Friday's Old Fashioned: Frontier Marshal (1939)

When we first see Wyatt Earp in “Frontier Marshal,” it is from below, the camera looking up as he takes to a balcony in the wake of a ruckus at a saloon across the Tombstone, AZ street. He is not there and then he is, no build-up, and no fanfare. The book on which Allan Dwan’s 1939 western is based, “Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal,” might have been littered with falsehoods and half-truths intended to inflate the man’s myth but the character and accompanying performance by Randolph Scott are matter of fact, not mythical. That goes for the whole movie, working out the Tombstone legend that would be explored in grander detail in following films. This one runs barely an hour, excises numerable characters, like Earp’s brothers and the Clanton Gang, and transforms the climactic Gunfight at the O.K. Corral into something more like an afterthought. 

If Earp is more man than myth, however, Doc Holliday is not, or Doc Halliday (Caesar Romero), I should say, which is how “Frontier Marshal” bills him which may or may not have had to do with naming rights. Whatever the reason, it’s ironic since he is more like Doc Holliday than Wyatt Earp is like Wyatt Earp, introduced in a magnificent close-up underscoring the sense of him being larger than life. His emergent friendship with Earp drives the movie, and the accompanying love triangle with showgirl Jerry (Binnie Barnes) comes across more important than the looming threat of Curley Bill (Joe Sawyer), “Frontier Marshal” as much about Wyatt saving his friend as it is cleaning up the town. And rather than the tragic romantic figure that Val Kilmer would portray over 50 years later, Romero’s Halliday ultimately across quieter and sadder. The most potent gunfight proves to be between Halliday himself when he sees his reflection in a saloon mirror, pulls his gun, and shoots.