Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) - film review

Arizona, 1881.  Wyatt Earp is a lawman who is renowned for his sense of fair play and decency.  So, when a lynch mob comes after Doc Holliday, a gambler with a history of killing, Earp intervenes to save his life, despite his personal loathing for him.  Holliday repays the debt at a later date when Earp, marshal of Dodge City, has a run-in with a gang of sharpshooters.  Having grown weary of his life as a lawman, Earp decides to throw away his badge and settle down to marry Laura Denbow, a lady gambler he helped to reform.  But on the eve of his marriage, he receives a letter from his brother Virgil, the marshal of Tombstone, asking for his help in thwarting a cattle rustling operation organised by Ike Clanton and his brothers.  The Clantons are none too please when Earp shows up in Tombstone.  When the new marshal ignores their threats, they gun down his younger brother Jimmy.  Enlisting the help of Doc Holliday, the remaining Earp brothers agree to a final showdown with the Clantons, at the O.K. Corral...

This, the most popular film account of the famous Tombstone gun battle, helped to reinvigorate the western genre in the late fifties and, thanks to its star-led cast and stunning production values, sounded the death knell for the cheap B-movie western.   Leon Uris’s fanciful screenplay may play fast and loose with the facts, but through John Sturges’ assured direction and Charles Lang’s lush colour cinematography, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral stands as one of the most well-crafted examples of its genre, a classic western that wears its age remarkably well.

The casting of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday respectively is inspired, although the reverse casting may have made for a more interesting film.  Lancaster gives a solid performance as the incorruptible lawman but is perhaps more naturally suited for the part of the mercurial and morally ambiguous Holliday.  Although Lancaster and Douglas worked together on a number of films, this is arguably their most enjoyable collaboration, their on-screen rapport making this one of the earliest and best entries in the buddy movie genre.  Avid Star Trek fans will instantly recognise Deforest Kelly in one of his butch western roles, some years before he found lasting fame as Bones McCoy on board the USS Enterprise. 

Although the first half of the film moves at a sluggish pace, things soon pick up in the second half, building to a crescendo in the masterfully staged set-piece gunfight sequence.  Sturges brings dramatic tension and pathos to a denouement that somehow avoided the familiar clichés and set the standard for future westerns.  Dimitri Tiomkin’s evocative score includes a haunting tragicomic ballad (sung by Frankie Laine) which effectively knits together the film’s various episodes; sadly, this musical embellishment soon became one of the most notorious clichés of the western genre.

A decade later, John Sturges would direct Hour of the Gun, a more realistic account of the Tombstone gunfight, although this did not enjoy anything like the success of his 1957 film.  John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) may still be the definitive account of the infamous Earp-Clanton shoot-out, but Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral comes a close second, and remains one of the most highly regarded of the classic westerns.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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