This is strictly Hollywood. If one reads even the most fundamental biographies of the Earps and their associates, we come to realize that their feud with the Clantons is overblown by writers who wished to satisfy an audience. The Earps and Doc Holliday were far from perfect enforcer's of the law. Wyatt was as much a politician as he was a lawman, having on many occasions to try to appease a population that didn't especially like him. Doc Holliday was a user and abuser and a very sick man. The Earp brother had their own problems. One of the foibles, especially of Wyatt, was being bad judges of women. This film makes them saviors and, in the Western tradition, black and white. The shootout is a lot of fun as is the suspense leading up to it. It's certainly not a biopic, but it's a really fun Western.

Save yourself the trouble. There is nothing to see here you probably haven't before, and better, especially if you have seen High Noon.With the corny opening theme song by Dimitri Tiomkin, it is painfully obvious that this is going to be a second rate attempted sequel to High Noon. The scenes of trees amid the hilly desert brush are virtually identical, except this version is in wide screen color -- and minus the political moralizing that torqued off the conservatives.It worked at the time, judging from the box office. And why not? Wide screen color spectacles were still new in the Fifties, and it wasn't bad enough to leave the theater. But today we have the pause and eject buttons. I made it through to the end, but only with great difficulty and frequent use of the pause button.Unlilke High Noon, I just didn't care about the characters. There was no coherent thread to the story, just a series of events, until about an hour in we finally shift to Tombstone. Then the dialog perks up, and the score starts to imitate a Rachmaninoff symphony. Spoiler alert:And then there is a gunfight. At the O.K. Corral. If there is any reason to watch this movie it is to see some of the secondary players in off-character roles: namely Frank Faylen, the father of Dobie Gillis and taxi driver in It's a Wonderful LIfe; and Dennis Hopper as the baby faced Billy Clanton. Look, any movie with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas can't be all bad, but this one comes close because their hearts don't really seem to be in their roles.The most interesting scene is watching Kirk Douglas shave. I mean, just how does he shave that cavernous dimple? We see him whisk a straight razor across his face and, presto, no stubble -- and no bloody nicks. He tells Earp: "I like a sharp razor." Right. Call me a cynic, but that was no more a real razor than they were using real bullets. Still, it is of some cinematic historical interest, mainly for its influence on the spoof "Support Your Local Sheriff." And the bit where the bad guy is swinging from a chandelier seems to have been the inspiration for a similar scene in Gremlins. I'm giving this a 5, but if you try to imagine it without Burt and Kirk, and only have the anemic plot and script, it is down to a 4 or 3. Heck, I only finished watching it an hour ago, and I can barely remember the first half.

Unfortunately this big production western is over-inflated. That's an endemic problem for movies of this expensive type. It's a star-studded cast, which means the headliners, Lancaster, Douglas, Fleming, and Van Fleet (coming off an Oscar for East of Eden {1954}), must get appropriate screen time. The result here is that the story gets stretched out into too many subplots and a leisurely pace. Of course, the gunfight at OK Corral should be the centerpiece. Instead, however, it's simply one more episode in an episodic narrative. First, we have to get through the many other gunfights and romantic interludes that stretch out the 2-hour run-time. Thus, the big showdown loses much of its in-built suspense. It also doesn't help that the Clanton's, with the exception of Billy (Hopper), are underwritten. In short, the bad guys are not etched strongly enough as individuals, which would have made the shootout more personal and suspenseful.That's not to say headliners Douglas (Holliday) and Lancaster (Earp) are not excellent in their roles. They are. It is to say that the Laura (Fleming) role should have been junked as unnecessary, glamour value or no, while Kate's (VanFleet) role should have been reduced since we get the idea early on. Of course, Hollywood was still trying to out-compete TV in 1956, which likely explains much of the movie's unnecessary sprawl. What the movie does do well is develop the friendship between Earp and Holliday, without sentimentalizing it. Also the VistaVision makes for an impressive visual experience that TV could not emulate. Nonetheless, I'm afraid this version of the celebrated gunfight, suffers in comparison with John Ford's tightly done, My Darling Clementine (1946), even if the latter is filmed in lowly b&w.(In passing—I don't go to movies for historical accuracy, nor do I expect it from an industry whose overriding object is profit.)

Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957)This has the makings of a classic, and of course the story is one of the great ture legends of the Wild West. Burt Lancaster as the tough and unbending lawman and Kirk Douglas as the unpredictable semi-lawless cad are both great, and the best scenes are probably those with the two of them. The rest of the cast is reasonable, some of them really good, though maybe the all important bad guys lacked some kind of wild evil they might have needed (a Lee Marvin intensity). One of the bad guys, Johnny Ringo, is played by a nice guy actor, John Ireland, even though Ringo was never part of thie OK Corral story. It does have a young Dennis Hopper, which is fun to see (and Hopper hailed from Dodge City itself in real life).Still, it looked like it would really be equivalent to "Rio Bravo" and others from the same time period.Not so, not for me. And it's simply because of that whole range of different things that add up in a great movie and slip and slither in a decent one. For example, there are a number of interludes with horses walking through the big landscape and the corny theme song is sung through a new verse. I can't believe this was effective even at the time (music from 1957 in general wasn't so corny and fakey, including country music), but now it deadened the flow. Likewise the series of events didn't always seem to lead one to the next in a compelling way, as the interludes allowed a shift in location and sometimes a whole new situation to develop.One problem (if this is a problem) is that it's based on facts. I think this made the movie makers add information and keep switching towns simply because it was the way it was and they thought they must. Maybe they did. Oddly, they got lots of the essentials wrong that might actually make a better movie if someone wants to take another crack at it (quick details at wikipedia). The final famous shootout is fun and well done but way too obvious with the good guys always getting their target and the bad guys missing, or hitting a leg.So why the reputation? It isn't bad, and it is always compelling to see Douglas in particular in almost any film. The filming (by Charles Lang, one of the greats) is first rate, and so just watching, whatever the scene, is enjoyable.