“Anything Goes in Wichita!”  In the second half of his starring career Joel McCrea turned to westerns, favoring ‘kinder and gentler’ scripts when possible. This civilized telling of part of the Wyatt Earp story was McCrea’s first collaboration with producer Walter Mirisch. It’s an Allied Artists ‘A’ picture right down the line, and a special favorite — the man behind the camera is Jacques Tourneur, the most mellow and expressive of genre directors. The cast is exceptional too: young Vera Miles, a sneering Lloyd Bridges, and Edgar Buchanan as an unexpectedly effective villain.

Wichita
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1955 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 81 min. / Available at MovieZyng / Street Date August 29, 2023 / 21.99
Starring: Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Keith Larsen, Carl Benton Reid, Walter Coy, Robert J. Wilke, Rayford Barnes, Jack Elam, Mae Clarke, Walter Sande, Sam Peckinpah.
Cinematography: Harold Lipstein
Art Director: David Milton
Film Editor: William Austin
Original Music: Hans Salter
Written by Daniel B. Ullman
Produced by Walter Mirisch
Directed by Jacques Tourneur

The late producer Walter Mirisch was of course the head of The Mirisch Company, a big-talent producting firm that released through United Artists, and became the Hollywood success story of the 1960. But before that breakthrough, Walter Mirisch worked hard to help keep the tiny studio Allied Artists afloat. His series films paid the bills and his low-budget efforts to add color and experiment with 3-D kept Allied Artists in the movie game.

Wichita takes a jump forward with CinemaScope and Technicolor; it’s also the first of four Mirisch/Joel McCrea western team-ups. This least violent version of the Wyatt Earp story offers a good cast and excellent direction by Jacques Tourneur. It can also boast meaningful Sam Peckinpah connection. Seven years later, Peckinpah’s masterful ‘retirement western’ Ride the High Country brought together the screen legends of Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. In a curious bit of career serendipity, Sam Peckinpah plays a small role in this film.

Wichita is a modest western assembled by some very special talent. The consistently superior director Jacques Tourneur earned full marks with classics in horror (Cat People, Curse of the Demon), film noir (Out of the Past, Berlin Express) and dramas without a specific genre (Experiment Perilous). Tourneur also made the unusual, individualistic westerns Canyon Passage and Great Day in the Morning. The director imposed a personal ‘gentle’ touch on his best movies. Joel McCrea had worked with Tourneur on the MGM ‘Bible’ western Stars in My Crown, making what might have been a preachy movie into a very moving one.

Wichita was one of producer Mirisch’s first full ‘A’ productions. In 1955 westerns were still very much a Hollywood staple. The ‘super-western’ had arrived on the big screen, relegating smaller oaters to mid-range status. But an established western star like Joel McCrea was still a bankable commodity, and a Big Name for an AA release. Mirisch granted Wichita a few days on location in Sonora and Santa Clarita, but most of it was filmed on a Hollywood back lot. He had the backing of resourceful Allied Artists personnel like editor-turned-producer Richard Heermance and frequent Mirisch writer Daniel B. Ullman, who worked on many of Mirisch’s ‘transition’ films.

“Anything Goes in Wichita.”

Ullman’s script glamorizes some of the historical Wyatt Earp’s activities pre- Dodge City and the OK Corral, distorting a few facts. The main ‘social’ conflict is between business interests and the public good. The Wichita business association is pleased when rowdy cattlemen spend their money in the bars, and look the other way when the cowboys shoot up the town and endanger lives. Earp resists becoming marshal after foiling a bank robbery, but only goes into action after a stray bullet fells a 5 year-old boy (named Michael Jackson!). Earp arrests about twenty drunken cowpokes with only a shotgun, and apprentice reporter Bat Masterson (Keith Larsen) backing him up. Wyatt imposes a ‘no guns in Wichita’ policy, that immediately rankles business investor ‘Doc’ Black (Edgar Buchanan).

Earp and young Laurie McCoy (Vera Miles of the next year’s The Searchers) become an item, but her father Sam McCoy (Walter Coy, also of The Searchers) thinks Earp’s ‘no guns’ policy will keep the cattlemen away. He wants the marshal fired, but the less scrupulous friend Doc Black (Edgar Buchanan) wants Wyatt murdered and hires some out-of-town killers to do the job.

Battle lines are drawn when Doc Black hires a pair of killers to assassinate Wyatt, only to find out that the pair are Wyatt’s own brothers Morgan and Jim Earp (Peter Graves & John Smith). It soon looks as if all of Wichita is against the Earps, with cattleman Clint Wallace (Walter Sande) actively encouraging his men to defy Earp’s law ‘n’ order stance. Lloyd Bridges gets third billing as a roughneck who nurses a personal grudge against the new marshal. Robert J. Wilke and Jack Elam are more rowdy cowboys. Representing good Wichita civic values is the dependable Wallace Ford, as Bat Masterson’s publisher/employer.

The most hot-headed gunslinger is Hal Clements, played unbilled by Rayford Barnes. Sam Peckinpah fans will be forgiven for not recognizing Barnes from his brief role in The Wild Bunch. The second time we get a clear look at Barnes in Bunch, his entire face has been shot away: “Finish it, Mr. Bishop!”  As for Peckinpah himself, his Wichita appearance is as a polite bank teller in a bank robbery scene.  ↓  Sam made a better impression elsewhere, as a solicitous meter reader.

