*. A landmark film, at least within its lane. The Curse of Frankenstein was Hammer’s first attempt to cash in on the famous Universal monsters of the 1930s. It would be followed by six more Frankenstein movies, as well as various Dracula and Mummy features, as Hammer went all-out in mining this rich vein of cinematic ore. And some of these movies were actually pretty good, so it’s worth acknowledging where it all began.
*. There were other firsts as well. It was Hammer’s first horror film in colour, and the colour certainly impressed contemporary audiences. It’s not a gory movie — even, I think, by the standards of the time — but seeing any blood on screen must have been more upsetting when it was actually red. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee had appeared in the same film (though not together on screen) as far back as Olivier’s Hamlet, but this was Cushing’s first leading role on the big screen (he’d been on television a lot) and Lee was still relatively unknown (he was cast here mainly for his height, and the fact that he was cheap). They’d go on to be quite a team.
*. Fun film anecdote: Apparently Lee complained to Cushing when he found he didn’t have any lines (he wouldn’t have many as Dracula or the Mummy either). Cushing told him he was lucky, as he’d read the script.
*. Along with Cushing and Lee the rest of the classic Hammer gang was here too. Meaning it was directed by Terence Fisher and written by Jimmy Sangster. Apparently Sangster hadn’t seen the Universal Frankenstein movies but adapted Mary Shelley’s book directly. Though this is a long way from Shelley’s Frankenstein.
*. There are two big changes made to the classic story (Shelley’s and Universal’s) that are really striking. First of all, this Victor Frankenstein (Cushing) is a dark figure. He’s not just a mad/obsessed scientist but a truly bad man. He’ll screw around with the help right under his fiancée’s nose. If he even thinks the old professor is going to get in the way of his experiments he’ll throw him over the balustrade. Or through the balustrade. A shocking scene, but not one you’ll want to pay close attention to as you can clearly see where the balustrade has been prepped to break before it does, and when the professor hits the floor below you can see it (the floor) bounce. In any event: Victor here is pretty awful, and deserving of his date with the guillotine. Though his friend Paul’s betrayal at the end was an unexpected twist. That Paul is a sketchy figure too, isn’t he? Sending his buddy to the razor while walking away with his girl? That’s cold.
*. The other change is in the monster’s appearance. I’m not sure, but I think they had to give him a new look because Universal had the rights to Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up. I think what they did here, apparently at the last minute, is great, with Lee’s face being a ghastly fish-belly white and one eye clouded over. I’d also add that the tank the monster is revived in was inspired. I don’t think that had been done before.
*. Both of these changes are bold and I think both work wonderfully well. This isn’t a remake or rehashing of the old story but a new invention that made a ton of money and set Hammer on its way for the next decade-plus. Today I think its boldness is harder to pick up on, and I imagine most people see it as downright stuffy. But it made quite an impact at the time, and not just in Britain. John Carpenter is one director who considered it a formative work, and Guillermo del Toro has said it’s one of his favourites. I don’t think it’s a great movie, suffering from Hammer’s inability to quite overcome period stuffiness, but for genre fans it’s a now classic work in its own right that deserves searching out.

*. In his Prefaces to Shakespeare the British literary critic Tony Tanner calls As You Like It “unambiguously, the happiest of Shakespeare’s comedies.” It’s a brisk outing, with lots of verbal jousting, more songs than any of Shakespeare’s other plays, and more weddings at the end. Even more than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it has to approached in a spirit of whimsy, something I’ve found lacking in other film adaptations. Most notably, I finished up my notes on Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 production by saying it “needed a lighter touch. It should have embraced the play’s spirit of artifice and fancy.”
*. I think this early visit to Arden does embrace that spirit. It’s a lot of fun, and is notable as the first appearance of Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare on screen. And there are a couple of other early credits worth flagging: the score by William Walton (who would go on to score Olivier’s Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III) and editing by David Lean. I think the latter’s work is most impressive, as it’s as lively as the rest of the film and keeps everyone on their toes. There’s frequent cutting in the dialogue scenes and is pretty seamless throughout. Jaques’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, which many productions try to present as a single take, has several cuts, all perfectly fluid.

