October 26, 1881. The prosperous mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, made rich and lively by a boom in silver. Grand enough to boast an opera house, two banks, four churches, fourteen gambling halls and sixty-six saloons, parochial enough to play host to violent flare-ups between town miners and the "country cowboys" who work the circumjacent ranches.
2:46 PM. Three brothers and a tubercular dentist of no small ill-repute start a long walk through town to disarm a band of cowboys who have been spoiling for a fight with them for many days. One of the brothers, Morgan Earp, worries that the men they seek will be on horseback; his brother Wyatt tells him if it is the case, they will shoot the horses first and then disarm the men.
2:47 PM. Virgil Earp, the city marshal, yells out, "Boys, throw up your hands! I want your guns." There is an ominous clicking as Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury cock their guns. Virgil shouts, "Hold on! I don't want that," but to no avail.
The shooting begins. Billy Clanton and Wyatt Earp fire first and simultaneously, Billy at Wyatt but Wyatt at Frank McLaury because he is known as the deadlier shot. Billy misses; Frank is gut-shot.
By 2:48, it is over. More than thirty shots have been fired. Three men will die of their wounds. At least one more will be gunned down some months later in retribution. The others will spend the rest of their lives reliving, retelling, distentangling the details of that thirty seconds, and living with its consequences.
The story has been a favorite in Hollywood since its beginnings, and Wyatt Earp himself was feted and lionized by the tinseltown elite. (Amongst the pall-bearers at his funeral were Tom Mix and William S. Hart.) But which of the many Hollywood versions tells truth about the incident, or about the notoriously abstruse details of Wyatt's own life? Even a cursory glance allows that OK Corral movies were generally less interested in historical truth-saying than in honoring or exploring the boundaries of the Oater and its heroes, and with expressing the current version of the ever-shifting American zeitgeist. Sadly bereft of TCM as I am, I can't find many of the early ones (the two Frontier Marshal films, both from the thirties, one with George O'Brien, the other with Randolph Scott, and Joel McCrea's Wichita are the ones I miss most acutely). Others, like Dodge City, veer so wildly off-track as to be unrecognizable as history at all and I leave them for another day.
Hour of the Gun: (1967. dir: John Sturges) James Garner offers a suitably stoical and fierce-in-family-loyalty Wyatt Earp. One of his kills may be my favorite in all of filmdom: the shooting of Warshaw, who goes flying back against the corral fence, bounces off to go flying back again as he gets the full six bullets. I realize how bloodthirsty that sounds, but you have to see it, how gracefully realistic it looks.
Sturges begins with a bold-faced lie: a message flashes onscreen promising that he's going to tell the story as it really happened. Hogwash, naturally; it's filled with blatant lies and fictions. One of the best parts is that it starts straight off with the corral. Jerry Goldsmith's music is great; there's a low-key suspense-theme playing while those four impressive figures meet up and embark on their death-march to that legendary thirty seconds.
One of the first things they get wrong is that although Doc Holliday (Jason Robards) was indeed carrying the shotgun, he was doing so because he had a long coat and so he could conceal it beneath its folds. This is the mid-sixties, though, and instead of his long coat and broad-brimmed gray hat, Doc is wearing natty peg-legs and Beatle-boots. It was an autumn day, cold with gusts of wind, but you'd never know that from most incarnations, this one included. In Hollywood's Tombstone, it's always sunny and warm.
Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) should have been much younger, not the patriarch of the family, and he was also drunk as a skunk on the day of the shootout. He'd been up all night playing poker with Virgil Earp, the doomed Tom McLaury and local Sheriff John Behan, and he kept up the drinking as constantly as he could into the morning. He also would have been woozy and infuriated from having been buffaloed, disarmed, dragged in front of a judge by Virgil Earp and fined. It is true he was unarmed at the corral and escaped following the first shots into Fly's photography shop, but in this version, Ryan's Ike is obviously both cunningly masterminding this shootout and slipping away to avoid it, with no sign of the previous traumas or visceral involvement the real Clanton endured.
Robards does his sad, wizened drunk thing, which works alright, but throughout there is talk that his drinking is what causes his coughing, whereas the opposite was really truer: his virulent TB drove him towards the temporary salve of drunkenness. That seems to be a trope which is repeated in every film, that it's the boozing that did him in, not the TB.
