Mustache Marathon 2: Tombstone (1993)

“Remember what I said about people seein' a bright light before they die? It ain't true. I can't see a damn thing.”

Tombstone came out in 1993 and was one of those movies that comes out when two similar movies come out around the same time.  It’s the counterpart to Wyatt Earp, just like Armageddon is the counterpart to Deep Impact, or like Mirror Mirror is the counterpart to Snow White and the Huntsman.  It stars many known names, such as Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Val Kilmer, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, and many more.  The movie is about the events surrounding the gunfight at the OK corral.

“I spent my whole life not knowing what I want out of it, just chasing my tail. Now for the first time I know exactly what I want and who... that's the damnable misery of it.”

With all of the good actors that are in Tombstone, it’s difficult to find a bad performance.  The best of the performances, according to many, would be Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday.  His portrayal of a man with a fatal illness is a performance that is tough to come by.  There is a subtlety that he uses in the scenes where the sickness isn’t the focus.  In the scenes in which the disease is the focus, Kilmer is able to sell it in a way that I’ve seen few actors sell a similar issue.  Other standout performances in Tombstone are Michael Biehn as an insane cowboy, Kurt Russel, Sam Elliott, and Bill Paxton as the Earp brothers, and Powers Boothe as another semi-crazy cowboy.  Yes, these are all of the main performers in the movie, but they’re all great in their roles.

“It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds.”

 “Doc you're not a hypocrite, you just like to sound like one.”

It’s easy to tell from the quotes that I’m putting into this write-up that I quite like the dialogue throughout the movie.  It seems written, but it’s so damn good that I love it.  There’s a brilliance to almost every line, and almost every reading that brings it above and beyond what it could have been.  The actors sell each and every line in a way that makes them stick and have meaning.  Other actors could have made the lines feel hollow and empty, but in this movie, the lines live off of the screen.

“From now on I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it. So run you cur. And tell the other curs the law is coming. You tell 'em I'm coming! And Hell's coming with me you hear! Hell's coming with me!”

The last thing I really want to make a note of in the movie is the violence.  It had been a few years since I had seen the movie and I didn’t remember the violence being so...violent.  It was bloodier and crueler than I remembered it being, but that worked with the material.  The west was a bloody and cruel place.  If you want to make a fantastical realism out of it, which I think this movie was doing, you need to have the cruel reality of it, by making the violence stand out more than it would otherwise.  Tombstone excels at this aspect.  It’s a bloody fun time.

“Why you doin' this, Doc?”

“Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.”

 “Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends.”

 “...I don't.”

Next up in the mustache marathon is the oldest movie of the marathon, The Gold Rush.  I haven’t seen too many silent films.  I think I saw 2.5 back in September.  That might be all that I’ve seen of silent movies, so this should broaden my movie knowledge a little bit.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

“And so she walked out of our lives forever.”