Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

This account of the events leading up to and including the historical shootout between Wyatt Earp and the former dentist come gambling gunfighter afflicted with tuberculosis (that becomes the Marshal's friend) Doc Holliday versus Ike Clanton and associates in Tombstone, Arizona is notable for the on screen relationship portrayed between its two leads, Burt Lancaster as Marshal Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Dr. John 'Doc' Holliday.Directed by John Sturges, with a screenplay by novelist Leon Uris from an article by George Scullin, this slightly above average Western received an Academy Award nomination for Warren Low's Editing; its Sound Recording by George Dutton was also Oscar nominated.According to this film, Wyatt Earp was a lawman above reproach, with an enviable moral code of conduct. He was so well thought of that the association which develops into a friendship between him and the gambler, who's also a notorious gunfighter, known as Doc Holliday threatens to tarnish the Marshal's reputation. Rhonda Fleming plays Laura Denbow, a gambling woman who temporarily interests Marshal Earp enough for him to consider settling down and retiring from the law. Jo Van Fleet plays Kate Fisher, a floozy and longtime girlfriend of Doc's; her loyalty wanes as he is weakened by his disease and promise to the Marshal not to kill anyone since they'd become friends. The situation is exacerbated when Kate takes up with Johnny Ringo (John Ireland), one of Ike Clanton's hired guns that exploits the situation.Clanton (Lyle Bettger) is a powerful cattle rustler who owns the less lily white county sheriff Cotton Wilson (Frank Faylen); Earl Holliman plays Earp's somewhat green Deputy Sheriff Charlie Bassett whereas a very youthful looking Dennis Hopper plays Clanton's youngest boy Billy. Whit Bissell plays the head of Tombstone's citizen council, which backs Wyatt and his brothers Virgil (John Hudson) and Morgan (DeForest Kelley); Martin Milner plays the youngest, greenest Earp brother Jimmy, whose murder by the Clantons leads to the personal showdown in this fictionalized account of the events. Don't blink or you'll miss Kenneth Tobey as Bat Masterson near the beginning of the film (sitting on a porch with Wyatt); would be Western movie veteran Lee Van Cleef appears a little less briefly as the disgruntled Ed Bailey, whose skirmish with a knife throwing Holliday is short-lived. Jack Elam might be hard to spot as well; he plays one of the McLowery brothers that's allied with the Clantons in the climactic (lengthened to a cinematic six minute) gun battle with the Earps and Holliday.As a producer, Sturges would follow-up this story ten years later by directing Hour of the Gun (1967) with James Garner and Jason Robards in the Wyatt and Doc roles, respectively.

Before this movie was released My Darling Clementine (1946)was the most unabashedly absurd movie ever made about the famous gunfight. Both movies were laughable and appalling and a waste of talent. This The Gunfight at the OK Corral had as much to do in reality with the actual gunfight as the re-enactment on Star Trek did. There are no saguaro cacti as far south as Tombstone. Both movies use them as props. When you enter Tombstone from the north the cemetery is on your left, not right as in both movies. The fight lasted less than 30 seconds. It was not a running gun battle. If America cared about history our defense forces would call in an air strike on Hollywood.

