Films tell lies, and they tell lies because they are fictions. Based on this person or that situation only accentuates the necessary lie that very few of the actions or people related to them were ever like that. I accept this because ' culture ' hold a mirror up to life and often the mirror is distorted. Wyatt Earp, the controversial man of so many books and films is portrayed very cleanly and very well by Joel McCrea. I even wanted to stop thinking he had to be Earp but just a man who believed in cleaning up the town of Wichita of too many trigger happy men who lived by the law of the gun. He arrives in town and a horde of men bringing business to Wichita go on a gun spree and a five year old child is killed by one of their bullets. A daringly awful action and a shocking scene that is not evasively filmed. An ordinary housewife later on is killed in the same way and the rotten spark in people is shown quite clearly; have a gun, use it and accidentally or not innocence is destroyed. This problem continues to this day and Earp's own use of the gun puts the town into some sort of order. I think this Jacques Tourneur film is brilliantly filmed, and despite many fictions of the time Earp was in Wichita the film is resolutely against gun ' freedom, ' and that for me sets it apart from many other Westerns which have a ' freer ' attitude, and glorify in the use of guns. The very fine actor Vera Miles plays the fiction of being Earp's focus of love and lasting marriage. She acts well, but too little is seen of her. The cast is excellent and as cinema it is first rate and my only fault was the over glamorised song that bookends the film. A certain reality is shown here and the death of the child is hauntingly memorable for its showing how that stray bullet can go brutally astray, killing the future of innocents and also maiming the lives of those close and left behind. See it and perhaps like me you will see how fictions tell uncomfortable truths.
Review of Wichita
