Val Kilmer Returns
From his pivotal role as Doc in Tombstone to his dead man act in a Polish Spaghetti Western.
Categories: Westerns
By: Henry Cabot Beck 08/01/2008
Kilmer draws a parallel between Holliday’s physical dissolution and the demise of the Southern ruling class during and after the Civil War.
“He fully embodied the physical history of the land that he was born out of, and that culture and society,” says Kilmer. “[And] it was destroyed. Georgia, Atlanta, Charleston were still there, but it was blown up. And Kevin Jarre’s original script, in a narration, said something like Doc was born of a highly aristocratic family, not just aristocratic, but highly aristocratic, an elite group of an elite group of people in the United States who could only be matched by Great Britain and France.
“All these men and women died, and Doc, by the end of the war, was 13 years. That made him a very poetic character because the same thing happened to his body. He went up to Philadelphia and became a successful society dentist, and then suffered the same fate as his own culture and society.”
Each important version of the Doc/Wyatt story has redefined and refined their relationship, portraying it as a kind of dance, with the moral center shifting back and forth from film to film. In John Sturges’s Hour of the Gun, Holliday tries to keep Earp from losing his moral bearing, whereas in the earlier Sturges film, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Burt Lancaster as Earp has difficulty tolerating Kirk Douglas’s moral questionability.
In Doc, Harris Yulin’s Earp is thoroughly corrupt, far more so than Holliday, while Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp has Holliday (Dennis Quaid) keeping something of a wry distance from his famous friend (Kevin Costner). And in My Darling Clementine, Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp seems amused and fascinated by the eloquent and damaged Holliday, but their bond is a tenuous one.
“Doc Holliday and Earp were both noble men. Noblemen. And they had ideals and principles that they lived out and in a very honorable way,” says Kilmer. “My own family history and my own experiences in the West—I see the ranchers and farmers and crazy desert rats, and the real-life Sam Shepard characters; I see the nobleness of their spirit and the poetic nature that contact with the land creates, and more times than not turns men and women into poets or crazies.”
Kilmer sees the two men as having a poetic kinship that was built both of their innate differences and of the vicariousness that each could live out through the other.
“And so my feeling about the core of their friendship is that they were different men but they found a kinship that each of them was willing to die for.
“There were plenty of things that Doc Holliday did that didn’t serve the Earps’ best interests, and Wyatt Earp backed him up. And Doc backed him up because he was his friend. And there was a deep love; it really is a love story along those lines, and they were both willing to die for what they believed the other possessed, in terms of nature and character.
“And I think that Doc had a real respect for Wyatt’s morality even though he didn’t live it out, and Wyatt had a real respect for Doc’s sense of freedom and experience, that he had trouble committing to, so they each possessed a quality about life the other didn’t have and they could live vicariously through each other,” Kilmer says.
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