Sunset (1988)

Nominated for 1 Oscar
- 1 win & 2 nominations total

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Director
- Blake Edwards
Writers
- Rod Amateau
- Blake Edwards
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia
Although the plot is mostly fiction, Wyatt Earp and Tom Mix were real-life friends. After Earp retired from law enforcement, he and his wife drifted around, eventually setting in Los Angeles, where he and Mix met. Mix tried to get Hollywood to produce a movie about Earp, but they weren't interested. Earp was hired as a technical consultant for movies starring Mix and William S. Hart. When Earp died in 1929, Mix and Hart were his pallbearers.

Goofs
One of the movie star doubles at the Candy Store is dressed like Mae West. The film takes place in 1929. West's big screen debut was in Night After Night (1932).

Quotes
Wyatt Earp: It's all true, give or take a lie or two.

Crazy credits
The final frame of the picture freezes, and the following text appears: "And this is how it really happened. Give or take a lie or two."

Connections
Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Shakedown/Stormy Monday/Sunset/Two Moon Junction/White Mischief (1988)

Soundtracks
Black And Tan Fantasy
Performed by Duke Ellington and the Duke Ellington Orchestra (as Orchestra)
Courtesy of RCA Records

I appreciate Sunset the film because it gave the man who I consider the best big screen Wyatt Earp, James Garner, a chance to reprise the role.

Garner played Earp back in the mid sixties in John Sturges's Hour of the Gun. That film took the unusual plot line of beginning with the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral and showing the aftermath from that event. It was a pretty grim western, and Garner was not playing his usual likable con artist.

It took twenty years from Hour of the Gun to Sunset, but it was over 40 years in real life from the OK Corral fight until the events of Sunset that take place in Hollywood in and around the first Academy Award dinner in 1928. Wyatt Earp was in fact in Hollywood and did in fact know Tom Mix. Earp died in 1929 at the age 80 and Garner is one of the liveliest 80 year olds ever on screen.

Blake Edwards must have hated Charles Chaplin because Malcolm McDowell as Alfie Alperin, the Happy Hobo and villain of the film is one loathsome creep. No doubt Chaplin's character is used as the basis for McDowell's. The famous Thomas Ince shooting on board a yacht is also worked into the plot. Topping all that the first Academy Award dinner had a triple homicide in the lobby.

Bruce Willis as Tom Mix stars as Wyatt Earp in a film about the OK Corral and of course with Wyatt still being alive, Garner is brought in as a technical adviser. The two of them get involved in a lovely web of intrigue during end of the silent era that starts with the murder of a bordello madam who had a lot of blackmail information concerning the mighty of Tinseltown. Wyatt Earp discovers a few personal facts about himself he didn't know also.

Patricia Hodge is McDowell's long suffering wife and Jennifer Edwards is his equally loathsome sister. Another pair that Willis and Garner have to deal with are Richard Bradford as a corrupt LA detective and M. Emmet Walsh as the studio cop who do a lot of McDowell's dirty work.

Sunset is entertaining enough, not a great film for either Willis or Garner. And it does capture the ambiance of old Hollywood, give or take a lie or two.