Wyatt Earp asks on his first night in Tombstone. Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan leave their kid brother James in charge of the herd and go into town for a shave and a beer. As they ride down the main street of Tombstone, under a vast and lowering evening sky, gunshots and raucous laughter are heard in the saloons, and we don't have to ask why the town has the biggest graveyard west of the Rockies. They have trapped a tarantula and are watching it being tortured by ants. Later in the film, a member of the bunch named Angel is captured by Mexican rebels and dragged around the town square behind one of the first automobiles anyone there has seen.
Children run after the car, laughing.
Near the end of the film, Pike is shot by a little boy who gets his hands on a gun. The message here is not subtle, but then Sam Peckinpah was not a subtle director, preferring sweeping gestures to small points. It is that the mantle of violence is passing from the old professionals like Pike and his bunch, who operate according to a code, into the hands of a new generation that learns to kill more impersonally, as a game, or with machines. Those days are closing fast. Mitchell won Best Supporting Actor for his role as the drunken Doc Boone, and the rest of the cast, notably Trevor as a hooker being run out of town, are memorable.