Shooting Off My Mouth About “Young Guns”

Recently I’ve been catching up on classic films about young men in trouble. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by the spectacular new TV production of Lord of the Flies. In any case, I’ve now seen  Stand by Me (1985), River’s Edge (1986), and The Lost Boys (1987), the last of which has just become a Broadway musical hit.  Each of these flicks features young and mostly white males who are still children—or barely out of childhood—cut off from the adults in their lives and learning to cope with their world on the most violent terms.

  In 1988 along came Young Guns, which is often rather sneeringly referred to as a Brat Pack western. The designation of course refers mostly to a cluster of young actors (among them Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore) who starred in the teen angst movies written and directed by John Hughes in this era. The young actors reportedly hated the “brat pack” designation, which came out of David Blum’s 1985 story in New York magazine in the wake of Hughes’ St. Elmo’s Fire. Emilio Estevez, who had figured prominently in the Blum piece, is the central figure in Young Guns, playing an embellished version of the Old West’s William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.

 To be honest, this is not a story that can easily be tracked. But it apparently takes off from actual historic events: a young Englishman named John Tunstall came to Santa Fe in 1876 to get into the cattle business. His success as a rancher and store-owner put him at odds with local interests, and he was eventually murdered. In the film Tunstall (played by the always interesting Terence Stamp) is an older man, serving as a father figure to a number of wayward teenagers who work for him and are tutored by him in reading and social graces. After his sudden death, they dub themselves The Regulators, and are briefly deputized to take down his killers. But corrupt forces in the vicinity soon have them on the run.

 Estevez’s film role as Billy the Kid is the most interesting: he’s smart, brash, and always itching for a fight. Also memorable is Kiefer Sutherland, who—though scary indeed in Stand by Me and The Lost Boys—here plays a character with a sentimental side. (As “Doc,” he’s a gunslinger who’s also a would-be poet. Eventually he rescues a pretty Chinese concubine who’s being kept in thrall by the evil Jack Palance. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.) Smaller roles are filled by Estevez’s real-life brother Charlie Sheen, by Lou Diamond Phillips (as the all-purpose Native American in the gang), by Dermot Mulroney as the slob of the group, and by Casey Siemaszko as a love-sick gang member who makes some unfortunate choices. Some veteran actors, including Brian Keith, Terry O’Quinn, and Patrick Wayne (yes, he’s John’s son), also have key roles in the proceedings.

 As action movies go, this one has much to recommend it. There are a lot of horses, a lot of bad guys, and a lot of blood to be shed in picturesque outdoor surroundings. The climactic siege of a house to which Billy and the gang have been lured contains some dramatic moments, though it doesn’t fully match up with the actual historical episode. I was rather taken, in fact, by the filming of this episode: the up-close and slo-mo camera work here serves, I’m convinced, to glamorize violence, and to make us eager for more. Which is why there was a lucrative 1990 sequel, and talk of other sequels to come.