*. But the stars here are the stars. First up is Olivier, a young man and quite the boyish heartthrob complete with a dramatic quiff. Every scene he’s in comes to life just from his walking into view. But as lively as he is, he actually takes a back seat to Elisabeth Bergner, who plays Rosalind.
*. At first I was thinking this might be a terrible case of miscasting, as Bergner has a heavy Austrian accent that just didn’t make sense since nobody else at court or in the forest had one. But when she turns into Ganymede in the forest she is transformed. Of course she wouldn’t fool anyone into believing she’s a boy just by going from a dress to a Robin Hood get-up, but her whole character seems set free. She’s all flashing eyes and wide grins and it’s impossible not to fall in love with her, which is how we should feel about Rosalind.
*. On the subject of her accent, it’s been noted that Bergner and her husband, the film’s director Paul Czinner, were both Austrian Jews who had fled their homeland around this time for obvious reasons. So the escape to the forest is read as also symbolizing the exile of refugees from Hitler’s tyranny. This is a nice way of thinking of it, and might even have been something they were conscious of, but I wouldn’t want to lean on it too far.
*. Another point I found interesting is that Bergner was 10 years older than Olivier. This made me think of something I read in the introduction to the Arden edition of the play: “Michael Redgrave reveals in his autobiography, In My Mind’s Eye, that in playing Orlando at the Old Vic in 1936 [the year of this film] he fell passionately in love and had an affair with his Rosalind, Edith Evans, who was then 48.” There’s something to the idea of Rosalind being an older woman who has to coach a naive youth in how to make love to a woman that plays into this.
*. A year earlier Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream had come out, which was a far more lavish production and has a much higher profile among cinephiles. Personally, I find Reinhardt’s Dream to be overlong and not all it’s cracked up to be, though it has some great stuff in it. I prefer this movie, which jettisons about a third of the play and pretty much sticks with just having fun. The bad guys are cartoonish, Jaques is a much diminished presence, and you can relax and delight in Orlando and Rosalind courting each other in the magic forest while sheep go wandering about the sets and Touchstone tilts his cap and bells at a milkmaid.

*. In my notes on My Darling Clementine I talked about how it represented various familiar elements of the myth of the Old West. That is to say, the Hollywood Old West. The Gunfighter covers some more of these, and adds one of its own, in a film a little more down the road and hence a little more aware of its status as myth. Not yet a modern, ironic Western then, but one that’s looking at itself.
*. Even the new wrinkle they add is a bit ironic: the story of the aging gunfighter that every punk kid wants to take a shot at in order to make a name for himself. According to the Criterion interview with Gina Telaroli this was the invention of the screenwriters, and apparently came out of the response movie stars had to always being recognized. It would go on to become a cliché of its own, and in her Criterion essay J. E. Smyth likens it to another film that editor Barbara McLean worked on the same year, All About Eve. Though I think that’s a bit of a stretch.
*. The point is that being a legend isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When the man becomes a legend, shoot the legend, we might say. Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck, with an off-brand moustache that the studio objected to so much they wanted him to shave it off and re-shoot his scenes) embodies this liminal in-betweenness perfectly. He’s quick on the draw — so quick we never actually see him pull his gun — but tired. Or, in Manny Farber’s view, stoic: having “the quality of a man standing absolutely straight while being depressed by a hopeless state of affairs.” Well put.
*. But more than that, even he seems a little confused about his status as a famous gunman. How many people has he killed? Who were they? Was it always in self-defence? He’s not sure. Should he be hanged? Well, maybe. But let’s talk about something else . . .
*. Jimmy Ringo is based on the real Johnny Ringo, an outlaw associated with the Clantons of O.K. Corral fame. Fun fact: Doc Holliday offered to be his huckleberry.
*. Ringo’s not only a legend himself, but has known legends like Wyatt Earp (who he thinks overrated). He’s so much a part of the culture that even the Cheyenne schoolkids can act as chorus to his fame. And his reputation does work to his advantage on occasion. When the reedy Hunt Bromley (who can’t even grow a proper moustache!) threatens him he can be frightened off with a pocket knife.

*. Another classic storyline that may have started here is the countdown til the arrival of the hero’s nemesis. I have to admit, when I was watching this I kept thinking of how it was riffing on High Noon, with the three brothers echoing the gunmen coming to town to settle scores with Marshal Will Kane (a role Peck turned down) and the constant checking of the clock to see how much time is left. But The Gunfighter actually came out a couple of years before High Noon, so you have to give them credit for that, and subsequent variations on the same story, like the outlaws coming to town in High Plains Drifter.

*. Irony is a big part of the structure of the story as well. It proceeds by way of deflated climaxes. We keep being led to believe that something big is going to happen and then it doesn’t. The vengeful father who is set up as a sniper across from the Palace has his gun taken away from him. Bromley goes looking for a fight but then has to back down. The three gunmen finally arrive in town and don’t end up doing anything. Then when fate finally does come for Ringo it comes at the hand of that yellowbelly wimp who gets bitch-slapped around before being sent out to the wastelands bearing the mark of Cain. He’ll have to try to live “like a big tough gunny,” which we’re sure isn’t going to last long as he isn’t a big tough gunny at all.
*. I think the point being made by this is the same one I mentioned earlier, that being a legend isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because Ringo couldn’t live up to such a reputation himself. Or didn’t want to. But like many a bad guy to come, just when he thought he was getting out of the life it keeps dragging him back. There’s no dodging fate, or a screenplay that has the friendly marshal tell Ringo “Looks like you’re going to make it after all.”

*. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a documentary that asks a couple of questions: one that I found annoying and the other quite significant.
*. First off, its subject is the street art movement as told through the eyes of a Frenchman who moves to Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta. Guetta adores street art and decides to start filming some of the leading practitioners, including Banksy and Shepard Fairey. He tries to make a documentary out of all his footage but it turns out to be a mess and Banksy (apparently) took over and edited it down to this film. Guetta, in the meantime, became a commercially successful street artist himself, adopting the persona of Mr. Brainwash.
*. So the first question is whether it’s real or if it’s fake, a documentary or mockumentary. On the fake side it’s even been said that Guetta is a total creation of Banksy, whose style he does seem to imitate pretty closely. Banksy himself has denied this.
*. The thing is, does it matter? Should it? I mean, Banksy is interviewed a lot here but he’s just a shadow wearing a hoody with a distorted voice. So is that even Banksy? Personally, this whole business sort of got my back up because I resented the implication that I should care if any of it was real, or who Banksy really is.
*. The second, more significant question has to do with what you think of Guetta’s work, or street art in general. I think a lot of it is very clever, marking an evolution of Andy Warhol and pop art into a new environment. And I like that it’s still a physical environment, because I guess NFTs were where all this was going.
*. But just as with pop art you have to wonder at the message. For example, I think Fairey and Banksy have a political bent in what they do, but with Guetta I’m not so sure. Also, it seems to me that in a movie like this you’re supposed to be cheering Guetta on as the little guy chasing his dream, but here he just seems like a phoney on the make. As with so much art in our age of irony, separating the fake from the authentic is difficult.
*. Is that Guetta’s point though? Let’s listen to his mentors trying to sum up at the end of the film.
*. Shepard Fairey: “Thierry’s obsession with street art, his becoming a street artist, a lot of suckers buying into his show, and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly. It’s anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe, and maybe there’s something to be learned from it.”
*. Banksy: “I don’t know what it means, Thierry’s huge success and arrival in the art world. I mean, maybe Thierry was a genius all along, maybe he got a bit lucky. Maybe it means that art is a bit of a joke.”
*. I don’t think Banksy feels that art is a joke, but I do get the sense that he thinks the art world is. So I suppose if you read this movie straight it’s mainly meant to expose or send up just how stupid that world and its focus on money and fame is. Which I think was Warhol’s aim at the end too.
*. I wouldn’t go any further than Fairey and Banksy do. Maybe there’s something to be learned here. Maybe it means . . . something. It’s an entertaining movie anyway, even if you’re watching a whole artistic movement swallowing its own tail.

*. One of the few visual resources for the production of Shakespeare’s plays in his own time is the so-called Peacham drawing, which is a sketch apparently made by one Henry Peacham of a performance he saw of Titus Andronicus maybe sometime around 1595 (there is no scholarly agreement on any of this, but I’m giving you the usual line). The drawing (probably) depicts Tamora pleading for the lives of her sons before Titus, a scene from early in the play. What’s interesting about it is the medley of wardrobe on display, with some attempt at classical garb and then a mix of renaissance finery and military get-ups from different ages.
*. I mention this just as a way of introducing the blend of costumes and historical fluidity throughout Julie Taymor’s Titus. Not only is this nothing new, it may in fact be as old as performances at the Globe itself. I mean, it’s hard to tell when Shakespeare’s play is even meant to be set in terms of Roman history. There was no real Titus Andronicus and the story might have taken place in the early Republic or late Empire.

*. There haven’t been many modern adaptations of Shakespeare as brassy, bold, and variegated as Titus. The remarkable thing about it though is that for all its seeming chaos of time and imagery, its blend of history, media and myth, it holds together so well.
*. It was Julie Taymor’s first feature film and she was coming off the stage production of The Lion King on Broadway that had blown everyone away. What she does here is very theatrical but in a good way, not stagey or feeling constrained to a set. Much of the action is outdoors, but shot in Rome (and the Arena in Pula, Croatia) which is basically a giant stage set anyway.
*. Reviews were mixed and there was almost zero box office, but the latter at least might have been expected. Shakespeare’s audience had an appetite for the messiness of Senecan tragedy, but today I think our taste for gore is more closely confined to genre ghettos and the intensity of the violence here, the real theatre of cruelty, is alienating. In other words, it’s hard to watch.
*. It’s not a play I care for, and I think the scholarly consensus now is that Shakespeare only wrote a few bits in it. So I give Taymor a lot of credit for making something not just so stylish but well done in most essential departments.

