Between his masterworks, Out of the Past (1947) and Night of the Demon (1957), Jacques Tourneur made this Technicolor-CinemaScope western for Allied Artists. A prequel of sorts to John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Wichita (1955) charts the transition from private citizen to public figure of Wyatt Earp, whom Tourneur and screenwriter Daniel B. Ullman etch as a man in tune with nature but one whose presence in society (after a spell in the wilderness) brings out in his fellow man their baser instincts. Star Joel McCrea was pushing fifty when he made the film (two decades older than the real life Earp at the time) and in the bell lap of a long career; equally adept at comedy as he was in action, McCrea had decided after starring in The Virginian (1946) to work exclusively in westerns. A specialist in the genre, the actor did his homework to play Earp - if only to distinguish his take on the character from those of Henry Fonda, Richard Dix, and Randolph Scott - and read Earp's memoir, Frontier Marshal. Ultimately, with Wichita bearing little relationship to fact, McCrea elected to play Earp as himself. Among the film's supporting players (Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Jack Elam) is Sam Peckinpah, as a bank teller. Then a busy Allied Artists dialogue director, Peckinpah was on the cusp of transitioning to TV writing and feature directing. A few years later, Joel McCrea would make his last great western for Peckinpah with Ride the High Country (1962).

By Richard Harland Smith