Director Tourneur is fully on his game, turning stock situations into something special. The regular western faces Wallace Ford, Jack Elam and Walter Sande impress as real people at work, not ‘types’ on a movie set. Each stands out as a thinking individual. Tourneur’s careful approach also makes credible Wyatt Earp’s ability to settle armed stand-offs with a minimum of violence. McCrea’s gun is quick and deadly when necessary, yet the essentially humanist Wichita feels directly opposed to the six-gun cynicism of Sergio Leone.

As is typical in Tourneur films, eccentricities get our attention. Rather than make him ride his horse all the way around to the back of the building, publisher Wallace Ford just tells Earp to walk the animal right through his printing room. It’s a folksy ‘Our Town’ touch. Even the presumed bad guys are working men sketched in three dimensions. Typically nasty baddie Robert J. Wilke plays a reasonable cattle ramrod. He smiles and shakes Earp’s hand. How many times in his film career did Wilke get to do that?

Jack Elam is under-used, while the third-billed Lloyd Bridges’ role is so small, we wonder if it was cut down before filming. The most pleasant surprise is the film’s most reprehensible villain, the unimposing, overaged Edgar Buchanan. We fully expect his Doc Black to be a lying snake, but not to strap on a six-gun to join the killin’ game. Buchanan comes through with a fresh dose of ‘mean old man’ menace.

Ullman’s thoughtful but placid script follows a predictable town-taming formula, but in this circumstance the effect is very pleasing. Joel McCrea’s resolute and uncomplicated Wyatt Earp isn’t as intriguing as the more interesting heroes of Tourneur’s other westerns. In Canyon Passage and Great Day in the Morning it isn’t immediately apparent that Dana Andrews and Robert Stack are good guys — their actions and motivations can be pretty unheroic. Although finished in Technicolor, Wichita also lacks the beautiful distant locations of those other Tourneur westerns. Generic rolling hills (accurately?) make southern Kansas look like a featureless nowhere. Tourneur’s blocking of scenes is good, but he and cameraman Harold Lipstein (Von Ryan’s Express) use the wide CinemaScope frame a little loosely. Either that, or the extra wide early C’Scope AR of 2.55:1 just seems extra-extra wide.

One of the least appreciated of the great western stars, Joel McCrea holds the screen with authority, calmly facing off with gunslingers of all kinds, and inducing several to back down with pure psychology. He’s a solid hero even if he looks a bit long in the tooth to be romancing young Vera Miles. The film’s women aren’t that interesting. Looking good in her Eastern-style dresses, Miles’s Laurie character shows little concern about being in love with a man likely to get shot at a moment’s notice. Was Laurie meant to have a side attraction for Lloyd Bridges’ character?  Her mother Mary is played by Mae Clarke, the recipient of Jimmy Cagney’s grapefruit in The Public Enemy.

Producer Mirisch covered all bases in hope for a big hit — even hiring Tex Ritter to sing the Hans J. Salter – Ned Washington title song. It’s a generic ditty without much personality, and its welcome-wagon lyrics always generate laughs:

The civic motto “Everything Goes in Wichita” is an invitation to trouble. Wyatt Earp is pointedly shown pulling one of these banners down after the child is shot dead. The boy’s forlorn mother is well chosen — she’s an unbilled Mary Alan Hokanson, previously the bereaved mother of two kids kidnapped by garden pests.

Wichita is one of the few westerns to sketch a complete picture of the civic problem of cattle-trail cowboys busting up western towns. A railhead depot generates big-business money for cattlemen, beef buyers and the railroad, very little of which stays in town. The local saloon owners and brothel-keepers are the only locals to profit from carousing cowboys, and the money these businesses earn more or less determines what’s legal and illegal on main street.

Other westerns set up ‘evil bad guys’ to take the rap for the killings and vice, whereas Wichita places responsibility squarely with the profit motive. You set up a town for the benefit of business over citizens and corruption is bound to set in. Jacques Tourneur, of course, rarely allows any conflict to be rendered in black and white. The corrupt town leader, for instance, is the one to suffer the worst loss before he learns his lesson.

Frankly, the real nostalgia factor in Wichita today is its common-sense championing of The Public Good. Wyatt Earp states simply that the only sane civic policy is for private arms to be banished from the town streets. The surrender of that wisdom to politics, greed and radicalism is social suicide.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Wichita is a beauty in full HD. An exceptional restoration renders extra detail and color that enliven the visuals. An extended chase scene on rolling hills now has more of a dimensional feel. The backlot western street is crowded with horses and extras. The artwork for title sequence is especially attractive as well. We hasten to add that the disc looks much better than the random images found here.

The old DVD (2010) had no extras; the WAC gives us a pair of Tex Avery cartoons in remastered HD, Deputy Droopy and The First Bad Man, both from the same year as the feature, 1955. The next Mirisch/McCrea western would be titled The First Texan.

I was a guest in the Walter Mirisch home around 1974, and got to see the big bookcase with all of his leatherbound scripts — the first shelf was a proud Bomba Boy parade. Mr. Mirisch spoke highly of his association with Joel McCrea, clearly happy that the McCrea westerns had been solid earners in the dicey lead-up to the formation of The Mirisch Company. He wasn’t as pleased by his one film with the celebrated western director Anthony Mann — their Gary Cooper picture Man of the West was a box office bust just when he didn’t need one. In the last twenty years or so Walter began attending screenings of his films, even odd titles like his first effort Fall Guy. His son Larry reported that Mr. Mirisch liked my first review of Wichita. Larry also said that his father eventually decided that Man of the West was a good movie after all. A warm reception at a movie revival did the trick.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Wichita
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good ++
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: 2 Cartoons in full HD, i>Deputy Droopy and The First Bad Man
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 31, 2023
(6987wich)

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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