*. For all the crowd scenes and background characters it’s envisioned very much as a two-hander, foregrounding the conflict between Titus (Anthony Hopkins) and Tamora (Jessica Lange). Harry Lennix is fine as the villainous Aaron and Alan Cumming as Saturninus is a caricature baby-man/drag queen, but they’re both playing very much in the wings. I didn’t like Demetrius and Chiron as clubby punks, but then what’s to like about them? They’re barbarians in the play.
*. Hopkins was appearing in everything around this time and frankly was spreading himself too thin. He’s on stabler ground here and does a great job as a proto-Lear, suffering the fate of the old fool who gets into trouble by putting his faith in others and neglecting his duty to the state. It’s not a great role, but he does everything he can with it and that’s a lot.

*. The revelation though is Lange, in what I was surprised to find was her first time doing Shakespeare. At age 50 she’s still glamorous (and even topless in one scene), channeling the femme fatale of her earliest screen appearances in films like The Postman Always Rings Twice and King Kong (beauty killing the beast). As a villain she’s well on her way to her later career turn to cable hagsploitation in American Horror Story.
*. If the costumes are all over the map, from classical to 1930s fascism, the tone is even more so. Taymor mixes in some comic notes that are deliberately jarring, like the reveal of the heads of Titus’s sons by a pair of what look like carnival barkers, but I thought that sort of approach worked. Indeed, it’s mainly the ending, with the boy walking off with Aaron’s spared son into the dawn that seemed false to me in its hopefulness.
*. In sum, it’s a movie I’d fully recommend but only for a select audience. It’s 162 minutes of often unpleasant action and if you’re mainly interested in just hearing Shakespeare done in a beautiful voice that’s not what’s on tap. What you do get are great design elements and two solid lead performances in a play that you’re not likely to see much of on stage or screen. And while it may not be a definitive Titus Andronicus, I can’t say I want to see another anytime soon.

*. Comparisons are one of the most useful tools in any critic’s kit, something that can be demonstrated by looking at Michael Bay’s Ambulance. In what follows I’ll make comparisons both to its advantage and disadvantage.
*. Before I even get to those, however, I should say that there’s one comparison I won’t be making. That is the one between this movie and the 2005 Danish film of the same name that it’s a remake of, shifting the action to L.A. I can’t say anything about the relative merits of the two films because I haven’t seen the original. I do note, however, that the Danish Ambulance is 80 minutes and this movie runs 2 hours and 16 minutes. In any event, as with so many cases of Hollywood adaptations of foreign material, the original isn’t even mentioned in any of the extras included with the DVD. I continue to wonder why this is, but let it be.
*. First then, to comparisons that are to its advantage. This is one of Michael Bay’s best films! Indeed, according to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it is the first of Bay’s movies to receive a “fresh” or positive rating since The Rock, which came out in 1996! His filmography is otherwise a wasteland distinguished mainly by several Transformers movies and epic trash like Pearl Harbor and the not-too-bad 13 Hours. So it’s a sort of backhanded compliment: a Michael Bay movie that doesn’t actually suck. Still, comparison to the rest of his oeuvre is a plus.
*. But now let’s try another comparison to another L.A.-based heist movie that came out just the previous year: Wrath of Man. Here the comparison plays against Ambulance. Wrath of Man was an excellent action film put across with style and skill. It’s a movie where the story and the characters are important, with their motivations giving the violence a greater impact and resonance. Ambulance, on the other hand . . .
*. So the story here has a mixed-race pair of brothers — Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) — joining together to rob a bank. Danny is the crime boss, while Will is going straight. Unfortunately Will is looking for a big payday because he needs money for his wife’s cancer treatment and despite being a vet who served in Afghanistan nobody at Veterans Affairs will even speak to him. Government bureaucrats! Bay has always hated them, presenting them as the forces of evil that manly men (mainly soldiers) must always struggle against. Don’t think popcorn movies like the kind Michael Bay makes don’t carry a lot of ideological freight.
*. The bank job goes to hell and the only survivors of the gang are, of course, Danny and Will, who manage to escape driving a hijacked ambulance that’s also carrying a paramedic (Eiza González) who is trying to save the life of a cop who Will shot. What follows is a feature-length car chase, or ambulance chase, with the police and FBI tearing after Danny and Will, who just want to get home.
*. Eiza González: “You don’t get anything but a spectacle from Michael Bay!” That’s meant as a compliment. Ambulance is high concept — a term of art that means it’s anything but elevated. There are car crashes. There are explosions. There are people shooting guns. There’s even a scene where the ambulance is pursued by helicopters through the Los Angeles River. I didn’t think any of it made a lick of sense. Why didn’t the police, who know where the ambulance is going, lay out some of those spike strips that puncture tires? Wouldn’t that have been easier? I don’t recall that even being mentioned as an option.

