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Gunfight at the O.K. Corral 4K

by Glenn Erickson Feb 17, 2024

Big stars, big action and a big sky canvas give Hal Wallis’ super-western everything we love in vintage oaters. Burt Lancaster & Kirk Douglas compare testosterone levels, with Rhonda Fleming and Jo Van Fleet cheering from the sidelines. The fabled showdown gun-down is embellished with VistaVision, Technicolor, and a classic clippety-clop soundtrack by Dimitri Tiomkin, aided by Frankie Laine. It was director John Sturges’ biggest picture yet, and it looks sensational in 4K Ultra HD.


Gunfight at the O.K. Corral 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1957 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 122 min. / Street Date February 27, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Rhonda Fleming, John Ireland, Lyle Bettger, Frank Faylen, Earl Holliman, Ted de Corsia, Dennis Hopper, Whit Bissell, John Hudson, DeForest Kelley, Martin Milner, Kenneth Tobey, Lee Van Cleef, Joan Camden, Olive Carey, Jack Elam, Charles Herbert.
Cinematography: Charles B. Lang Jr.
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Walter Tyler
Film Editor: Warren Low
Costume Design by: Edith Head
Original Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Written by Leon Uris from the Holiday magazine article The Killer by George Scullin
Produced by Hal B. Wallis
Directed by
John Sturges

John Ford’s My Darling Clementine is still the primary classic version of the legendary Tombstone shoot-out known as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but the great director John Sturges made two supremely entertaining westerns on the subject. The bigger-than-life action drama Gunfight at the O.K. Corral shows Hollywood at its best, turning out big-screen excitement that television couldn’t match. Twenty years later, Sturges and writer Edward Anhalt would team for a gritty, revisionist retelling of the famous event, the highly-recommended Hour of the Gun.

1957’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a confident law ‘n’ order opus that assures us that America is strong and righteous, and that bad guys never prevail. The movie has a terrific appearance. VistaVision and Technicolor give the exteriors a glorious Big Sky splendor, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s restless score transcends sagebrush clichés. Once again, we’re given an idealized take on what long ago became an American mythology. To hear director Sturges tell it, you’d think he was filming a truthful docudrama, as opposed to John Ford’s fairy tale version of events.

 

Novelist Leon Uris gives the early character-building scenes a sense of importance and gravity, before a grudge feud commences between the Earp, Clanton and McLowery clans. Marshall Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) wants to quit being a lawman but his brother Virgil (John Hudson) needs help keeping crooked rancher Ike Clanton (Lyle Bettger) in line. Although he’d like to head West and marry gambler Laura Denbow (Rhonda Fleming), Earp goes to Tombstone with his new friend Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), a flashy card sharp suffering from tuberculosis. The authority of a badge doesn’t clear things up — when Earp becomes a Federal Marshal, an ambush by Ike’s boys kill one of his brothers by mistake. The legal dispute then becomes a personal affair — the Earps versus the Clantons.

We western fans possess an active gene that inclines us to love glossy genre pictures. We eagerly anticipate every detail of Gunfight before it happens. We know that Burt Lancaster is going to be a humorless hero with a heart of gold, and that Kirk Douglas will be an intense stylish rogue, who beats up on his girlfriend Kate Fisher (Jo Van Fleet). There are no surprises among the cowpokes that they encounter: John Ireland is a testy gunslinger (in his second classic O.K. film), and Lyle Bettger plays yet another unredeemable bad guy.

Every galoot fits into his predetermined slot on the spectrum between good and bad. Freckled innocent Martin Milner meets a violent end almost identically to the way he did two years before in Pete Kelly’s Blues. Earl Holliman is young but seasoned, while Star Trek’s DeForest Kelly and John Hudson (The Screaming Skull) are solid family men.

 

Crossing the line from good to bad, Dennis Hopper contributes a James Dean bit as a ‘troubled youth’ in a bad environment. The crooked Sheriff Cotton Wilson is Frank Faylen, the taxi driver Ernie from It’s a Wonderful Life. We get a broad selection of gunslingers & other types fated not to survive to the end of the picture. Two classic bad men, Lee Van Cleef and Jack Elam, make archetypal appearances. Ted de Corsia is a roughneck cattle boss and Kenneth Tobey gets a short bit as none other than our old friend Bat Masterson.

