(...in which I continue my quest to snuffle out the occasional historical fact from the mass of Hollywood hocum and bunk that's been spun around the West's most famous and enduring shoot-out.)
Gunfight at the OK Corral: (1957. dir: John Sturges again!) Burt Lancaster is Wyatt Earp, only he walks like a dancer and smiles too much. Or maybe it's not that he smiles too much, but that his face is far too lyrical to belong to the stoical Earp. Kirk Douglas is Doc Holliday, and dazzlingly tony in those fancy waistcoats. In fact, the one great good thing about this version is the easy chemistry between its two leads; when one or the other is missing from the screen, the story lags.
This one starts way before Tombstone, back in Dodge, with Wyatt Earp co-marshalling with Bat Masterson. Even so, he's already following Ike Clanton and Johnny Ringo, notorious rustlers, set up as a sort of nemesis-duo for him and Holliday (Ringo even steals Big-Nose Kate in this one), which of course is all fluff and padding, but plays well enough. This is, however, the one time you'll see Big-Nose Kate with an actually sizable nose (Jo Van Vleet!) and she and Holliday enjoy a trashy, tempestuous, completely dysfunctional relationship, a supposition which probably keeps some truck with non-fiction.
The lady gambler (Rhonda Fleming as Earp's entirely fictional love interest; he would have been involved with his laudanum-addicted common-law wife Mattie Blaylock at that time) is badly written and nothing but a maddening diversion. Maybe she's trying to be Feathers (Rio Bravo will be another few years down the line), but poor Feathers needs a better writer (apparently Leon Uris has some trouble writing for the ladies) and certainly a more fascinating actress before she makes her long-awaited entrance into this world. Another annoyance is that poker, as in so many films, is portrayed as a game won not occasionally or dishonestly, but with unebbing continuity if one lives, as Holliday does, within the graces of the appropriate gods. By his own testimony, his secret is not caring about losing his money or his life, and so he never loses.
Also annoying is the Donna Reed Show squeak of cleanliness exuded by the Earp clan, who were in reality as often running, living in, and arrested in brothels as they were working as lawmen. One of the more compelling things about the Wyatt Earp legend is that he is equal parts criminal and lawman, and it seems almost a random historical hiccup that he is remembered in his star-sporting and law-abiding persona. Reading about the Earp clan, you get a strong impression that they went where the money was, and weren't particular about what tasks might be demanded or what company might be kept.
It is the slaying of young Jimmy Earp, as in the Ford movie, which sets off the killing, although in real life he was the oldest brother and a saloon-keeper in Tombstone. He was not present at the OK Corral, left Tombstone with his brother Morgan's body and died of natural causes in his eighties in California.
As usual, the shootout itself is a big sackful of highly photogenic lies. Johnny Ringo is there (he wasn't), the invitation has been sent in advance for a specific hour (it wasn't), and it is Billy Clanton, not Ike, who stumbles into Fly's Photographic Studio and is there picked off by Holliday (he wasn't). Frank McLaury, hiding in a wagon, fires the first shot at Ike Clanton's urging (in reality, all participants were out in the open, maybe ten feet apart), and the only words we hear are Doc saying, "Hit the dirt!" when in fact it was Virgil who started things off by demanding the cowboys disarm. (Interestingly, Virgil was carrying a walking stick, which you don't see often at a shoot-out. He'd taken it from Doc Holliday after giving him instead the shotgun to carry.) This cinematic shootout is a massive endeavour of choreographed running and tumbling and hunkering behind things, a fiery climax that continues for several minutes longer than its original did.
The verdict: see it for Douglas and Lancaster, but don't expect to learn from it.
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