*. But then nothing adds up. I also found myself wondering why the helicopters were buzzing the ambulance in the river scene but then read that it wasn’t in the script and it was just tossed in because Bay found he could rent a couple of ‘copters on the day in question.
*. For his part, Bay, who had been going stir crazy in COVID lockdown at the time, races his camera around with high-speed tracking shots and wild, spinning drone acrobatics as a way of heightening the action. I guess. The DVD box cover had a pull quote calling it “Absolute Bayhem!” which I thought worth an eyeroll. But then one of the special features in the DVD was titled Bayhem, so “Bayhem” is a thing now. As they say.
*. I mentioned the running time earlier. It’s too long, and surprisingly slack, with no tension or suspense developed despite all the potential. The whole hospital epilogue is just a huge drag, highlighted by Cam’s boyfriend putting in an appearance. I thought she’d dropped that loser? What did he do to redeem himself? Also: none of the humour works. In fact, it’s annoying. I’m not sure Gyllenhaal was even aware of what kind of a movie he was in, and Bay wasn’t helping him figure it out. And why were they painting the ambulance neon green anyway? To make it less conspicuous?
*. So there you have it. One of Michael Bay’s best movies, or at least the best he can do. And it’s still crap. The thing is, I don’t see where Bay has grown as a filmmaker a bit over the last thirty years, and he wasn’t fresh back in the ’90s. Other people are doing this material a lot better now, and indeed always have been. Ambulance doesn’t even rate as a fast blast down memory lane.

*. I had a bad feeling about this one as it got started. The look was obviously borrowed from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, something that I think everyone noticed immediately (it was widely remarked upon by reviewers). This even extended to changing the setting of the story from Shelley’s eighteenth-century Europe to Victorian England (Holmes’s stomping grounds). There’s also (and this is more by way of trivia) a connection to the television series Sherlock, which shares many cast members and one of its directors (Paul McGuigan) with this film.
*. Did the Frankenstein story need this kind of treatment? It’s a look we’re familiar with now so in a way it’s not even that fresh an interpretation. Then there’s the way the title is introduced. Daniel Radcliffe (Igor) pursues James McAvoy, who he has just met, and asks him “Sir, please, may I know your name?” McAvoy turns and, without saying anything, the title “Victor Frankenstein” appears. Oh, please.
*. Also part of the bad start: it turns out Igor, who works as a clown in the circus, isn’t a real hunchback but only has an abscess. He has also, remarkably, trained himself into becoming a first-class doctor (though he hasn’t got as far as finding out for himself that he isn’t really a hunchback yet).
*. So, yes, things really get off on the wrong foot. I wonder if a lot of people who didn’t like it (which was most people, based on its reviews and box office) gave it much of a chance after this. They should have, because it gets better.
*. What helps the most are the two leads, who do much to redeem the usual nonsense. I wasn’t as blown away by McAvoy in Split, the multiple-personality thriller, as others were, but I think he’s very good here. He’s even more watchable than the monster, when it finally gets going.
*. The script he has to work with isn’t great, but I don’t know how much could have been done with such worn material. As the narration points out at the beginning, we all know the story. And when you think of it, it’s not like there have been a lot of well-written Frankenstein movies in the past. The old story has been filmed countless times, but after the classic Universal appearances not often with great results. In fact, quite often with results that have been just plain awful. So what standard are we judging this one by?
*. Much of the script just sort of fizzles. Victor has a back story involving a brother Henry that McAvoy only barely manages to make me go along with. But there’s also a cynical aristocrat that we don’t get enough of, a devout police investigator on the trail who the movie doesn’t know what to do with, and a love interest for Igor who is just, miraculously, there. Some interesting elements are assembled, but they aren’t brought to life.

*. The monster, or really two monsters, are pretty good. Victor’s first crack at things is a chimp-like creature that is, at least, somewhat original and not what I was expecting. And the final creature is big and sort of waxy, which is what I guess a monster made out of spare parts would look like. He doesn’t have much to do, as he just shows up at the end and the movie really isn’t about him at all.
*. Instead, it’s more about the relationship between the two leads, with Victor claiming Igor as his greatest creation. This was sort of interesting, but I thought a bit presumptuous on Victor’s part. Sure he rescues Igor from the circus and drains his abscess. In that sense he saves his life. But does he create Igor? Then the two are partners in the monster’s creation. Maybe Victor’s arrogant attitude is just part of his character, and what will, the end suggests, keep leading him on to further experiments.
*. Not a great movie, but in my opinion a slightly better than average Frankenstein movie. It does try to do something a little different with the old story, and while that part doesn’t work very well there’s enough here to make it worth watching.

