Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957)

First, I need to offer you all a big apology for the long silence.  There was a bit of upheaval here in the apartment; Roommate Russ had an unfortunate and serious bad reaction to some medication he was taking, and had to be rushed to the hospital for a couple days (in the middle of a blizzard, to make everything a bit more complicated).  I’d already been given leave to work the whole week from home – the snowdrifts would make my travel to work a little more difficult than normal – so when he got out, I was on hand to help him finish off recovery, through the use of indulgent food, friendly conversation and movie screenings.

As it turned out, one movie was precisely what the doctor ordered. Roommate Russ had already told me he was curious about Gunfight At The O.K. Corral, since he’d seen it as a child; he said that a lot of it had gone over his head back then, and he was curious how he would receive it today.  He loved this rewatch so much that he ended up shifting my own opinion on it a bit, and I’ve even asked him to share his own thoughts; I’ll put up a link to his blog when he’s ready.

As you’d guess from the title, this is another take on the famous Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday Tombstone gunfight, which we’ve previously seen in My Darling Clementine.  This take hews a bit closer to history, but still takes some liberties with the tale, particularly with the friendship between Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas).  The real Earp and Holliday kept coincidentally running into each other as they tooled around the West, Earp in search of a permanent U.S. Marshall placement and Holliday seeking a better climate to ease his tuberculosis.  The movie Earp and Holliday start out as “frenemies” – Holliday is on a self-destructive path, determined to drink and gamble and hellraise his way to death before his disease takes him, and Earp is determined to rein him in mainly to keep order, and so their turning up in the same town is more intentional.  The antagonism turns first to grudging respect, then to a mutual appreciation by the time the famous gunfight takes place.

It’s a pretty talky and heady take.  I ultimately was lukewarm on the film; ironically, if they’d focused more exclusively on the Earp/Holliday relationship I may have liked it better.  However, the film also tries to cram in details about Earp and Holliday’s love lives, and the women get pretty short shrift – Jo Van Fleet is “Kate Fisher”, a saloon girl stuck in a love/hate hellscape of a relationship with Holliday, and Rhonda Fleming is “Laura Denbow”, who seems to exist solely to be the woman Earp sacrifices in service to his duty.  Getting even shorter shrift is Olive Carey as “Mrs. Clanton”, mother to the clan who started the famous gunfight – she’s only in one scene where Earp brings the youngest Clanton boy, Billy (Dennis Hopper) home from the drunk tank and then sticks around to warn him against the gunfighting life.  She wrings her hands a time or two, fretting that she’s told Billy again and again to straighten up, and then after Earp’s words finally sink in with Billy, she thanks him effusively….and that’s it.  Rather, that’s almost it – there’s a moment on the morning of the famous fight which visits each of these women in turn, showing them peering through their various windows with furrowed brows as Their Men go off to fight.  Roommate Russ argued that for its time, including the women’s perspective was a novel detail, but for me it felt like a bit of a pandering sop and I would have preferred to skip it.

The gunfight itself was another story.  A stunt choreographer I know told me once about how all of the best-done fight scenes had to tell a story instead of just being flashy violence – and this gunfight absolutely does so.  We see strategy play out, and we see how people change their approach as the fight ebbs and flows; we know it and feel it when various people fall in battle, and when one character finally comes to a tragic end, it feels like he’s earned that end, instead of being a maudlin bit of schtick.  I got curious enough just now to look up who choreographed that gunfight – unfortunately the IMDB entry only lists the stunt fighters themselves.  Whoever planned out the fight deserves a credit, in my opinion.

The gunfight was the part I appreciated most, and it was apparently the part that young Roommate Russ remembered best.  This rewatch, though, hit him much more profoundly – more so than it did me – so he’s preparing a few words himself. We’ll link you soon!