Monday with Joel McCrea

“Wichita” recasts the story of Wyatt Earp and company

If you want to watch a big, bold, old-fashioned Western with a hero, watch Joel McCrea in Technicolor and CinemaScope in 1955’s wonderful Wichita. I’d never heard of this movie. I was delighted to learn that it has everything I want in a Western.

Opening with a band of rowdy cowboys driving cattle across the open range, Tex Ritter sings the title song about the cow town where they’re heading. Stagecoaches filled with passengers pass the herd with banners reading “everything goes in Wichita”. The cowboys, including a filthy Lloyd Bridges, are led by a practical cattleman and everyone’s ready to unleash pent-up demand, rest and let loose because everyone’s been riding and rustling hard. Wichita represents a whole new way of life in the West.

Enter a lone figure on top of a hill. If the set-up for Wichita is cliched, it’s not wrong about the history of settling the American frontier and it’s entirely earned. As cowboys converge, confront and get acquainted and, eventually, ride into the ne…