*. I have a bit of a history with Theater of Blood. Back in the 1980s it was about the creepiest and goriest thing you could watch on TV. What I remember bothering me the most about it though wasn’t the violence so much as the opening scene, and one shot in particular, where the two (phoney) cops are such sinister figures, appearing slightly out of focus in the background. It’s one of those images that has stayed with me for decades now.
*. Later on I cooled a bit toward it. It just seemed kind of silly, with Vincent Price essentially reprising his role as Dr. Phibes, accompanied by a beautiful consort (a daughter this time instead of a dead wife/lover), and killing off his victims in set-piece theatrical ways. In fact, the project was offered to Rober Fuest, who directed The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as “the guy who makes Vince Price theme killing movies.”
*. Watching it today I like it more, and see it as really standing out from the usual Brit-horror fare of the day for its macabre blend of horror and humour. You can tell why it was Price’s personal favourite of all his films, and the one Diana Rigg thought her best.

*. The story has it that a Shakespearean actor named Edward Lionheart (Price) feels slighted by the decision of a circle of London’s leading theatre critics to give their actor of the year award not to him but to a young up-and-comer. He tries to kill himself by jumping off a balcony into the Thames, but unbeknownst to anyone, is rescued by a gang of grubby mudlarks. Revived, he plots his revenge on the critics, killing them off in ways suggested by Shakespeare’s plays.
*. This is a concept that I don’t think could work today. Of course the idea of the theme killer is still going strong. Witness the Saw franchise, which is very much in the direct lineage of this movie and the Dr. Phibes films. But in 1973 you could probaby expect a basic level of familiarity with Shakespeare that would help the audience enjoy more of what’s going on here.
*. Because it’s not just the killings themselves. It’s the first critic’s wife trying to persuade her husband not to go the theatre (and his death) because of her bad dreams, which is a foreshadowing of his Julius Caesar-style murder. Or the way another victim looks down into the pit in a manner that recalls the scene in Titus Andronicus, which is not the play whose rubrics he will be killed according to. Or the name of the wine emporium that will see a critic drowned in a butt of malmsey. These are pretty sophisticated in-jokes for a slasher flick.
*. Even the plays aren’t the ones you’d expect everyone to know. Cymbeline? Troilus and Cressida? Henry VI Part 1? Nowadays you’d probably need a graduate degree to know anything about those plays, much less recognize plot elements from them.
*. Of course you’re not meant to take any of it seriously. Not when the critics have names like Dickman, Psaltery, Sprout, and Snipe and Rigg is dressed up in hippie drag most of the time. But that undertone of dread I mentioned still attaches to Phibes’s gang of “Meths Drinkers” (which is how they’re credited). I don’t find these guys funny at all. Swinging London has gone to seed, something that the location shooting assisted with.

*. A brief aside on Meths Drinkers. This is not a reference to methamphetimines but to methylated spirits, which means stuff like paint thinner. Now you can drink liquid meth, which is powder methamphetamines dissolved in water, but that’s not what’s going on here.
*. I’ve never been sure what we’re meant to think of Lionheart as an actor. Apparently he really was a respected Shakespearean actor and was definitely in the running for the actor of the year award. But at the same time, the critics have all panned his performances. So was he just past his prime? Or was he only ever a ham? And how would you answer that question with regard to Vincent Price? I think you can at least see why Vince was so fond of the role. Or maybe it was more because he met his third wife (Coral Browne) on the set. He was still married to his second wife, but not for long.
*. Director Douglas Hickox doesn’t let the side down by being too arty, beyond an overfondness for low-angle camerawork. The sterling supporting cast delights. I especially got a grin out of Diana Dors hyperventilating through another alt-sex scene (I was thinking of her turn in Deep End all the way). And the hair! The eyebrows of Milo O’Shea and Robert Morley! The sideburns of Ian Hendry!
*. Especially given the time and the place, I think it stands out as a really superior production. It shares its blend of gore and humour with the Phibes films, and those were singular and prophetic enough, but throw in Price waxing Shakespehearean and you’ve got one of the more unique and enjoyable horror romps of the period, and one that like the Bard himself isn’t just for its day but for all time.