When it comes to Westerns, the words stereotype and predictable are not necessarily derogatory. Like comforting fables, these stories restage familiar crises to assure us that the traditional ways are best: women should stay out of bars and remain loyal to one man, and male friendship is the highest virtue. Doing the right thing comes at a price. Justice inevitably adds more graves to Boot Hill, mostly assorted bad guys and unlucky featured players. These are bedtime tales for grown men.

 

The ‘lawless frontier’ is a myth. If anything, too much law was involved.

Leon Uris’s version of the events around the famous gundown are almost as fanciful as John Ford’s mythologizing, and nowhere near as believable as the morally messy Hour of the Gun. The historic confrontation wasn’t as clear-cut as most movies make out. The Earps took jobs as lawmen mainly to wield political power, and they and the Clantons had competing cattle interests. Several overlapping city, territorial and state jurisdictions were in play. When the shooting began, participants on both sides were said to be carrying valid arrest warrants for their opposite numbers. Small claims court wasn’t going to be able to settle this one. The gunfight did not finish the feud. Ike Clanton wasn’t killed at the Corral.

The roles are no stretch for two stars that bring considerable stature to their roles. Burt Lancaster didn’t like riding horses, which may account for Wyatt’s using a buckboard when he can. He didn’t want to make another western, and accepted the role only after producer Hal Wallis sweetened the deal with a second movie Burt did want to do, The Rainmaker.

 

Hal Wallis had years before given Kirk Douglas his start at $1,250 a week, and now his going price was $200,000. Fresh from chewing French scenery in Lust for Life, Douglas stresses Doc Holliday’s semi-psychotic personality, but thankfully doesn’t overdo the coughing fits. Rhonda Fleming is just okay as Lancasters’s love interest, but makes an interestingly classy lady gambler.    Fleming later told author Glenn Lovell that she thought John Sturges just used her for ‘window dressing.’

Acting honors for the whole show go to recent supporting actress Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet.    As Doc Holliday’s girlfriend Kate Fisher, Van Fleet resembles old photos of alcoholic frontier molls. Her status as a fallen woman is confirmed when she switches loyalties, back and forth, between Holliday and John Ireland’s Johnny Ringo. Kate stays sympathetic even when she fails to warn the heroes of an ambush. She and Douglas compete to see who can be more of a lowlife — she scowls, while he looks like he’s going to explode. When Doc roughs up Kate, she seems to be saying, “Is that the best you can do?”  Between Elia Kazan’s East of Eden and Wild River, Jo Van Fleet gets our vote as a top film actress of the 1950s.

 

With its relaxed pace Gunfight seems longer than its 122 minutes, yet it is wholly satisfying. The actual gunfight expands history’s 30-second flurry of shots into a full-on battle. It’s just as violent as John Ford’s version, and much more glamorized. Lancaster and Douglas’s showboat gunslingers give John Sturges a template for his later ‘mythomanic’ western The Magnificent Seven. The impression of dawn light on the clean rocks of a dry wash is excellent, and so is the groan-inducing ‘THOOMP-BOOM’ of a key shotgun blast that catches one Clanton full in the face. Dennis Hopper fumbles, stumbles and whines his method-y way to an ignominious demise. We wonder if Lancaster wanted that topical action so as to make his Wyatt ‘sensitive’ to juvenile delinquents.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral looks clean and pretty at all times. Wyatt and Doc dress so well that Tombstone must boast an excellent dry cleaning establishment. The show had many locations, with the town split between Arizona’s familiar ‘Old Tucson’ set later used in Rio Bravo, and the western set on the main Paramount lot four blocks from CineSavant Central in Hollywood. Cameraman Charles Lang chooses good angles to disguise the fake mountain backdrop behind the Earps and Doc Holliday as they start out for the O.K. Corral. Sturges uses a four-abreast formal march down main street, a convention that’s been around since the silent days. Some giant cacti are present to connect the two locations. Is it just me, or does having the prickly things right there on the sidewalks somehow look fake?  

 

When Frankie Laine sings, every word gets extra stress.

