Gunfight at the OK Corral ***** (1957, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland) – Classic Movie Review 1393

In one of their finest Westerns, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas star together as marshal Wyatt Earp and gunslinger Doc Holliday for director John Sturges’s 1957 classic Gunfight at the OK Corral. It certainly deserves its place in any Best of the West film collection.

The film is based on a real event that took place on October 26 1881 and fancifully re-creates, or rather reinvents Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday’s gunfight with the Clanton gang in Tombstone. It’s an exciting movie and there’s plenty of mounting tension and just enough action as it builds steadily and surely to its famous classic culminating gunfight climax.

All its ingredients work a treat and contribute to the film’s enormous success: the iconic, dynamic Douglas and Lancaster performances, good star support from Rhonda Fleming (as a gorgeous gambler named Laura Denbow) and Jo Van Fleet (as Holliday’s girl, Kate Fisher), the stupendous character support, Hal B Wallis’s widescreen production for the Paramount Pictures studio, director Sturges’s sharp shooting, novelist Leon Uris’s stalwart screenplay from an article story by George Scullin, and Frankie (Rawhide) Laine memorably singing the title tune.

The main title song Gunfight at the OK Corral sung by Frankie Laine has music by Dimitri Tiomkin and lyrics by Ned Washington.

It is a very striking looking picture, shot by Charles B Lang Jr in widescreen and Technicolor.

George Scullin’s article story The Killer appeared in the 1954 cosmopolitan travel wishbook Holiday Magazine. It was published from 1946 to 1977, with more than one million subscribers at its height, employing writers such as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Lawrence Durell, James Michener and E B White.

John Ireland, Frank Faylen, Kenneth Tobey, Earl Holliman, Lee Van Cleef, DeForest Kelley, Dennis Hopper, Ted de Corsia, Jack Elam, Lyle Bettger, George Mathews, Whit Bissell and Martin Milner head the great cast of character actors, several of them legendary names.

The film is only loosely based on the actual event in 1881 and does not bother too much with historical accuracy. In reality, the culminating gunfight was a 30-second-long, face-to-face affair with only a few firearms, not the medium-range, heavily armed shootout as portrayed in the movie.

Gunfight at the OK Corral was a big hit and earned $4.7 million on its initial cinema release and $6 million on re-release. Its budget was $2 million.

Good buddies Lancaster and Douglas made several films together over the decades, including I Walk Alone (1948), The Devil’s Disciple (1959), Seven Days in May (1964), and Tough Guys (1986).

Sturges revisited the same material when he later directed a more historically accurate sequel of sorts, Hour of the Gun, starring James Garner and Jason Robards as Earp and Holliday. Interestingly, the film begins with a more accurate version of the OK Corral gun battle.

The OK Corral story is famously told in Stuart N Lake’s book Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, which was filmed as Frontier Marshal in 1934 and as Frontier Marshal in 1939, and again by John Ford as the classic My Darling Clementine in 1946 with Henry Fonda as Earp, Victor Mature as Holliday and Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton.

The cast are Burt Lancaster as Marshal Wyatt Earp, Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday, Rhonda Fleming as Laura Denbow, Jo Van Fleet as Kate Fisher, John Ireland as Johnny Ringo, Lyle Bettger as Ike Clanton, Frank Faylen as Sheriff Cotton Wilson, Earl Holliman as Deputy Sheriff Charlie Bassett, Ted de Corsia as Shanghai Pierce, Dennis Hopper as Billy Clanton, Whit Bissell as John Clum, George Mathews as John Shanssey, John Hudson as Virgil Earp, DeForest Kelley as Morgan Earp, Martin Milner as James ‘Jimmy’ Earp, Lee Van Cleef as Ed Bailey, Jack Elam as Tom McLowery, Peter Lawman as Jack Morgan, Brian G Hutton as Rick, and Kenneth Tobey as Bat Masterson.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1393

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