Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Burt Lancaster, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda FlemingBrand: LANCASTER,BURT
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-04-22
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
Movie Review: The Big Gunfight, Retold Yet Again
Summary: 5 Stars
Recently I heard a teenager bemoaning the death of King Kong in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of the 1933 Merian Cooper classic. He was of the opinion that they should never have made it where Kong died. The ending should have been different. The big guy should have gotten back to Skull Island.
I told this young fellow that there were certain constants in life...and in the movies...that you just had to learn to deal with; Cleopatra was always going to be bitten by the asp, Julius Caeser was always going to go down to assassins' knives,
the Titanic was always going to sink, the Earps and Doc Holliday were always going to kill the Clantons & McLaurys at the O.K. Corral, and King Kong was always going to get shot off the building. That's how life works.
And where those Earps and their friends and foes are concerned, John Sturges's 1957 epic oater "Gunfight At the OK Corral" is one of the top cinematic retellings of that bloody day in October of 1881 when the six-guns started blasting and the lead started flying.
"Gunfight" is a well-engineered DVD version of the original widescreen Technicolor original. The colors are warm and vivid and the images sharp and clear. The sound is good and the soundtrack musical score by Dmitri Tiompkin excellent, as is the driving, infectious theme song sung by Frankie Laine. The opening title sequence begins with a group of riders topping a hill and riding down into full audience view with Laine's ballad lyrics (by Tiompkin & Ned Washington) goading the viewer into an interest in who these riders are and what their intentions might be. It is a device that "hooks" viewer attention immediately and draws them quickly into the film story. This is good screenwriting (Leon Uris) and good direction (John Sturges). Really savvy filmmaking.
The film opens with these three "revengers" heading into Fort Griffin, Texas, in order to kill the man who killed...in a fair fight...one of the riders' brother. Their target is one of the west's most famous "bad men", gambler/gunfighter/dentist John Henry "Doc" Holliday. As these men come to Fort Griffin looking for Holliday, yet another trail rider, Dodge City, Kansas, Chief Assistant Marshal (the actual Marshal, historically, was Larry Deger) Wyatt Earp , out hunting outlaw Ike Clanton, rides into town. Earp rides in and meets with the local sheriff, one "Cotton Wilson" (a non-historical, fictional character) seeking info on the Clantons. I would note here that fans of Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" will instantly recognize "Fort Griffin" as BEING "Rio Bravo" (actually a movie set at Old Tucson, Arizona). The street where "Dude" (Dean Martin) is knocked into a horse trough is there, as is the hotel owned by "Carlos" (Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales), where "Feathers" (Angie Dickinson) and
"Colorado" (Ricky Nelson) stay, and the saloon where Doc Holliday kills Lee Van Cleef is the same saloon set ("Burdett's Saloon") where Dude and John T. Chance (Duke Wayne) track a wounded killer and finish him off.
As the old cliche goes, "But I digress". Getting back now to "Gunfight At the O.K. Corral" itself; disatisfied with the answers he gets from "Cotton Wilson", Earp stays over to seek more helpful news on his quarry and, in doing so, becomes involved in yet another...plainly justifiable...killing by Doc Holliday, as well as a local lynch-mob attempt (aided and abetted by same-said "Cotton Wilson") to hang Doc. Earp helps Doc escape from Ft. Griffin and this incident (culled from Stuart N. Lake's biography of Earp, "Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal") forms the basis for the Earp-Holliday friendship that carries through for the rest of the film.
Lancaster's characterization of Earp is pretty much "on the money" historically. The early western film pioneer William S. Hart knew Earp personally and the stoic, heroic, laconic, amd iconic western hero type that plays through all of Hart's westerns...and on into those of Gary Cooper and others...was based on the Earp persona. And Lancaster's version of Earp is not that far removed at all from Kevin Costner's version, done four decades later.