Composer Dimitri Tiomkin accompanies the VistaVision logo with crashing chords suitable for the entrance of angels with flaming swords. That rude blast that soon settles into a folksy, bouncy clip-a-clop ballad that any 3 year-old would immediately associate with horses. Frankie Laine sang at least a dozen main themes for Westerns, but few as memorable as this title vocal. Laine returns at regular intervals, singing overly literal lyrics that describe Wyatt’s state of inner confusion, a repetition of the issues in Tex Ritter’s song from High Noon. Words like ‘killers’ and ‘die’ get exaggerated emphasis. Several stanzas begin with ‘Boot Hill,’ which the chorus echoes, thusly:

Laine: “Boot Hill”  Chorus:  “Boot Hill  Boot Hill  Boot Hill …”
Laine: “Boot Hill”  Chorus:  “Boot Hill  Boot Hill  Boot Hill …”
Laine: “So Cold”  Chorus:  “Mighty Cold  Mighty Cold  Mighty Cold …”
Laine: “So Still!”  Chorus:  “So still,  so still,  so still…”

The clip-a-clop rhythm will have you bobbing up and down and singing along. Well, maybe. Either way the music is a major factor in the enjoyment of the picture. It’s ironic that Russian-born Tiomkin would be the composer to best capture the ‘epic glory’ of the West, in pictures like Red River and The Big Sky.

 

Just as director John Sturges earned his ‘A’ status, his creative freedom was challenged by a shift in power in the industry. He had been adept at gaining the trust of studio bosses, but movies were becoming ‘deals’ in which key movie stars had more clout than most directors. Sturges’ initial success was tied in to his ability to elicit cooperation from troublesome actors like Spencer Tracy. But he would later meet his match with Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen, who altered scripts to their personal advantage, and sometimes wouldn’t take direction. When he lost creative control, it can be argued that Sturges fell out of love with the movie game.

But Sturges was riding high during the filming of Gunfight. Fresh from the succès d’estime of Bad Day at Black Rock, he had earned his place of authority on the set. He used firm diplomacy to prevent Burt Lancaster from overriding his decisions. When Lancaster wrote an extra ‘noble speech’ for himself, Sturges obediently filmed it, but didn’t put it into the cut. To be fair, the director added other bits of dialogue on his own, against the objections of Leon Uris.

John Sturges reported that Lancaster called him a ‘nowheresville’ director — but took back that opinion when he saw and loved the finished product. Burt happily accepted the starring role in Sturges’ The Hallelujah Trail, nine years later.

We recommend Glenn Lovell’s career biography of John Sturges.

 


 

The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a delight for lovers of classic westerns — they don’t get as good-looking as this one. The big-format VistaVision images have blazing colors, little grain and impressive clarity. We were able to see a studio print once at a museum screening, under optimal conditions. The 4K disc rendition recaptures the full experience. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral came out on a Warners-Paramount Blu-ray in 2014. This release is identified as a ‘brand new HDR/Dolby Vision Master.’

Everything about the show pleases on repeated viewings. The music is a major reason that we replay it every couple of years. The museum screening impressed us with VistaVision’s higher-fidelity audio. The improved gunshots really deliver a BOOM quality. Paramount’s sound engineers had perfected ear-splitting gunshots for George Stevens’ Shane. Home theater enthusiasts should have no trouble reproducing that effect.

The previous disc had no extras, but Kino Lorber adds a spirited commentary-conversation from their house western experts C. Courtney Joyner, with Henry Parke of True West magazine. Some of their talk includes facts about the real gunfight, from October 26, 1881.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Gunfight at the O.K. Corral 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and one Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
February 14, 2024
(7078ok)
CINESAVANT

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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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david smith

Absolutely love this film. Burt’s westerns were all awesome: Ulzana, Vera Cruz and the Professionals. Even late efforts like Valdez and Lawman are excellent. In the past i’ve seen slightly sniffy reviews on this Stuges effort comparing it unfavourably with Black Rock etc. You can’t beat the Vistavision

cadavra

Some corrections: HOUR OF THE GUN was ten years later, not 20. It’s DeForest Kelley, not Kelly. And Lancaster wasn’t at all happy about doing HALLELUJAH, not only because he wasn’t comfortable doing broad comedy but mainly because UA forced him to do it at a tiny fraction of his usual salary to make up for all the losses his Hecht-Hill-Lancaster pictures had piled up.

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[…] the promotion and premiere of Paramount’s much bigger VistaVision and Technicolor western  Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, an attraction that made Anthony Mann’s picture look like a glorified TV […]

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