Hour of the Gun **** (1967, James Garner, Jason Robards, Robert Ryan) – Classic Movie Review 2082

Director John Sturges revisits the same material as his 1957 classic Western Gunfight at the OK Corral when he directs this more historically accurate, but comparatively little known 1967 sequel of sorts. This first-rate movie boasts outstanding performances from Jason Robards as the outlaw Doc Holliday, Robert Ryan the villainous Ike Clanton and particularly James Garner in a surprisingly tough and hard-edged performance as the lawman Marshal Wyatt Earp.

Interestingly, the film begins with a more accurate version of the OK Corral gun battle with the Clanton gang in Tombstone, in which Earp kills a couple of the Clanton men. Then Earp and Holliday set off with a posse  to chase the killers and have vengeance on Ike Clanton (Ryan) after the shootout, in which Earp’s brothers Virgil and Morgan (Frank Converse and Sam Melville) are shot by Clanton’s men.

This is a powerful, compelling, dark-toned story delivered from the hip from guns-blazing screenwriter Edward Anhalt. Sturges’s direction hits the target, with the help of the moody music in Jerry Goldsmith’s distinguished score and Lucien Ballard’s striking widescreen colour cinematography.

Jon Voight makes his film début as a gunslinger called Curly Bill Brocius and writer Anhalt has a small cameo role as the Denver doctor. Also in the cast are Albert Salmi, Charles Aidman, Steve Ihnat, Michael Tolan, Larry Gates, Karl Swenson, Lonny Chapman, William Schallert, William Windom, Bill Fletcher, Austin Willis and Monte Markham.

The film starts with the real event that took place on October 26 1881. The gunfight was a 30-second-long, face-to-face affair with only a few firearms.

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 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.

James Garner, best known for his charming, wry anti-heroes in TV’s The Rockford Files and Maverick died on 19 July 2014, aged 86. He recovered from a quintuple heart bypass in 1998 but suffered a stroke in 2008.

His cinema roles include The Thrill of It All (1963), Move Over, Darling (1963), The Great Escape (1963), The Americanization of Emily (1964), Grand Prix (1966), Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969), Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), Sunset, Victor/Victoria (1982), Murphy’s Romance (1985) which earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination, Tank, Twilight, Maverick (1994), My Fellow Americans (1996), Space Cowboys (2000), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Notebook.

He received an Emmy nomination for best actor in Maverick in 1959 and won an Emmy as private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files in 1977.

RIP William Schallert, 8 May 2016.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2082

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