as a recognition that the

77

fears of Gunfight's 1957 audience had indeed come to pass: w ith the United States'
new powers and responsibility, the nation had abandoned its adherence to the ideals
that served as a basis for its culture, including those of free-will, democracy, justice,
and self-determination. This film was far more overt with its depiction of the
troubling aspects of American foreign policies than Sturges' previous take on W yatt
Earp had been, and suffered at the box office, perhaps as a result. Nevertheless, its
ticket sales were far greater than the sales of tickets to Doc, which confronted its
audience w ith the hideous visage of the w orst excesses of the American
establishment in Vietnam. Doc offered no respite from this portrait, and provided
no safe haven from the implicit guilt of the enfranchised American citizen. Doc's
Nixonian Earp was an apt shift for a post-Mylai, post-Pentagon Papers America, but
was perhaps too grim an indictment to be palatable for its intended audience. In
any case, Harris Yulin's portrayal of Earp in Doc w ould be the last depiction of
W yatt on film for over fifteen years.

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5.

"The Last Charge of W yatt Earp and

His Immortals": Tombstone, Popular Memory, and
The New World Order

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral w ould not be depicted on movie theatre
screens again until 1993. In that year, director George P. Cosomatos brought Wyatt
Earp to life once again in Tombstone, a major Hollywood picture with a strong cast
that included Kurt Russell as W yatt Earp, Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, Powers
Boothe as Curly Bill Brocius, and cameo appearances by Charlton Heston and
Robert Mitchum. The film was highly regarded by many film goers and grossed
over $55 million in its theatrical release. Apparently, film audiences were once again
finding currency in the W yatt Earp myth, to the point that they were able to stomach
the somewhat less successful W yatt Earp within less than a year of Tombstone's
release. The reasoning behind the revival in the story of the gunfight at the O.K.
Corral and the success of Tombstone speaks to a new set of American anxieties
regarding the nation's role in the world. By 1993, the Cold W ar was over. However,
any optimism that Americans had about the collapse of Soviet Russia was tem pered
once again by an unease about w hat shape the world of the future was to take.
While the Cold War had taken w ith it the tensions of mutually assured destruction
and evil empires, in its wake it left a new set of problems. For over forty years,
American foreign policy had been relatively static w ith a single enemy to focus on.
W ith the crumbling of enem y's empire, a new approach was necessary, and it was

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unclear w hat form that approach w ould take. Additionally, the ascendance of other
nations —notably Japan and G erm any—as economic powers intensified American
anxiety regarding the sustainability of its empire. As the ideological war came to a
close and the potential for an economic one developed, fears regarding the
American ability to rem ain an economic powerhouse w ithout the impetus of a
massive defense build-up weighed heavily on some peoples' minds. With
Tombstone, audiences were able once again to look to the American past for solace.

The film rendered American history in mythic terms and allowed audiences to
psychologically deal w ith their anxieties in a narrative that is in many ways
supremely triumphal. To this end. Tombstone functions as a narrative that
mythologizes not only W yatt Earp but also American Cold W ar history, while
simultaneously articulating the anxieties of the new world order.
Tombstone was but the latest in a series of Western films that appeared toward

the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Prior to this period, the W estern had
not been a popular genre among filmgoers, nor had it been since the early 1970s. As
the United States in 1980 elected a president who m arked himself as a W estern actor,
some filmmakers hoped for a revival in the genre, but the three W esterns released
that year —The Long Riders, Tom Horn, and the epic Heaven's Gate, all flopped (Coyne
185). The distaste for the genre continued throughout the 1980s, prom pting
Anthony Lejeune's 1989 lamentation that the genre was as good as dead (23).
W estern films no longer had the cultural power that they once did. After Vietnam,
the casting of American expansion and subjugation of an Other was far more