There are at least five films I am aware of based upon the notorious Gunfight at the OK Corral; the others are "My Darling Clementine", "Hour of the Gun", "Wyatt Earp" and "Tombstone". This film and "Hour of the Gun" from ten years later were both directed by John Sturges. The later film can be seen as a sort of sequel to this one, although it does not star the same actors. "Gunfight at the OK Corral" starts with the earlier history of Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday, and then moves on to events in Tombstone, with the Gunfight as the climax of the film. "Hour of the Gun" starts off with the Gunfight and then moves on to the subsequent feud between the Earps and the surviving members of the Clanton gang."Gunfight at the OK Corral" takes a number of liberties with history, although not as many as the notoriously inaccurate "My Darling Clementine". Some of these seem to be derived from the earlier film. As in "My Darling Clementine" the Earps are intent on revenge for the death of their younger brother James, murdered by the Clantons. In reality James was the eldest of the Earp brothers and was not murdered; he lived to die of natural causes at the age of 85. As in the earlier movie, the Gunfight is shown as taking place at dawn rather than in the afternoon. Johnny Ringo is shown here taking part in the Gunfight, in reality he was not present, although he was an associate of the Clantons. A fictitious character is introduced in the form of Laura Denbow, a lady gambler who serves as Wyatt's love interest. All the Earp brothers had bushy moustaches, but here they are portrayed as clean-shaven. (Male stars of the forties and fifties were often reluctant to wear facial hair, even when it would have been historically appropriate. The commercial failure of "The Gunfighter", a biopic of Johnny Ringo from 1950, was sometimes blamed upon the moustache worn by Gregory Peck).Historical accuracy, however, is not always a reliable guide to the quality of a film; there are plenty of excellent movies which bear little relationship to the historical events they purportedly depict. Often departures from historical fact can be justified on good dramatic grounds. The actual Gunfight itself, for example, probably lasted for less than a minute and was fought at close range. Any attempt at an accurate depiction of this even would doubtless have resulted in the film ending in a disappointing anti-climax; the full-scale shootout lasting several minutes shown here is far more dramatically satisfying.And this is a large-scale dramatic film that needs a large-scale dramatic ending. Apart from Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp" this is the most epic treatment of this particular story, certainly far more so than "Clementine". It is a Western of the wide-open spaces; the tone is set by that opening scene in which a wagon drives across the prairies to the accompaniment of that muscular but at the same time mournful theme song, the work of that greatest of all Western film composers, Dimitri Tiomkin. (Remarkably, Tiomkin was not a Westerner or even American by birth; he was originally from Kremenchug in the Ukraine). There is plenty of attractive photography of the Western landscapes and, unlike "Clementine" where John Ford relocated Tombstone from Arizona to Utah in order to pander to his love of shooting in Monument Valley, this is generally appropriate to the location- prairies around Dodge City, desert around Tombstone.There are two impressive, and contrasting, performances from Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, close friends who appeared together in several movies. Lancaster portrays Wyatt Earp as a courageous and incorruptible lawman whose one weakness seems to be his friendship with Doc Holliday, a man who has earned a reputation as a gambler and gunslinger. This leads to a disagreement between Wyatt and his brothers, especially Morgan, who distrust Holliday, but this distrust is eventually overcome and Doc joins the Earps in the final shootout with the Clantons. Douglas's interpretation of his role, however, does bring out his character's moral ambiguity, far more than Victor Mature did in "My Darling Clementine"; his Holliday is certainly a potentially dangerous character, but also one who is capable of restraint, as when he resists Ringo's attempts to provoke him to a fight. In my view Lancaster is the best cinema Wyatt and Douglas the best Doc with the possible exception of Val Kilmer in "Tombstone". There is another good contribution from Jo Van Fleet as Doc's mistress Kate Fisher.Overall, I would regard this as the best movie version of the story. The film is well paced and the action sequences well handled, with the final firefight coming as a stunning climax. John Sturges might not today attract quite the same adulation as Ford; at his worst he could churn out some dreadful stuff, such as that misfiring "comic" Western "The Hallelujah Trail", which also starred Lancaster, but at his best he was capable of some sublime work. "The Great Escape" is one of the greatest war films ever made, and "Bad Day at Black Rock" one of the greatest modern-day Westerns. "Gunfight at the OK Corral" is not quite in the same class as those two masterpieces, but it is not far behind. 8/10

If all of a sudden, the "Road" movies usually with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were taken over by Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, the film would still be a success even if they weren't comics or singers. These two have great chemistry, and in a beautiful, Technicolor western, it makes no difference that the real-life incident they dramatize here is totally changed to fit the star's personalities, so I simply look on it as an entertainment, nothing more, nothing less.In this variation of the classic western gun battle that took place in 1881, dentist Doc Holliday (Douglas) and Wyatt Earp (Lancaster) are two total opposites who strike up a reluctant friendship even though Wyatt is annoyed by the Doc at first. But every time Earp gets into a jam, Doc is there, and even when Earp warns the Doc to stay out of Dodge City, he doesn't heed the warning. It's a good thing, too, because they seem to suit each other, even as opposites, and when the men take off for Tombstone to fight the notorious Clanton gang. Jo Van Fleet chews the scenery as Doc's drunken mistress who betrays him with the gang yet never gives up hope they'll get back together, and Earp finds himself enamored of a beautiful red-headed gambling lady (Rhonda Fleming). The actual gunfight is strikingly filmed and sticks to some, if not all, the facts.Any movie which opens up and continues playing a Frankie Laine song will be as equally dramatic as it is action packed, and Laine's singing of the title song all throughout the film, ties everything together. Some future TV stars (Earl Holliman of "Police Woman", DeForrest Kelley of "Star Trek" and Martin Milner of "Adam-12" fame) appear, and are surrounded by some great character players like Frank Faylen, Dennis Hopper, Lee Van Cleef and Lyle Bettger. As Hollywood got away from the second feature, the westerns began to improve, and classics like this, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and "Ride the High Country" were made on a more epic scale.