Curly Bill Brocius looked nothing like the young Jon Voigt (who nonetheless plays a compelling outlaw), and was killed in a sudden throwdown with Earp-led vigilantes at Mescal Springs amongst outlaw compadres, not alone in front of a saloon. Also, he was one of the "cowboys", occasionally employed at the Clanton ranch but nothing like a regular worker there, and in this version he is practically a right-hand man.
On the stand during the post-shootout hearing (and there was one), Robards' Holliday claims to have fought during the Civil War, which he never did.
Morgan Earp's death is done right, shot through the window of a billiard hall.
The womenfolk (Big-nosed Kate, Mattie and Josie and the other WAGs) do not appear in this version, and they are not missed. I did miss Johnny Ringo, if only because the mystery of his death is such a strange one, but really only Tombstone gives Ringo the fascination he deserves.
Dubious historicity aside, I liked this movie a lot.
My Darling Clementine: (1946. dir: John Ford) You go for awhile without a John Ford film and a suspicion creeps into your head that he's over-rated; the cheese and hogwash stick with you, all the things that made you wince, and the other stuff, the real stuff, starts to fade at the edges. Then you throw one on: say, My Darling Clementine, the movie with the lamest title ever; the Wyatt Earp movie that really has nothing to do with Wyatt Earp whatsoever but is somehow more about him than his real life was. You throw it on, and it starts right up with the cheese of the choirboy-cowboy singing that Ford loved so much and you think, yep, yep, over-rated. After that, it takes about one minute (maybe not so much; I'll time it sometime) before you're bowing and scraping in contrition.
This was the first film Ford made after the War (They Were Expendable was shot while fighting was still underway), and maybe he'd had some nonsense stripped away because I'd say it has less sugary goo and doiley-lace than most of the rest. For instance, nobody has any dying words. Someone gets shot, he dies. His brothers or some people find him dead, there's some kind of stately pieta-type of tableau, then they move on, they go on to get justice for this dead fellow.
I was going to say the camera-angles are perfect, but they're better than that; they're too fascinating to be perfect. The noir-western lighting is flawless, as is the editing, which is breathtaking. Dorothy Spencer takes all these amazing shots Ford and DP Joe McDonald give her and allows just enough space for the story to tell itself comfortably, not a breath too little, not a second too much.
Whoever thinks about Walter Brennan as a master thespian? He's a steadfast, dependable journeyman, or so I always thought, and yet his Pa Clanton is a mighty character, ruthless and unhesitating and frighteningly canny. The scene in which he waits smiling until Henry Fonda's Earp has left the room then takes a bullwhip to his sons in punishment is awesome to behold. And certainly this Doc Holliday, mawkish sentiment and all, is my favorite thing that Victor Mature ever did, for what that's worth.
None of this, you understand, has anything to do with history, despite the old saw about Ford knowing Earp on the old Hollywood sets and getting the true gen straight from the horse's mouth; that's all crap. He might have got a visual detail or two, but the shootout in the movie has no resemblance whatsoever to documented witness statements of the time. The real mccoy lasted about thirty seconds: six guys are waiting in a corral, four guys walk down the street and demand their guns, there's shooting, Ike Clanton says he's not armed and Wyatt says then get the hell out of the way, there's shooting, and then it's over but for the legalese and the legend.
Ford's shootout is far more interesting. There's strategy and subterfuge involved, and beautifully used clouds of dust stirred up by a passing stagecoach, and all the bad guys are dead by the end, and two of the good guys who survived in real life (Holliday and Virgil Earp) are also dead. In fact, the whole movie is fiction from beginning to end, but it plays like a dream. The real story wasn't shaped like a movie, and this one's a doozy. It gets some little details right, like the Birdcage Theatre, which looks just like the real Birdcage in Tombstone, with its strange, low boxes and the box-like claustrophobia of its audience space.
This Wyatt Earp (OK, it IS the young Henry Fonda, so, yeah) is much nicer than the real one. Other changes are inexplicable: why did he cast Ward Bond as Morgan Earp when he obviously should be playing Virgil, and why is Virgil slain prior to the shootout when he actually survived (and is buried in a Catholic cemetery near Sellwood in Portland, Oregon, as a matter of fact) when it's Morgan who should have died? There's no reason for it except that he's telling us this isn't history we're watching, and it's not: it's something far better.
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