Category: Kirk Douglas

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Sturges
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland, DeForest Kelley, and a young bit player named Dennis Hopper
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Fresh

PLOT: Lawman Wyatt Earp and outlaw Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance which culminates in their participation in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.


In real life, the legendary gunfight at the O.K Corral in the frontier town of Tombstone lasted thirty seconds, but what kind of movie would that be?  (Kill Bill: Vol. 2 springs to mind…)  A 1950’s Western requires a long-to-medium shot of the good guys – Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday – striding down the street to meet the challenge of the dastardly Clantons, who had gunned down Wyatt’s youngest brother in cold blood.  We need a gunfight, not too long, but longer than 30 seconds.  And we need to make sure the ratio of surviving bad guys to good guys is just right: 0 to all.

John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral delivers the goods in a remarkably mature film for its time, free (for the most part) of cheap sentimentality and distractions from the main plot.  That’s a double-edged sword, though: we rarely leave the side of either Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but the result is we get little to no information about Earp’s brothers until the final reel, nor do we get many details about Earp’s romance with the lovely Laura Denbow, a high-class gambler who knows enough about cards to beat the men at their own game.  We only find out they’re engaged as an afterthought, it seems.

As for Doc Holliday’s relationship with Kate Fisher (Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet), the word “dysfunctional” is woefully inadequate.  Loosely based on Holliday’s real mistress, referred to only as “Big Nose Kate” on Wikipedia, she seems to exist only to serve as Holliday’s psychological punching bag when required.  Her emotional yo-yoing gave me whiplash: she pledges her unending devotion in one scene, tries to stab him in another, helps him escape a lynch mob, takes up with the loathsome Johnny Ringo after yet another fight, begs to be taken back, and eventually tells him, “I’ll see you dead!”  With friends like these…

But even that kind of sordid melodrama is not enough to derail the throughline of the film, which is focused intently on establishing the rocky relationship between the morally good Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) – who nevertheless wears a black hat the entire film – and the morally chaotic Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), a professional gambler who leaves a string of dead bodies behind him, all killed in self-defense, of course.  Earp also helps get Holliday out of town before a mob can lynch him, so Holliday decides to stick around until the debt is paid.

I think the essence of their relationship is summed up in a scene where Earp is forced to deputize Holliday when no other options are available.  Earp reluctantly walks up to Doc, tells him to raise his right hand, and says, “Do you solemnly swear to uphold…oh, this is ridiculous.  You’re deputized.”  Doc: “Wait a minute, don’t I get to wear a tin star?”  Earp: “Not on your life!”  Both men are torn between their philosophy and their sense of honor.  Holliday is no hero, but he’ll help Wyatt until his debt is paid.  Earp despises Holliday’s moral code, but he’s the best gunslinger in town.  What can you do?

All of this is handled in dialogue that seems mostly uncluttered by the hokey clichés I’ve heard in so many other films of the 1950s, even some of the great ones.  This may perhaps be due to the fact the screenplay was written by Leon Uris, a novelist who would eventually go on to write, among many others, Exodus, Topaz, and QB VII.  Listening to the characters talk, it was interesting to hear how natural they sounded, compared to the overblown melodrama of so many other westerns and dramas of that era.  The dialogue was clearly written by someone with a writer’s ear, who wants to get to the point of every scene with a minimum of fuss or flowery exposition.

As I mentioned, however, this quest for directness means we spend all our time with Earp and Holliday and almost no time at all with the Clantons or Earp’s brothers or anyone else.  By the time we hear Wyatt’s brother, Virgil, is in trouble, we’ve almost forgotten he HAS brothers.  As far as the Clantons go, we hear everything about them secondhand until we finally meet them in Tombstone.  We never even see Wyatt propose to Laura; we barely even see them courting (their courtship appears to consist of one false arrest and one kiss in the moonlight).

And I would be remiss if I did not mention…that song.  I learn from IMDb that the song, “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” that plays over the opening and closing credits, and which also plays over any transitional scene as Earp moves from one town to the next, was one of the inspirations for the theme song for Mel Brooks’s parody Blazing Saddles.  Brooks even got the original artist, Frankie Laine, to sing for his own movie.  It is so corny and earnest, juxtaposed against the gritty characters and scenery, that any sequence featuring that song loses all credibility.  If the filmmakers had just ditched that song, I might consider this one of the greatest Westerns of all time.  (see also Rio Bravo with Ricky Nelson’s crooning.)