80

problematic a m yth than it once had been. However, as Richard Slotkin has argued,
while the W estern had been pushed to the periphery of Hollywood genre films, this
"did not entail the disappearance of those underlying structures of m yth and
ideology that had given the genre its culture force" (633). Instead, the tropes and
structures of the W estern "were abstracted from the elaborately historicized context
of the W estern and parceled out among genres that used their relationship to the
Western to define both the disillusioning losses and the extravagant potential of the
new [post-Vietnam] era" (633). Slotkin attributes the necessity of this abstraction to
the failure of "the progressive historical m yth of westward expansion" to rationalize
the necessity of violence. Thus, a num ber of films did appear in the 1980s that while
not being explicitly Westerns did borrow heavily from the W estern form. Many of
these were science fiction, horror, or "urban vigilante" films. Slotkin pays special
attention to the urban vigilante genre, which is typified by films such as Clint
Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" series. According to Slotkin,
[wjhat makes the urban vigilante genre different from the W estern is
its 'post-frontier' setting. Its world is urbanized, and its possibilities
for progress and redem ption are constricted by vastly ramified
corporate conspiracies, and by m onstrous accumulations of wealth,
power, and corruption. Its heroes draw energy from the same rage
that draw s the paranoids, psychopaths, mass m urderers, and terrorists
of the m ean streets, and their victories are almost never socially
redem ptive in the W estern mode. (634)

81

This genre, like the slasher horror film, inverts the m yth of the frontier: "[t]he
borders their heroes confront are impermeable to the forces of progress and civilized
enlightenment; if anything, the flow of aggressive power runs in the opposite
direction, with the civilized w orld threatened w ith subjugation to or colonization by
the forces of darkness" (Slotkin 635). Meanwhile, Slotkin notes, science fiction films
like Star Wars "allegorize the condition and imaginative freedom —the power to
imagine the most magical or utopian possibilities —by keeping real historical
references at a distance" (636).
Ultimately, Slotkin suggests that this rejection of the W estern points to a
"reaction against the m yth / ideology of liberal progressivism in the backwash of
the 1960s," and notes that "other factors, operating more subtly and over the longer
term, seem likely to prolong the eclipse of the W estern and promote other
historically oriented genres in its place" (638). As an exemplar of this trend, Slotkin
points to Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. Set in Chicago, this film narrates the
conflict between Eliot Ness and A1 Capone. However, in spite of its urban setting
and apparent generic alignment as a gangster film, structurally, the film has m uch in
common w ith the Western. In this film, Michael Coyne notes,
Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness effectively ran the gam ut of movie W yatt
Earps, starting as an idealistic lawman akin to Henry Fonda in My
Darling Clementine, becoming buddy to Sean Connery's Irish cop in the

style of Burt Lancaster to Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. . .

82

and ending as a cold blooded killer similar to James Garner in Hour o f
the Gun. (187)

Slotkin, too, points out links between The Untouchables and the Western, identifying
it w ith "the town-tamer and counter insurgency Westerns of the 1960s. Eliot Ness .. .
is the stranger in town, a Puritan w ith a hidden gift for violence who has to clean up
a city ruled by criminals who have corrupted the authorities" (641). Slotkin
continues to note that The Untouchables "[conflates] the 'historical' space of the
Depression w ith the 'M ythic' space of Westerns," resulting in "a radical departure
from the nominal historical source and the ideological limitations of the TV series —a
departure that allows them to make a powerful case for the political necessity of
'extraordinary violence'" (641 - 2).
These films —which cast the W estern mythic space in an alternate historical or
pseudo-historical framework, constitute w hat Slotkin terms the "post-Western."
The post-Western emphasizes the necessity of the mythic structure of the W estern
for American audiences while suggesting that "the Western may no longer provide
the most im portant of our ideologically symbolic languages" (642). Thus, the
essential generic trappings of the W estern—the open frontier and the settlement of
that liminal space —ceased to be of significant value to the audiences of the 1980s.
This rejection m ay indicate that the essential discourse of the Western, dealing with
the anxieties of America's role in the world, had similarly ceased to be the most
pressing concern of film audiences. The thaw ing of the Cold War and the apparent
American victory over its ideological nemesis stripped the American public of the

