--Theme Song to The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp

In a shrewd move, Rhino has taken this once popular but now mostly forgotten 1955-61 television series and packaged it as a (single-sided) four-disc, 26-episode "Best of" compilation. Sensibly guessing that few will want to commit themselves to all 266 half-hour episodes, this reasonably-priced set instead traces the entire run of the show, from the first episode to the series' five-part finale, the long-awaited Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Rhino had previously released a much pricier boxed set of The Lone Ranger in 2003, but where those shows were time-compressed, dated masters apparently selected at random among the show's later, color episodes, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp -- From Ellsworth to Tombstone plays like a labor of love. Maybe it was a pet project for someone at Rhino's Home Video department.

The series, alas, isn't up to the enthusiasm of the packaging. Hugh O'Brian stars as the iconic lawman, whose famous mustache is conspicuously absent here. In the interview with O'Brian included on the fourth disc he calls the show "the first adult Western." That may be true in the sense that during the earliest days of television, the late-forties and early-fifties, Westerns shows like The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and The Roy Rogers Show were pretty much geared for kids. Gunsmoke, which debuted four days after Wyatt Earp ushered in what would lead to a great flood of TV oaters that would oppressively dominate the airwaves by the end of the decade. That said, Wyatt Earp is much more generic, old-fashioned, and less sophisticated than later-fifties shows like Have Gun, Will Travel; it might have been cutting edge in 1955, but even by 1960 it probably seemed pretty stale.

Stories are narrated with professorial authority and purport to be drawn from history, but play like a very '50s TV Western. As the show's central character, Earp is drawn in the blahest of terms. O'Brian is stalwart enough but lacks the charisma to carry the show without any characterization to guide him. His character doesn't change or arc or much of anything over the run of the series. He's just the vanilla-flavored Hero.

Surprisingly, even the supporting and guest characters, many drawn from the historical west, are homogenized to the point of madness. Doc Holliday (Douglas Fowley) is inappropriately robust for someone famously afflicted with tuberculosis. Fowley, 50 years old by the end of the series, is also too old for the part. After Walter Brennan, Trevor Bardette's Old Man Clanton is far too cordial and accommodating. (For an excellent film faithful to history, this reviewer recommends 1993's unjustly maligned, much-underrated Tombstone.)

Part of the problem with the series, especially with its five-part finale, is that audiences were already familiar with Earp, Holliday, and the O.K. Corral story, in movies like My Darling Clementine (1946) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and this only makes the TV show seem even more tepid than it already is. At least those movies had colorful actors in key roles. Instead of using the program to go into more detail on the historical Earp, especially the complex series of events leading up to the infamous gunfight, writers Frederick Hazlitt Brennan (who committed suicide shortly after the series ended) and John Dunkel spin wildly fictional characterizations and tales that not only are at odds with historic fact, but which are actually far more convoluted in the telling. Each episode of the five-part finale is such a narrative mess as to become an exasperating experience. (Maybe those who followed the series for its entire run can follow it, but not new viewers.)

The bland visual look of the show can be traced to its killer production schedule, with as many as 41 shows per season, with two episodes shot every week! It's no surprise that a schedule that grueling didn't attract the best writers and guest performers.

The boxed set samples the series over four discs. Disc One: Ellsworth and Wichita, includes "Wyatt Earp Becomes a Marshal" (episode 1.1), "Marshal Earp meets General Lee" (1.4), "Wyatt Earp Comes to Wichita" (1.5), "The Buntline Special" (1.16), "One of Jesse's Gang" (1.28), "The Pinkertons" (1.29), "Bat Masterson Again" (1.33). On Disc Two: Dodge City, there's "Dodge City Gets a New Marshal" (2.2), "Wyatt's Love Affair" (2.6), "Hang 'Em High" (2.27), "Wyatt meets Doc Holliday" (2.33), "When Sherman Marched Through Kansas" (3.27), "Dodge is Civilized" (4.34), "Dodge City - Hail and Farewell" (5.1). Disc Three: Tombstone includes: "Tombstone!" (5.3), "Wyatt's Decision" (5.4), "The Ring of Death" (5.10), "Wyatt Wins One" (5.11), "Wells Fargo Calling Marshal Earp" (5.18), "Wyatt's Bitterest Enemy" (5.41), and "The Truth About Old Man Clanton" (6.1). Finally, Disc Four: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral offers "Requiem for Old Man Clanton" (6.33), "Wyatt's Brothers Join Up" (6.34), "Just Before the Battle" (6.35), "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (6.36), and "The Outlaws Cry Murder" (6.37). Guests on these shows include Gloria Talbott, Angie Dickinson, Darryl Hickman, Randy Stuart (The Incredible Shrinking Man), Tony Caruso, John Anderson, and others.

Video & Audio

The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp is presented in its original black & white, full-frame format, in transfers that have their share of speckling and minor negative damage, but overall look very good, with the later episodes a bit better overall. While there's room for improvement, the series is infinitely more pleasing to the eyes than Paramount's Have Gun - Will Travel, a better show, and DVD atrocities like Image/Disney's Combat!, which was produced long after Wyatt Earp had ended. Shows are complete and not time-compressed, running between 25 and 26 minutes, but are not subtitled.

Extra Features

Supplements are modest, but will please fans of the series. An Interview with Hugh O'Brian runs 12 minutes and features the actor, now a handsome senior of 80, reminiscing about the series, as does Mason Dinehart III, who played a young Bat Masterson, in a similar featurette running 11 minutes. A Timeline of Wyatt Earp's Life and Legend is presented as text unspooled on a scroll; it's quite detailed and runs nearly eight minutes. O'Brian reappears in a Featurette on Hugh O'Brian's Youth Leadership (HOB), a youth organization geared for high school sophomores which he founded in 1958 and which has helped more than 340,000 teenagers. Finally, a short bit of text on Producer Louis F. Edelman rounds out the program.

Parting Thoughts

The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp isn't bad, but there are a number of superior Western shows worth exploring first, though Rhino's DVD is undeniably well done, and is likely to tempt even casual Western fans.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.