A point of interest in this film is that the famous "Buntline Special" .45 Colt with the long barrel appears here briefly in a scene between Lancaster's Earp and Earl Holliman's Charlie Bassett.What is shown here in this scene is pretty much what the "Buntline Special" actually was; a Model 1876 Colt Revolver-Carbine, a handgun with a 10 or 12 inch barrel (the T.V. Show with Hugh O'Brian depicted it as the 12" version, but research evidence indicates Earp's real revolver-carbine was the 10" version). Thriller writer Ned Buntline bought one of these for several Dodge City lawmen (among them Bat Masterson & Bill Tilghman) and had special fancy-carved walnut handles put on the stocks...handles with the name "Ned" carved onto them. These "Ned" handles were what made one of these revolver-carbines....which featured a bolt-on "skeleton frame" rifle stock attachment..."Buntline Specials"; NOT anything having to do with the barrel length.
As usual in depictions of the Earp saga, this movie is pretty much "owned" by Doc Holliday, one of the most colorful figures of the old west, and in the person of Kirk Douglas, Holliday is given masterful representation. Douglas's Doc is tortured and sardonic, a man with many demons, yet a man of integrity with a strong code of honor. And he is depicted as a Southern Gentleman to the core. Much drivel has been written that "until Kilmer and Quaid" essayed the role in the 1990s Holliday's Georgia roots had never factored into any film depiction previously. The lie is given to this claim in "O.K." in a scene where Big Nose Kate Fisher
(Jo Van Fleet) rages at Doc about being so proud of his Georgia
plantation background when "all of that is gone now". Another verbal jab or two at Doc's "Southern Gentleman" ways and family gets Kate a thrown knife stuck in the wall by her head.
Douglas's portrayal here is powerful and charismatic and it is only Lancaster's own considerable screen presence that keeps Douglas from stealing every scene right out from under him. It is a long-standing fact that any attempt to do an Earp movie is going to be a challenge to whoever portrays Earp, because you realize, going in, that audience interest is going to gravitate, ultimately, to the far more colorful and interesting Holliday. Lancaster, to his credit, hangs in there and gets the job done.
The gunfight itself is wildly inaccurate historically, though not as much as was that in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine". There are wagons here, and "Cotton Wilson" (again...now taking on the role of Cochise County's crooked sheriff Johnny Behan), and Phin Clanton (who was not there), and John Ireland's Johnny Ringo (another one who was not there), and a secondary shoot-out in Fly's Photographic Gallery
involving Dennis Hopper's Billy Clanton (another event that never happened...as was Ike Clanton's being killed in the shoot-out). In keeping with the legend...and at odds with history...Doc Holliday shoots down the no good Johnny Ringo (in truth Ringo died months later and may have been a suicide).
Historically accurate? This gunfight? Heck no! But it IS a beautifully realized sequence. The pacing, editing, and ingenuity of the thing are first rate. This is just damn good filmmaking on view here.
The acting throughout the film is first rate as well. Earl Holliman is excellent as Dodge City deputy Charlie Bassett,
Rhonda Fleming does good duty as "Laura Denbow", a gambler gal who wins Earp's heart (and represents a vaguely semi-accurate version of Earp's true-life actress-singer girlfriend, Josephine "Josie" Marcus). Kenneth Tobey ("The Thing","Beast From 20,000 Fathoms", "It Came From Beneath the Sea", and "Davy Crockett And the River Pirates") turns in a great but all-too-brief Bat Masterson characterization that is one of the best I've seen. As for Bad guys, hey, Lee Van Cleef is there but gets it early on from Doc, and Lyle Bettger is his usual arrogant, oily self as Ike Clanton. The great Jack Elam is one of the McLaurys and he, of course, eats lead from Wyatt at the film's climax.
Produced by Hal Wallis (later to helm Duke Wayne's oscar winning "True Grit"), "Gunfight At the O.K. Corral" is a first rate fifties-style western that is just plain hard to beat. Good filmmaking is good filmmaking, whatever the era represented.
This one I recommend highly to anyone who loves the genre. And, if you find yourself liking this one, check out John Sturges's follow-up western (also starring Kirk Douglas and Earl Holliman), "Last Train From Gun Hill", available through Amazon.
Summary of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
Lancaster is Wyatt Earp and Douglas is Doc Holliday, in this film about their famous shoot-out against the Clanton gang.Genre: Westerns
Rating: NR
Release Date: 28-MAR-2006
Media Type: DVD
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