83

overwhelming anxiety regarding their role in the world. In some ways, the success
in the Cold W ar ultimately justified the angst-inducing elements of American
diplomacy, mollifying the audiences for the time being. The disconcertion that
Americans felt shifted from being related to the external —represented by the wide
open spaces —to the internal, metaphorically realized by the enclosed urban settings
of Chicago or the suburban landscape of the slasher film.
However, this comfort with America's status in the international community
could not last. Indeed, as the Soviet Union went through its death throes in 1989
and 1990, the W estern appeared to be regaining its audience. A num ber of Westerns
appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s that m arked a return to the standard
form, albeit w ith some modifications. The most notable of these w ere Dances With
Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992), which not only garnered financial success but

became the first and second W estern films since Cimarron (1931) to win the Academy
Award for Best Picture. Significantly, both of these films were in many ways
metafictive: Dances W ith Wolves was a flimsy attem pt to invert the "typical" roles of
Native Americans and the Cavalry in the Western, though Coyne has observed that
the film merely reworks themes that had been previously dealt w ith in Broken Arrow,
Run o f the Arroiv and Little Big Man and ultimately communicates "a conservative

message at the core of its countercultural idyll" by purposefully avoiding the issue
of miscegenation, resulting in "a hym n to an attractive (and ecologically
harmonious) culture in which nice young WASP couples might find a home" (188).

84

Unforgiven, meanwhile, presented audiences w ith a "dark, savage tale" w ith "much

contemplation on the nature and psychology of violence" (Coyne 188).
These films were followed by Tombstone, which similarly developed
metafictive qualities, though in a considerably different way. While Dances with
Wolves and Unforgiven examined the W estern through some degree of inversion or

generic manipulation. Tombstone moved in the other direction by adhering fairly
closely to the conventions of the town-tamer Western. Nevertheless, the metafictive
trend is developed through the use of intertextuality and a conscious effort to
fabricate authenticity. The effect of this is that Tombstone is capable of combining a
reconsideration of the w estern m yth w ith a simultaneous reinforcement of the
values that the m yth entails. In doing so. Tombstone serves as an expression of the
cultural forum that works to address the audience's anxiety about the new world
order following the Cold War while providing an adulatory narrative that
champions the gunfighter hero and the values he represents.
Like M y Darling Clementine and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone reflects
a sea change in American foreign policy; however, while M y Darling Clementine and
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral represented the troubling nature of the arrival of Cold

W ar diplomacy. Tombstone dramatizes the uncertainty associated w ith the end of
those same policies. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign policy had
rem ained relatively static for over forty years. As Kenneth A. Oye has argued, "[t]he
boundary between the Eastern and W estern blocs came to define m utually exclusive
zones of military protection, economic production, and relative political

85

homogeneity. In subsequent years, this core system was projected onto the
periphery as the Soviet-American rivalry infused civil wars and regional conflicts
throughout the Third World. Routinized geopolitical rivalry between the United
States and the Soviet Union operated largely in defense of the postwar status quo"
(3). However, w ith the collapse of one of the poles of the Cold W ar order, this
structure was no longer a reliable one. As James E. Winkates notes, "the premises
underlying that extraordinary consistency have now perished or have so
fundam entally changed as to require new rationales, priorities, and approaches to
ensure the defense of the United States" (31; Oye 3). Even in his m oderate study of
the implications of this shift in the American position, historian Stephen Burman felt
compelled to observe that
the euphoria surrounding American-inspired and led victory in the
Gulf w ar has, paradoxically, given rise to visions, or nightmares, of a
resurgent, militaristic America dom inating the new w orld order to an
extent that will make its hegemonic role in the post-1945 era look pale
by comparison, (ix)
In the wake of this shift in the world balance of power, it seemed as though
the w orld m ight return to some of the conflicts that had dom inated the inter-war
years. Oye observes that in the early 1990s, the liberalization of the former Soviet
bloc resulted in a resurgence in cultural, territorial, and political struggles that had
festered between the World Wars (18). Furthermore, the economies of Germany and
Japan ascended to a position of power once more, compelling the neighbours of