*. Ah, the unbearable weight of Kevin Costner. Looking back, I think maybe all the acclaim showered on Dances with Wolves (for which he won two Oscars — Best Picture and Best Director — at the age of 35) was the worst thing that could have happened to him. An example of what Tennessee Williams called “the catastrophe of success.” Oliver Stone knew how to use him in JFK but after that he was clearly getting too big for his britches, resulting in pretentious slop like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, A Perfect World (which was almost unwatchable), and Wyatt Earp.
*. But I guess he never really changed. He first made a name for himself playing Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, and as Jim Garrison he was yet another uncompromising lawman. A He-ro. So you’d think he’d be perfect to play Wyatt Earp. But in fact, he’s playing against type and sinks any chance the movie has of being interesting.
*. What I mean by this is that the real Wyatt Earp was a complicated fellow. There was as much bad in him as good. But while this movie hints at his darkness, Costner is so obviously uncomfortable at doing a heel turn that we just can’t buy his descent into drunkenness and violence for a second. He’s better at projecting contempt for women, but this too is undone by the need to portray him as a Romantic Hero even when it’s made explicit that he’s a complete jerk. Costner being a Star, which is perhaps an unconscious bias or just the very real limits to his acting ability, is at war with the script, which could so easily have been made deeper and more interesting.
*. We could shrug this off as what might have been. And in fact we know what might have been because Costner was originally going to be in Tombstone before deciding to go his own way. This turned out to be a lucky break for Tombstone, which came out half a year earlier and was a much better movie. Wyatt Earp could only suffer in comparison, and it did.
*. The critics did not rave. Roger Ebert: “Wyatt Earp plays as if they took Tombstone and pumped it full of hot air.” David Thomson: “probably the longest, slowest, dullest film about Earp ever.” Or just listen to Michael Madsen (who plays Virgil Earp), looking back over twenty years later: “It’s long, it’s stupid and boring. It’s a giant close-up of Kevin for three fucking hours. The only reason I did it is ’cause I wanted to walk down that goddamn street to the OK Corral. If I knew that the movie was gonna be that fucking boring and stupid, I would have taken a fucking taxi cab.”
*. Madsen had good reason to feel bitter. He’d originally been offered the role of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction but was under contract to do this movie. Ouch.
*. Yes, as Ebert, Thomson, and Madsen make clear, it’s long. 190 minutes. It was originally going to be a six-hour miniseries until Costner came on board. As it is, I’ll confess I watched it like a miniseries over a period of three days. I don’t know if that helped. It still seemed dull.
*. As I do with most movies this long, I started making a list of things I would have cut. Did we really need all the stuff about Wyatt’s first marriage? Maybe it’s meant to make us feel some sympathy for him, or help us understand his attitude toward women (“Wives come and go, that’s the plain truth of it. They run off. They die.”). I found it pointless. I also didn’t need to see young Wyatt running through a very modern cornfield at the beginning, wanting to join his brothers fighting in the Civil War. What did that add to anything? None of the brothers register as individual characters anyway.
*. I also didn’t need Gene Hackman as the Earp family patriarch serving up pearls of wisdom like “Nothing counts so much as blood” and “You take on a job, you finish it. Any man who can’t be depended on steady, ain’t worth the trouble of having around.” Thanks, pops. And it gets worse. “Do you think you’re the first person to lose someone? That’s what life is all about, loss! But we don’t use it as an excuse to destroy ourselves. We go on, all of us.” Or: “hit first if you can. And when you do hit, hit to kill. You’ll know. Don’t worry. You’ll know when it comes to that. The Earps always know.”
*. That’s leaden stuff, but it fits with the rest of the film. The epic score, which has a nice main theme, is overused as director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan brings it in to highlight every big moment, I think mainly because for a movie this long there are so few big moments. So not-so-big moments get inflated too, like Josie stepping off the stagecoach. Or we get a heroic crane shot pulling up, up and away from Wyatt when he’s made sheriff of Dodge City, as the music swells.
*. This style of filmmaking is the visual complement to Pa Earp’s hokey lines. Look at Wyatt and Josie’s first kiss, which they have to arrange to occur right at the prettiest spot in the West, revealed in a cut from a close-up of them smooching to a long shot taking in that picturesque mesa in the background. As Spanky used to say, “Ah, mush!”

