A Calendar of Hollidays: John Sturges in Tombstone, Part Two

The Voice of Conscience. Jason Robards Jr., Hour of the Gun (1967).

Ten years later, Sturges made a sequel of sorts to OK Corral starring James Garner and Jason Robards, Jr. It starts off with the gunfight and purports to tell the true story of what happened afterwards (the murder trial, Virgil getting shot, Morgan getting killed playing pool, Wyatt getting revenge) but its just as fictional in its own way as the previous film. Virgil is older than Wyatt, not younger; Ike Clanton never holed up in Mexico and Earp didn't kill him; and the faux-spaghetti-western coldness of Garner's Earp owes more to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name than history. In fact, that's what this movie feels like: an attempt at a spaghetti western, only without any of the sauce, so all you end up with is a plate full of cold pasta.

I am the only nutritious part of this meal.

All bones and no meat except for Robards, who seems to stand off to the side of the action, which is straight out of the "hunt down a killer/kill him/repeat till everyone is dead" school of revenge movies. It's hard not to compare this to another movie from the same school, a movie that was taking geometry when Hour of the Gun was taking algebra: Hang 'Em High, made just one year later, which has that operatic, over-the-top quality that Gun is missing. (It also has Inger Stevens, which a lot of other movies in the 60's were missing.)

I can't wait to start filming Once Upon A Time In The West

Robards is about ten years too old to play Doc, but given that guys in their 30's in the 19th Century looked 45 to 50, the look fits. He coughs a lot more Kirk Douglas, but he never really looks ill. Just tired and fed up. And after trying to talk sense into Garner's Wyatt Earp for two hours, who wouldn't be? In this movie, Earp is the bad guy, telling innocent bystanders "You have a lot more to fear from me than Ike Clanton" while Holliday looks on from the side. It's a logical extension from OK Corral; in this movie, Earp's rectitude has hardened into the God-given right to kill anybody in the name of revenge.

I'm going to sit here and watch you hurt people.

The film is ostensibly about law and order, which is why there's the same three-part structure to all the confrontations: Earp works within the law to seek justice, the law fails, and Earp has to choose whether to go outside the law to get justice. Which would only be a real choice if there was a struggle involved, but there's no struggle at all. Just distance and irony.

The Big Irony: once Morgan's shot and Virgil's wounded, there's a reward for the arrest and conviction of those involved--not dead or alive, arrest and conviction. So naturally Holliday is in it for the money, as is the rest of the posse, and just as naturally, Earp kills everybody they could have arrested, which is Thematic (No Reward For Violence) and undramatic. If there was an ongoing battle between Earp the Lawman and Earp the Killer? That would create tension. But Robards watching Garner kill people and then chewing him out afterwards? That's two parts enabling and three parts nagging.

I stood by and watched you kill a man.

Now I'm going to chew you out for it. [Cough!]

A Calendar of Hollidays: John Sturges in Tombstone, Part 1

The Suicidal Drunk. Kirk Douglas, Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957).

You could have your eyes closed at the start of this movie and know it was made in the 50's, thanks to the hoofbeat-driven Frankie Laine title song, which reappears almost every time there's an outdoor shot. Since most of this movie takes place in bars and hotel rooms (and if you look closely, it's the same bar and hotel room, only redecorated), the song doesn't become too annoying, which is like saying that sometimes nagging tooth pain doesn't lead to a root canal.

I've never done the actual math, but Gunfight feels as if it's 60/40 on the Holliday/Earp scale. Whatever it started out to be, it's much more interested in Doc than Wyatt, not the least because Kirk Douglas is much more interesting than the unusually low-key stick-up-his-butt Burt Lancaster. You stare at him and think "Wait--this is the same guy who did Crimson Pirate? NFW." I mean, when you think of all the other film sets which bear his gigantic teeth marks, you have to wonder if Lancaster was bored, drugged or just picking up a paycheck, because that's how he comes across. Douglas might as well be in the movie by himself.

The game is solitaire.