86

those nations to recall their rise to power after World War 1 and think
apprehensively of the historical results of those labours (Oye 18). Such
maneuverings did not go unnoticed in the United States, and the acquisition of
American businesses by German and Japanese interests spawned a "resurgence of
nativism" and "activated latent xenophobia" in America (Oye 22). Additionally,
there was some concern that the reduction or withdraw al of American and Soviet
forces in the Third World could create a power vacuum that w ould lead to renewed
conflict, especially in Europe: "To state the obvious," Oye comments, "the effects [of
the postwar order] m ust hinge in part on preexisting levels of violence. On the one
hand, a Europe that has been at peace for forty years may become less militarized
but cannot become more peaceful" (18 - 19). There also existed concern about the
potential for conflicts in Russia itself, as Moscow continued to use force to stifle
independence movements in former Soviet states (Oye 22).
Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War did produce some signs that pointed to
a rosier future for the world. In addition to these potential crises, there was also the
outbreak of a hot w ar in the Persian Gulf as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The
United States was able to m uster an international coalition to combat the dictator.
Oye notes, "The scope of economic sanctions, the effective use of the United
Nations, the form ulation of a multinational deterrent force in Saudi Arabia, and the
coalition-wide attack on Iraqi forces in Kuwait w ould have been impossible only
two years ago" (20). In this respect, at least, the breakdown of Com munist Russia
provided some hope for the future.

87

Under these circumstances, it is appropriate that a film like Tombstone w ould
be released. Tombstone in many ways m arked a return to the Westerns that were
released in the 1950s: it is a clear example of the "town-tamer" W estern wherein an
outsider arrives in a chaotic town that is plagued by an autocratic power center in
the Cowboy gang and ineffectual law enforcement in the corrupt Sheriff Behan and
the elderly Marshal Fred White. Marshal Fred White tells W yatt that Sheriff John
Behan "ain't no law. The only law around here is the Cowboys," while White
himself is somewhat decrepit and incapable of any physical enforcement of the law.
Like the settlements in m any town-tamer Westerns, Tombstone straddles the line
between civilization and savagery. Upon arriving in town, W yatt and his brothers
marvel at the bustling m ining tow n—"H ot damn, this burg's jum ping" comments
M organ—and are told by Behan that Tombstone will be bigger than San Francisco in
just a few years. However, Tombstone's pretension to m etropolitan status is
immediately undercut: just as Behan lauds W yatt's suggestion of building a
racetrack to "send a signal [Tombstone is] growing up," their discussion is
interrupted by a shooting in the street, prom pting Doc Holliday to observe
sarcastically, "Very cosmopolitan."
W yatt is soon, but reluctantly, forced into the role of the tow n's saviour. He
resists this position but is compelled to act for the sake of his brothers who volunteer
to serve as the law after Fred White is killed by Curly Bill Brocius. The Earps
inevitably come into conflict w ith the Cowboys, leading to the confrontation at the
O.K. Corral. Subsequently, after Virgil Earp is shot, costing him the use of his arm.

88

and Morgan Earp is m urdered while playing billiards, W yatt takes up the m antle of
United States Marshal and commences his "vendetta ride" to eliminate the Cowboy
menace from Tombstone.
As a town-tamer Western, Tombstone may be the most mythicized
representation of W yatt Earp to date. In this reading, Wyatt is not merely a
gunfighter hero, but is positioned as an avenging agent of God. The film opens with
the Cowboy gang m urdering a Mexican lawman at his wedding. After this deed
they are accosted by a priest, who warns them about a coming judgm ent by quoting
the Biblical book of Revelation. As Ringo translates for the rest of the Cowboys,
"There came the pale horse, and the m an who sat on him was death. And hell
followed with him." The scene then immediately cuts to W yatt's arrival in Tucson
on an "iron horse" (Cohen 219). W yatt's supernatural qualities are further
emphasized later in the film during the vendetta ride (Cohen 219). When Wyatt
begins exacting his vengeance at the Tucson train station by killing Stilwell, he
allows Ike Clanton to escape, though not before admonishing him to tell the
Cowboys that "I'm coming! And hell's coming w ith me!" W yatt's hunt is
excessively stylized as he and his posse perform acrobatic feats of riding and combat
while the Cowboys scatter ahead of them. After the Cowboys catch W yatt's posse in
a crossfire, W yatt marches out of his hiding place to confront Curly Bill one-on-one.
Curly Bill raises his gun to fire, but, providentially, is out of bullets. W yatt raises his
own rifle and kills the Cowboy as an off-screen voice cries out "Jesus Christ!"
Afterward, w hen W yatt's posse is recuperating near a stream. Doc Holliday declares