*. What all this is in aid of is what Kasdan thought the movie essentially was: an essay on American manhood. Which he sees as being made up of sterling virtues like duty, family, friendship, honour, and self-reliance. In other words: Wyatt Earp/Kevin Costner as all-American hero.
*. Are we supposed to be impressed at a threat to cut somebody open “from his belly to his dick”? Because that’s not so great a distance. No distance at all for some guys.
*. I can’t get over that steaming cup of coffee in the opening scene in the bar. How cold is it in Tombstone? Because that cup is blasting out steam like it’s full of dry ice.
*. In general I agree with Ebert’s observation that the womenfolk come off better than the men. At least they’re allowed flashes of character. Though Joanna Going as Josie is saddled with dialogue as bad as Hackman’s. On the plus side, for the film’s Alaskan coda “17 years later” she hasn’t visibly aged a day, while Wyatt’s moustache has silvered.
*. It’s not all bad. To be honest, I think it’s probably better than its reputation. I wouldn’t rate it worse than most biopics. It looks great when it’s in postcard mode. And Dennis Quaid is very good as Doc Holliday (he shed nearly 50 pounds for the role), though again he suffers in comparison when set next to Val Kilmer’s turn in the role. But at the end of the day it’s just a slow-paced, conventional oater with only a few big action scenes, none of which is presented in a way that’s new or exciting. Even the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral is pedestrian. I’d like to think there was the potential here for a much better movie, but being such a star project I think this is the best they could do. And it’s nothing special.

*. The screenplay for Tombstone was written by Kevin Jarre and he was also supposed to direct, but it was his first (and to my knowledge only) directing gig and it didn’t go well. He ended up being fired a month into filming and was replaced with George P. Cosmatos. But the role of Cosmatos has also been called into question, with star Kurt Russell claiming the he in fact directed the movie and that Cosmatos was just a front or “ghost director” since for some reason Russell did not want directing credit.
*. To this day, the breakdown of duties remains a bit of a mystery. My point in bringing this up is only to note that a movie with this troubled a production — with script rewrites during shooting and conflict between Cosmatos and cinematographer William A. Fraker thrown into the mix — rarely work out. Even Val Kilmer had a reputation by this point as being a difficult star to work with. I’m not sure the studio even believed in Tombstone, as it was kept away from critics before release. That’s usually a bad sign.
*. But somehow things had come together and Tombstone is a delightful Western, with Kilmer giving a career-defining performance. Sometimes, as Roger Ebert remarked about it on Sneak Previews, a strong and effective movie can emerge out of creative chaos.
*. Tombstone may not be a great movie, but it’s great entertainment. It’s an old-school Western, one where the heroes are heroes (manly, meaning they are adored by women and can slap men they don’t like around) and the bad guys are bad (cowards and bullies). It also understands, consciously or not, that the way the best genre material works is by giving the audience exactly what it expects/wants with the slightest of twists.
*. The main twist here is Kilmer’s Doc Holliday, a character who seems to have beamed in from another movie or even comedy sketch. Or look at how the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral plays out, with everyone braced to draw and then frozen until Kilmer gives one of the bad guys a sly wink (an improvised moment). There’s nothing as old as a stand-off and a gunfight in a Western, but there’s never been a gunfight introduced like that before or since, at least to my knowledge. It’s both something old and something new.

*. What a cast. Chock-full of early ’90s sweetness. Kurt Russell (Wyatt Earp, “a tall drink of water” in the desert) is always a good time. One of the more underrated actors of his generation. Kilmer steals the show as Doc Holliday: both a great character, given heroic beats and memorably obscure lines, and a great performance. Sam Elliott (unimaginable without a cowboy hat on) and Bill Paxton play the other Earp brothers. Powers Boothe is “Curly Bill” Brocius, about to be immortalized as a meme (“Well . . . bye”). Michael Biehn is Johnny Ringo. And, in the background, Billy Zane as a doomed thespian, Jason Priestley as a possibly gay and certainly compromised lawman, Michael Rooker, Frank Stallone . . . bonus points if you recognize Billy Bob Thornton because I sure didn’t. Throw in a cameo by Charlton Heston, narration by Robert Mitchum, and a delightfully modern turn by Dana Delany in the only meaningful female role. This is what movies, at least popular movies, were like thirty years ago.
*. As history it’s not perfect, but it’s miles ahead of My Darling Clementine in that regard. Both movies, coincidentally, have traveling actors performing famous speeches from Shakespeare in Tombstone. I wondered how likely this would be. The real history nerds will tell you that the Bird Cage Theatre didn’t open until several months after the gunfight, if that matters.
*. There are missteps along the way. I agree with Ebert that the montages of Wyatt and his gang taking out the Outlaws are just dull filler. And the best that can be said of the ending is that it’s relatively quick. That the last line should be Mitchum’s narration telling us that “Tom Mix wept” at Wyatt Earp’s funeral was a real headscratcher. Who cares? Who, among the audience then or now, would even know who Tom Mix was? I mean, I recognize the name but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of his movies.
*. I’m not a big fan of Westerns in general, but I really liked Tombstone when it came out, and so did everyone I saw it with. Thirty years later, it’s just as much fun as it was then. What’s more, I think it’s fun for all ages. The kind of film then that does make you wonder if they make them like this anymore.