R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

Bonnie and Clyde Go to War

A biographer I know, Charles J. Shields, posted a memorable entry on his “Writing Kurt Vonnegut” blog. It vividly details what happened when he approached several elderly combat veterans who, like Vonnegut himself, survived World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. Shields’ goal was to ferret out personal details that would help make Vonnegut’s wartime experience come alive. What he discovered was men who, more than sixty years later, were still traumatized by what they had seen and done on the field of battle.

A few years back, while researching the films of the landmark year 1967, I too found myself talking about the Battle of the Bulge. Director Arthur Penn, who set Hollywood on its ear with his brilliant work on Bonnie and Clyde, told me that he had served in the infantry in World War II, and that his experience at the Bulge was one he’d never forget: ““It was not glorious, not organized, nothing, nobody knew what the hell they were doing, it was just save your life and chaos.”

From Penn’s perspective, the turbulence of the Sixties sprang from the complacency of the post-war period: “After the war, there was this great wave of self-satisfaction, with America, the American family, everything was wonderful. And then some time passed, and there were the family troubles. Veteran father and the kids, and they begin acting out. And that was the beginning of the next phase.” That next phase turned up in such generation-gap movies as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. And then, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, which made the life of a young outlaw seem (for a while, at least) like fun.

In its day, Bonnie and Clyde was most notorious for its scenes of explicit violence, including a climactic slow-motion bullet barrage that in the words of Pauline Kael “put the sting back into death.” Penn’s handling of bloodshed in this movie came directly out of his World War II memories. He told me, “I had decided not to mollycoddle the audience about shooting and death. This, after all, was wartime. “ Penn was referring here to the fact that while Bonnie and Clyde was in production, the conflict in Vietnam was dramatically ratcheting up. The young people who championed the film—the same young people who had recently mourned the assassination of John F. Kennedy and other political heroes—were in many cases facing the military draft. Penn felt that they, and the American public as a whole, needed to see violence for what it was, up close and personal.

The notoriety of Bonnie and Clyde has faded, as other films have far surpassed it in terms of on-screen carnage. Only two years later came Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which seemed to revel in its blood-spewing finale. Down the road there were George Romero’s zombie fantasies, the brilliantly lurid films of Quentin Tarantino, and gross-out horror flicks like the Saw franchise. This trend was anticipated back in 1980 by film scholar Robert Phillip Kolker who insisted in The Cinema of Loneliness that “Penn showed the way. Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”

He’s right, of course. Today even the posters for the last Harry Potter film seem to foretell graphic violence. In widely-seen images, Harry, Ron, and Hermione look battered, bruised, and not in the least kid-friendly, letting potential viewers know that there will be blood.

Post-Mortem

Well, now the silly pageantry of Oscar night is over. I’d hoped for something remarkable and unexpected, but instead there were uncharming hosts and predictable (if often well-deserved) awards. What lingers most for me was the In Memoriam section of the evening, hailing the movie legends who left us last year.

How moving to see photos of director Arthur Penn and film editor Dede Allen. Not long ago, I interviewed them both regarding Bonnie and Clyde. Both the feisty Allen and the gentle, thoughtful Penn were a delight. I’m lucky to have spent those hours in their company. (That's my snapshot of Penn at his art-filled home, above.)

What made me saddest, though, was the moment when there flashed on screen a photo of director George Hickenlooper. George died suddenly, and much too young, at age 47. I considered George a colleague and a friend. Like me, he began with Roger Corman. In George’s case, there was a brief stint as production assistant on a juicy little thriller called The Drifter (1988). Then with Hearts of Darkness, his documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now, George started gaining major attention. His reputation built as he made feature films like The Man from Elysian Fields and last year’s Casino Jack, a telling of the Jack Abramoff saga (starring Kevin Spacey) that was released after his death.

But I’ll always remember George for his grace under pressure. It was a few days after L.A. had emerged from the bloody civil disturbances of 1992. Roger Corman, who loves movies “ripped from the headlines,” had summoned the press, announcing that his new film would lay bare all the causes and effects of those dark days. He introduced George as his writer-director. As the news media waited expectantly, Roger turned to George, saying, “Tell them about your movie.” George had come into the office for a simple business meeting, and there was as yet no story. But he had to say SOMETHING.

Noticing a video camera in someone’s hands, he had a moment of inspiration. His film, he announced, would follow the path of a video camera as it moved from hand to hand through the L.A. streets, picking up all the chaos that the riots engendered. The newsmen were impressed, and went away to file their stories. We on the Corman creative team went to work—until Roger suddenly lost interest in the riots as a film topic. Spielberg was shooting Jurassic Park, and we were redirected to a new project: Carnosaur.