89

that W yatt is "Dow n by the creek, walking on water." Morgan Earp similarly
positions W yatt in divine terms, repeatedly telling W yatt that he is "the one."
This reading, in spite of director George P. Cosomatos' assertions that the film
is "as accurate as possible," positions Tombstone as an allegory for the recent Iraq
war. As Colleen Coughlin has argued, "[l]aw in Tombstone provides a vehicle for
addressing the problem of vengeance and civil order in a community. Law is also a
ready fool to be m anipulated for purposes of power and control of capital. It is
about sanctioned violence, who can use it and in w hat situations it will be accepted"
(150). W yatt Earp's quest in Tombstone is, in this reading, absolutely justified; the
contrast between him and the Cowboys could not be more explicit. While the
Cowboys are initially presented to the audience as destroying a w edding by
m urdering the groom and priest, raping the bride, and then consuming the w edding
feast, W yatt's first appearance involves protecting a horse from an abusive stable
hand. The Cowboys are drunken and slovenly, while the Earps are impeccably
attired; indeed, W yatt's long black frock coat and white collar is reminiscent of a
priest's garb. Finally, while the Cowboys are adversarial in response to being
punished for their transgressions of the law, W yatt's vendetta is spurred by the
ambushes perpetrated against his family. Even W yatt's most obvious
transgression—his abandonm ent of his common-law wife Mattie in favour of the
actress Josephine Marcus —is rendered unproblematically through the depiction of
Mattie as a completely unlikable drug addict who all but drives W yatt away. In this
reading, W yatt once again functions as a synecdoche for the United States and his

90

"reckoning," as Doc Holliday calls it, as a just retribution for the attack on his allies,
who are analogous to Kuwait. Thus, the Cowboy gang, autocratic and wholly evil,
serves as an apt symbol of Saddam Hussein. As Slotkin has suggested, "Hussein .. .
was the perfect enemy for a m odern Frontier-Myth scenario, combining the barbaric
cruelty of a 'Geronimo' w ith the political power and ambition of a Hitler" (651).
This depiction of Hussein was emphasized in the discourse of President George
Bush, who suggeseted that "the violence of the Gulf W ar . . . regenerated the
national spirit and moral character by expiating the defeat in Vietnam" (Slotkin 652).
Thus, Slotkin's notion of "regeneration through violence" is exercised in the national
discourse once a g a in .^
However, Tombstone functions not only as an allegorization of present-day
conflicts but also as a meditation on America's recent past. While George
Cosomatos' commentary on the digital video disc release of Tombstone emphasizes
the film's supposed authenticity, extolling the virtues of the cast's "real moustaches"
and the process of aging the clothing and using photographs and newspaper reports
of the times to develop the "atmosphere of the period," the film contains a strong
element of retrospection. To this end. Tombstone hearkens back not only to the past
of the American West, but also to the Cold War through repeated allusions to older

^ An alternate reading, suggested by Allen Barra, w ould paint Tombstone as being an
allegory for a shift in national attention from foreign to domestic affairs. In this
interpretation, the Cowboys are analogous with gangs, complete w ith their colours
(the red sashes) and W yatt Earp is American authority being forced to move from
one conflict to another {Inventing 364). W yatt's reluctance to involve himself in the
conflict and his interest in money may thus be read as a m editation on class issues
that m ight contribute to rises in gang activity, such as poverty and ghettoization.

