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 new Kansas boomtown, context and conflict are hitched and ready to ride. 

The hero is a man portrayed by Joel McCrea, who excels in every role, including this one, as the supremely confident horseman, gunfighter and man of reason. McCrea plays Wyatt Earp, a real-life American hero and man of justice. Wichita, whatever its veracity, demonstrates why. Here, Earp’s motivated to come to Wichita to make money—he wants to be a businessman—but first he wants to investigate the new city and gauge his prospects. A pretty, poised, bright young woman (Vera Miles) brings out the gentleman in Wyatt Earp, whose strange and unusual ways and means—he’s an individualist—garner controversy and attention.

Among those who notice Earp are a handsome, young newspaper reporter named Bat Masterson (Keith Larsen) and the town’s mayor (Carnegie Tech graduate Carl Benton Reid in a fine performance). It’s rare that a movie’s heroes are a journalist and a businessman uniting to step out of line and rise up against injustice but this is what Wichita depicts and that’s a fact. This 81-minute movie directed by Jacques Tourneur had me all the way. With Mission: Impossible’s Peter Graves, Petticoat Junction’s Edgar Buchanan and others in showdowns, gunfights and chases — and, at its core, a moral drama about the honorable way to make a profit — Wichita shows the way of the West with splendor, grace and conviction.

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Monday with Joel McCrea

The Outriders