But…having said all that, I must report that Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was entertaining from start to finish.  By avoiding the temptations to give in to melodrama and hokeyness, we are presented with a surprisingly solid Western drama that culminates in a decent (for the late ‘50s) gun battle.  It’s not as flashy as anything from one of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, and it’s not quite as thrilling as the one at the end of 1993’s Tombstone, but it’s satisfying, nevertheless.

(And for the record, when it comes to memorable lines, against Val Kilmer’s immortal “I’m your huckleberry”, I would gladly put Kirk Douglas’s venomous, “You slut!” …you have to see it in context, trust me.)

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964)

by Miguel E. Rodrigugez

DIRECTOR: John Frankenheimer
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Martin Balsam
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91%

PLOT: United States military leaders plot to overthrow the President because he supports a nuclear disarmament treaty, and they fear a Soviet sneak attack.


Barely two years after The Manchurian Candidate shocked audiences, director John Frankenheimer delivered the goods again with a political conspiracy thriller that is the equal of Candidate in almost every way.  Were it not for some overcooked sermonizing during a transitional scene, I would almost call Seven Days in May a perfect example of the genre.  I’m frankly a little surprised it’s not mentioned more often in the same breath with other similar thrillers like Fail Safe, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor.

The action starts on a Monday and, predictably, spools out over the next seven days.  We learn that the current American President, Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, this being the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s.  His actions have brought his approval ratings to a record-setting low, and demonstrators outside the White House express their desire to see someone else in the Oval Office: General James Scott (Burt Lancaster), a hawkish individual who sees no evidence the Russians will ever honor such a treaty.  General Scott’s aide is Colonel “Jiggs” Casey (Kirk Douglas), a soldier who disagrees with Scott’s views privately, but who knows his duties and performs them admirably.

Over the next couple of days, Casey picks up scraps of conversations from senators and other generals critical of the President.  There is talk of the President attending an “alert”, or an exercise in which armed forces are scrambled in a drill; uncharacteristically, he’s attending alone – no press.  A friend of Casey’s mentions something called “ECOMCON”, a secret Army base in El Paso, and a mysterious “Site Y.”  A Pentagon messenger relays a teletype message from General Scott to other members of the Joint Chiefs about who’s placing bets in the Preakness pool…then gets transferred to Pearl Harbor.  Casey wonders why questions about a horse race would be broadcast over Top Secret channels…

Watching Casey piece the clues together is one of the pleasures of this movie.  It never talks down to the audience, depending on them to follow Casey’s line of reasoning while he draws his own conclusions.  Once he brings his suspicions to the President, and the President elects not to attend the alert, things start happening very fast.  It’s here where the height of suspense occurs, as three men are sent in different directions to accomplish three separate fact-finding missions.  As each man got closer to achieving their goal, there was a feeling in the air, a vibe, a tone that felt like disaster was just around the corner, knocking on the next-door window.  A man drives his car into the desert in search of the secret base in El Paso, and I half-expected the sands to just open up and swallow him whole.

Frankenheimer always was an expert at that kind of suspense generation.  Second only to Hitchcock among his contemporaries, he was a genius at creating tense situations with a minimum of flash, depending on strength of story and screenplay, and his actors, to generate a nervous tension in his viewers.  Those powers are on full display here.

It’s odd…Seven Days in May is a political thriller that doesn’t have any real action scenes or sequences.  A plane crash is referenced but never seen, as opposed to today’s films that would make room in the special FX budget to show audiences the crash.  At least in this film, it’s far more effective when it’s revealed but never seen.  That’s pretty gutsy.  There are no pumped-up chase scenes between a guy with crucial evidence and the shadow forces trying to keep it a secret.  It’s all handled very simply, which makes everything more plausible…and, as a further result, much more suspenseful.

I haven’t mentioned Ava Gardner’s character yet, Eleanor Holbrook, a former lover of General Scott’s.  How she figures in Casey’s plans to uncover evidence of Scott’s treason leads to a devastating scene involving old love letters and mistaken assumptions.  It’s some brilliantly incisive writing, and another example of how the movie achieves plausibility through simplicity.

Any further discussion would necessarily involve spoilers, so I’ll stop here.  Seven Days in May is a prime example of a good story told well, with hardly any bells or whistles.  It reminded me, for some reason, of some of those classic ‘80s thrillers where their only reason for existence was to turn up the tension without getting bogged down in subtext (Body Heat, No Way Out, Blow Out).  There is that one sermonizing speech, as I mentioned before, and I cringed a little when it happened, but it’s a minor quibble.  This is a superior thriller that deserves to be seen.