91

films. The first such allusion comes in the opening pseudo-documentary, which
splices together footage of early newsreels, older W estern films, and footage of
Tombstone's incarnations of W yatt Earp and Doc Holliday. This prefatory material is

punctuated by a scene from the earliest example of a W estern film. The Great Train
Robbery. The effect of this faux newsreel at the beginning of the film is a suggestion

that mythical depictions of the American past contain some truth. The newsreel
conflates the fictional past w ith the real past, thus providing the older Westerns w ith
an authority as records of events. Tombstone's recollective reading is also reinforced
casting and narrative allusion. Actors w ith strong lineages in the W estern genre fill a
num ber of small roles in the film: Charlton Heston plays ranch owner Henry
Hooker; John Ford's godson Harry Carey, Jr. portrays Fred White; and Robert
Mitchum narrates the opening and closing of the film. But more striking than even
these allusions is Tombstone's repeated use of scenes modeled nearly directly from
older Westerns, m any of which come from older depictions of W yatt Farp. The
most blatant of such scenes is the standoff between W yatt Farp and Ike Clanton after
Curly Bill kills Fred White. As Ike, confident in his superior numbers, orders W yatt
to turn Bill loose, W yatt turns his gun on the Cowboy and warns him, "You're first,
get it? Your friends m ight get me in a rush but not before I turn your head into a
canoe." This scene is a clear allusion to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, save for the fact
that in Gunfight, Shanghai Pierce is the recipient of W yatt's warning. The Farps' and
Doc Holliday's walk to the O.K. Corral in Tombstone similarly recalls Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral, though in Tombstone the walk is interrupted by a gang of kids w ho run

92

past playing at guns them selves—an event that alludes to an encounter of Marshal
Kane's in High Noon. Thus, Tombstone bolsters the mythic depiction of the West in
American history, and in doing so simultaneously sanctifies the past it represents
which, in their overt narratives sanctifies American intervention overseas and Cold
W ar foreign policy, lending additional support to the laudatory reading of the text
as an abstraction of the Persian Gulf War.
Clearly, the dom inant discourse in Tombstone is one that sanctifies the use of
lethal force in certain situations. The film mythologizes the use of violence in
nineteenth-century America as a way for its audience to understand violence in
twentieth-century America and the nation's recent battles against dictatorial enemies
in the Soviet Union and Iraq. However, this reading is problematized by a subtle
but nevertheless significant counter-discourse that challenges the motivations of
W yatt and his brothers. This reading emphasizes that W yatt's sole motivation in
Tombstone is financial gain. As Colleen Coughlin argues, "W yatt is not in
Tombstone to act as a lawman. The film makes clear that Wyatt, his brothers
M organ and Virgil, and all three of their wives are in town to make their fortune"
(148). Coughlin additionally notes that, in Tombstone, W yatt is never motivated by
any sort of altruism. He absolutely refuses to accept any position in law
enforcement, and even w hen the dangerous Curly Bill is shooting up the main
streets of Tombstone, his suggestion is to "let it alone." He is unsw ayed by his
brother Virgil's decision to take up the badge of United States marshal, even when
Virgil angrily argues that they are m aking money off of the suffering of the

93

townspeople. W yatt is only coerced into action w hen the battle becomes personal
and his brothers are in danger; he acts not out of a genuine sense of justice but rather
out of a quest for personal vengeance. As H utton notes, "none of the writers or
directors working on the latest Earp films had an ideological axe to grind, but they
were determ ined to expose the darker truth regarding Earp's career" ("Showdown"
30).
Thus, the subtle rem inder that conflicts cannot be cast in such a Manichean
light compromises the narrative that w ould sanctify violence as a means of
combating an evil dictator. While the Cowboys in Tombstone are undoubtedly the
villains of the piece, W yatt is not opposed to them for the chaos that they impose on
the town, but rather because they have attacked him personally. Furthermore,
W yatt's motivation to be in Tombstone —he tells his brothers that in Tombstone they
are going to "make their fortunes" —can be connected with the possibility of ulterior
motives in the United States' intervention in Iraq that would conflate the American
leadership's interest in the national integrity of Kuwait with their interest in Kuwaiti
oil.
Ultimately, Tombstone fulfills its purpose as a cultural forum and a bad faith
narrative. While there is a clear dom inant narrative that w ould justify the use of
force in extreme circumstances and that mythologizes American foreign policy in
the Cold War and beyond. Tombstone simultaneously, but subtly, questions the
motivations of the United States in its continued interventionism. Tombstone
articulates an unease in the American population. While the nation might, like

