Content area
Full Text
"Westerns have changed and reflected our culture over the different decades." Dennis Quaid (Kasdan 107)
When asked by Teddy Roosevelt why he had not written about his colorful Ufe, Bat Masterson is said to have answered, "Mr. President, the real story of the Old West can never be told unless Wyatt Earp will tell what he knows, and Wyatt will not talk." Well, he did. Not many years before he died (1929), Wyatt twice made the effort to tell his story. He did so, believes Earp biographer Alien Barra, because he was furious about articles in the Saturday Evening Post that portrayed him and his brothers as "the instigators of much of the Tombstone trouble of the early 188Os" (Inventing 382). Neither of these efforts of Wyatt came to fruition.1
Eventually, Stuart Nathaniel Lake persuaded Wyatt to talk to him, and the resulting fictionalized biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), launched the Earp legend.2 It became "one of the great myth-making American books of the twentieth century,"3 reviving both Wyatt's fame and the memory of those associated with him. Lake provided westerns with a modern hero. His Earp did not wear buckskins, but a white shirt and black coat that made him look more like a twentieth-century businessman and thus someone with whom the average man might more nearly identify. He portrayed Wyatt as the peace officer who could not be swayed from doing what he thought was right. Lake, however, oversimplified matters, and in doing so made Wyatt's life less complex and exciting than it actually was. As Bat Masterson's comment suggests - and this was the opinion of Wyatt's other frontier friends - Wyatt was larger than life. As a consequence of Frontier Marshal, historians even now judge him "not by his own achievements or by the standards of lawmen in his own time and place but by the absurdly unrealistic ideals of the saintly Hollywood characters derived from [the] book" (Barra, Inventing 11, 384). But, as we shall see in the six films that are the subject of this study, including two that credit Lake's biography as their source, Wyatt generally is far from being a saint. His motive, moreover, for confronting the men at the O. K. Corral is, with maybe...