The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 77

SUNDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 1994 Frontier herb or capitalist pawn? wyatt earp teMrhs to the OK Corral a darker and more real character, says; Philip French character's, boasting reminiscences from his youth in the Caribbean. Finally, two poor movies set in the world of Los Arigeles psychotherapy. In Mike Figgis's Mr Jones, Richard-Gere convincingly impersonates a charming manic depressive who believes that to submit to. permanent medication may turn him. in to an acceptable citizen butwill destroy his personality, Lena Oliri (whose throaty voice is among the most attractive in the movies) plays a.

psychiatrist drawn towards him by professional self-doubts, who ruins heir career by falling in love arid sleeping with him; Thefilm'opens. strongly, but by largely Jones when in his depressive periods and taking the view that sea, still looking for his El Dorado, and a young man approaches the ex-marshal and his third wife to raise memories of Tombstone. In this scene Kasdan pays homage to John Ford's' The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the question it -raised of the relationship between fact and legend. Hkka Jaryilaturi's Firinish-Estpnian-Swedisli-Anierican co: production Darkness in Tallinn is a pleasant surprise, a heist thriller set in 1991 as the newly independent Estonia's national gold' reserves come home after 50 years in a French bank vault. A Russian gang, backedby a force of ex-soldiers, plans to steal the whole lot during a total-black-out to be.engineered by a ybung.electriciari at the Tallinn power plant.

The ill-paid electrician has been pushed into crime by his pregnant wife. But when he pulls the plug, her prematurely-born baby is in an incubator and the head obstetrician has used the diesel oil from the hospital's emergency generator to run his car. Shot in a harsh blackrand-white, then switching during the final minutes to colour, this brisk, unpretentious movie manages to be immensely entertaining while providing some deeply depressing sidelights on life in the new Baltic States. Randa Haines's Wrestling Ernest Hemingway is a superior example of flie Old Codgers Flick, that sub-species of the Buddy Movie dealing with disparate. old-timers bonding and bellyaching in "endearing fashion.

They're usually written by sympathetic, patronising young men (the author of this one, Steve Conrad, is a-21-year-old student), frequently.bring Oscar nominations to their stars, and are not to be confused with serious studies of old age like Bergman's Wild Strawberries, De Sica's Umberto or the plays of Samuel Beckett. In this one the old fellers meeting one July in. a shabby Elorida seaside town are Robert Duvall (who at 63 needs, make-up and a wig to play an elderly, reserved, Cuban-born ex-hairdresser) and Richard Harris (who at 61 needs no make-up to convince as a 75year-old finally get to Tombstone Kasdan starts to rush things a little. George Cosmatos's' recent Tombstone is clearer on the town's politics, fairer to the Earps' better on the extraordinary character of the place itself. But the accumulation of telling social and psychological detail is remarkable, arid the film is particularly telling in the unflinching way it shows the Earp wives (most of them former prostitutes) being treated by Wyatt as.

It'is also uriroinaritic in its handling of violence. The teenage Wyatt vomits after seeing a messy gunfight in a dusty Yet the. picture avoids the cynicism usually found in revisionist Westerns. Above all, the creates a plausible. portrait of Wyatt and, through Costner' presence, at once ordinary and charismatic, it leaves question mark over himIna touching coda set at the turn of the century.

the ageing Earp approaches Alaska by furiiici se.i capt.u'n. imaged jiui a Jiiciimc 01 boozing There kw sui prises and there is little IJUUI LUES are first-class; 1 he title ictus to one of the I Lulls falter Burns's Tombstone (iQ27), the first serious book on Wyatt Earp, was sub-titled. 'An Iliad of the American West' and presented the Earp brothers as knights.in shining armour. The most recent reappraisal of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Robert Maxwell Brown's neo-Marxist essay on 'Violence' in The Oxford History of the American West, sees the Earps as pawns of large-scale capitalist interests in 'the Western Civil.War of Incorporation'. The truth, if such a thing exists, is to be found somewhere in between, and in the intelligent, perceptive and visually striking Wyatt Earp, director Lawrence Kasdan and his co-screenwriter Dan Gordon attempt to place the legendary lawman, gambler and frontier opportunist in the context of his time's.

The film-begins in October i88i as Wyatt (Kevin Costner) sits in a- Tombstone saloon before going out to face the Glanton'gang at the OK Corral. As he rises to join his Kasdan cuts back to 1863 and the 15-year-old Wyatt on his father's farm in Iowa, dreaming of glory arid envying his older brothers fighting with the Onion army. His efforts to join them are frustrated his father (Gene Haekman), a stem Protestant patriarch whose wanderlust is part of an incurabli belief in the bounty of life west of the Mississippi. In addition to this belief in the infinite promise of th West, Dad instills in Wyatt three, precepts that family is everythin the rest are strangers; that the law all that holds a society together; that when confronting vicious menyou must strike first. After drifting round the post-war frontier, Wyatt settles into quiet married life back in middle-western Missouri, aiming to be a lawyer.

But when his pregnant wife dies of typhoid, he turns to drink and horse-thieying in Arkansas Territory and is saved from die gallows by his father. He heads west again in search of redemption, reconstructed as a 'deliberate man', his heart hardened. The first hour is the most considerable and original part of the lengthy film, and it is nearly half- way through before Earp strikes up his odd friendship with the antithetical Doc Holliday, an'! aristocratic Southerner with a mordant wit and a death wish, played with style and conviction by, Dennis Quaid. When the Earps Doniils Quald (loft) as Doc Holliday and Koviri Costnor as Wyatt Earp 3m 1, vmskjim love conquers all' and justifies everything, it dodges the important issues it raises. Color of Night, the first picture from cult editor Richard Rush since The Stunt Man 15 years ago, is an erotic thriller so ludicrous that it may possibly be intentionally parodic.

Bruce a leading figure in Hollywood's thugo'cracy, stars as a New York shrink, who relocates to Los Angeles after a patient defenestrates herself from his office, the combination of her blood and green dress down on Park Avenue leaving him colourblind. Once in California, however, his best friend psychologist (Scott Bacula) is murdered, and Willis is pressured by a neurotic Hispanic cop (Ruben Blades) into.taking over the deceased's group therapy sessions as he's evidently been killed by a patient. The picture is crude, slick and shamelessly entertaining, though too much weight is1 placed on Jane March's shoulders, which are not her strong-point. Color of Night's chief contribution to the gaiety of nations is its. addition to Hollywood's library of psychological studies.

In Hitchcock's Spellbound Gregory Peck is taken to be the autlior of Labyrinth qfthe Guilt Complex; in House of Games Lindsay Wagner has Written the bestseller Driven 5 in Scenes From a Mall therapist Bette Midler has produced I Do I Do I Do-in What About BoB? Dr Richard Dreyfuss is farniaus for his book Baby Steps. Now Willis's late chum has become rich by penning Way to Go; One day I'm going to get a Borgesian shock by discovering one of these books in a library. Wyatt Earp (191 'minutes, 12) Warner West End, general release Darknoss In Tallinn (99 mlns, 15) ICA cinema, London SWi Wrestling Ernest Homihgway (123nilns, 12) Warner West End; general release, Mr Jones (114 mlns, 15) Odeon West End. 1 Color of Night (123 mlns, 18) Odeon West End, general' release.