94

W yatt Earp in Tombstone, prefer to retire from its role as an international police force,
it is draw n back into the conflict by its status as a superpower as well as its greed. In
this reflection of American anxiety. Tombstone continues the thrust of W yatt Earp
films throughout the Cold War. Since World War II, W yatt has continued to operate
as a symbol of the United States and its changing role in the world. Tombstone
brings this depiction full circle. While Henry Fonda's portrayal allegorized
American uneasiness about its newfound position as a world superpower, Kurt
Russell's performance accentuated once again the anxieties of a nation in the m idst
of a new liminal state. The anxieties at the daw n of the Cold W ar had seen fruition
in the Vietnam War, and, twenty years after that bloody conflict. Tombstone once
again expresses a fear of the discontinuity between an ideal America and the real
America.

95

6. Conclusion

Wyatt Earp rem ains one of the most resonant figures in American historical
mythology. At the time of the writing of this thesis, American cable netw ork HBO
announced the casting of the latest actor to step into Earp's spurs, to be featured in a
limited num ber of episodes in its gritty Western series Deadivood. Given the history
of Earp's appearances on film prior as outlined in this thesis, it should come as no
surprise that W yatt Earp should ride again; as the United States continues its W ar on
Terror and rattles its saber at new ideological enemies, Wyatt Earp has once again
become a relevant cultural symbol.
Indeed, the m yth of W yatt Earp is likely to remain a powerful and useful one
for American culture. As this thesis has proved, W yatt Earp occupies a particular
space in the American pantheon. His conflicted position as both a "rounder" and a
businessman and his tenuous position between legitimate authority and vigilante
justice has m ade W yatt a remarkably potent symbol to American culture. W yatt
Earp offers American audiences a space wherein their own anxieties about issues
such as hegemony and imperialism can be tacitly addressed in an environm ent that
offers no threat of reprisals. Above all, W yatt is a figure through which Americans
can project their own views as well as entertain alternative views whenever the
reality of American involvement in the w orld seems to run contrary to American
ideals of individualism and democracy. He serves as a figure that at once
champions American intervention—he is the one who is capable of making

96

Tombstone safe for the schoolmarm and religion—but also symbolizes the dangers
that are inherent to such endeavors. While Wyatt may indeed make the frontier
town safe for "civilization/' he does so only at great cost and often with morally
troubling methods. Therefore, W yatt Earp occupies a very particular space in the
American W estern myth. In a genre that draw s its popular strength from its
liminality and ability to allegorize transitions, W yatt Earp is capable of personifying
the United States as it negotiates sea changes in American culture.
Through the Cold War, the W yatt Earp legend gained particular currency. As
the United States emerged from W orld War II as a superpower, W yatt Earp
provided a cultural forum wherein the nation could examine its newfound power
and the anxieties associated w ith that power. Through the films My Darling
Clementine and Gunfight at the OK Corral, audience members engaged in the

adulatory narrative of American strength and power, while simultaneously dealing
w ith a discourse that problematized that power and the obligations it entailed.
Years later, as the United States became embroiled in the Vietnam conflict, W yatt
Earp became an allegorical figure that articulated the nation's questions about its
role as an international authority and the moral questions associated with its
exercising of this power to advance its own political agenda of making the world
safe from Communism. Twenty years later, W yatt Earp would ride again in
Tombstone, a film that reexamined American foreign policy during the Cold War

while turning an eye to the new w orld order where American capitalism had
ostensibly won out over Russian Communism.

97

There is little doubt that the W yatt Earp myth will continue to be relevant to
American audiences; the only question is which W yatt will be depicted next: the
noble cavalier of My Darling Clementine, the sadistic bully of Doc, or a new version?
In any event, it is clear that the m yth of Wyatt Earp has not yet ridden off into its last
sunset.

98

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