Gunfight At The O.K. Corral

Burt and Kirk Take on the Clantons!
'Gunfight at O.K. Corral' is one of the many films that have told the tale of the famous showdown between the Earps and the Clantons, but what sets this version apart is the casting of Burt Lancaster as the straight-shooting Marshal Wyatt Earp, and Kirk Douglas as the sardonic, dying gambler, Doc Holliday. As in all their pairings, there is a chemistry between them that makes even mundane scripts seem magical!

Lancaster, continuing his rule of alternating between heavy drama and action films, researched the historic Earp extensively, speaking to many who knew him, and his performance is restrained and assured. Douglas, on the other hand, fresh from playing Vincent Van Gogh in 'Lust for Life', knew he needed a splashy hit film, and played Doc Holliday as larger than life, swaggering, diseased, and charismatic. His portrayal is far closer in spirit to the interpretions of Holliday by Val Kilmer, in 'Tombstone', and Dennis Quaid, in 'Wyatt Earp', than Victor Mature, in John...

The Big Gunfight, Retold Yet Again
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...

Better than OK
Much like its predecessor "My Darling Clementine", this film uses the names of real people for its characters - the Earps, Clantons, Doc Holliday - but has virtually nothing to do with historial reality. It's a marvelous film nonetheless and entirely different in its feel and approach from "Clementine." "Gunfight" focuses on the friendship between occasional marshall Wyatt Earp and occasional gunman John Holliday (Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas), and if anything underplays the intense bond between the two men in real life. Screenwriter Leon Uris telescopes several years of events into a few months to fit the movie, and director John Sturges was never better at the pacing and staging of his story. For my money this is Kirk Douglas' greatest performance; the combination of menace and degraded dignity he gives the TB-ridden Holliday is something to see. Just as great as the performances and production work is Dimitri Tiomkin's score. It's so powerful...

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