Lancaster may be as stiff as a stiff, but Douglas is a volcano waiting to erupt. He spends most of the movie with a deck of cards in his hand instead of a gun (memorable moment: on the road to Tombstone, Lancaster asks "Where's your kit?" and Douglas reaches into his jacket to pull out a poker deck), but he doesn't need a gun. His self-lacerating scenes with Jo Van Fleet as Kate Fisher look like warm-ups for his Van Gogh; you half expect him to cut off his ear and throw it in a shot glass. This is the relationship that's at the heart of the film, not Holliday's with Earp; and while there's a parallel relationship between Earp and a female gambler called Laura Denbow (played with red hair by Rhonda Fleming), it feels like a sublimation of what the movie should have been about: the romantic triangle of Doc, Kate and Wyatt.

I could be in Arles! But no--you wanted to go to Tombstone!!!

Historically, the movie gets some things right--Doc's a dentist, he's from Georgia--and some things wrong--Wyatt's been chasing Clanton from before the movie starts; one of his kid brothers is killed before the Corral fight. There's also a subplot where Earp tries to save young Billy Clanton, played by young Dennis Hopper (who celebrated his 19th birthday on the set). But because Lancaster has that big old stick up his butt, you don't really care, and you can't blame Billy for siding with his own family against Earp (and his family). Any more than you can blame yourself for thinking that the movie is a collection of subplots that never really combine, like ingredients for a cake that results in a pan full of soupy crap after you take it out of the oven.

Visually the movie is, well, odd. Since most of the film takes place in saloons and hotel rooms, the elongated VistaVision screen shows you acres of furniture and walls instead of landscape and mountains. It does work in one sequence though. Going by the theory that certain shots in a film are there solely to illustrate the theme, there's a giant close-up of Douglas' clenched fists over a gun he's refusing to pick up when he's being goaded by John Ireland's Ringo. There's an entire movie you could spin out of this shot; but because OK Corral is all moons and no planet, it's not this movie.

Only in Hollywood: gunfighters who refuse to fight.

Oh and by the way: OK? It stands for Old Kinderhook.

A Calendar of Hollidays: Part One

Having finally gotten over The Doc Holliday Cold, during which I watched a lot of Westerns, I started thinking about how all the Hollywood Docs compare to the real Doc (and each other). So let's start off with an obscure Doc and then a classic one:

The Doctor in Need of Redemption. Cesar Romero, Frontier Marshal (1939).

Answer to the trivia question: who played Doc Holliday and the Joker?

Watching Frontier Marshal (which is a "special feature" on the new two-disc Ford At Fox edition of My Darling Clementine) will give anybody who's familiar with Clementine a pretty frightening case of deja vu. It's like watching the two early versions of Maltese Falcon: you not only get echoes everywhere, you get echoes in strange voices. There's nothing quite like watching Ricardo Cortez mortalizing the same lines that Bogart makes immortal, unless it's watching Randolph Scott lighting up the same set pieces that Henry Fonda makes dark, and realizing that the classic you grew up watching is an adaptation of an Ur-Tombstone movie that was made seven years before.

How alike are they? Both movies are based on the Stuart Lake bio of Wyatt Earp. Both have a saloon girl in love with Doc Holliday (in Frontier Marshal he's Doc Halliday); both have a girl from his past show up in Tombstone, a girl Wyatt Earp is obviously sweet on; both have Doc operating to save someone from a gunshot wound (because in both movies, Doc is a medical doctor and not a dentist). The major differences? In Frontier Marshal, Wyatt Earp has no brothers (!); instead of the actor doing Hamlet we get Eddie Foy (bonus points for historical accuracy); and Doc is killed before the OK Corral gunfight (whoops--take those bonus points away). Also: Doc drinks milk (!) until he gets depressed, then he starts in on the whiskey.

That's more like it.

Self-destructuive drunkard that he is, Doc finds redemption when he saves the life of a little boy who gets a bullet in the neck as part of a horse-by shooting, assisted by Nancy Kelly as (well) Clementine. (Hard not to think of it in those terms.) After which, with his arm around his girl, stone-cold sober and proud of himself, Doc gets shot by one of the Clantons as he's leaving the saloon. Shot dead, as in too dead to fight at the OK Corral. Which, because this film's Wyatt Earp is an only child, means that Randolph Scott gets to go up against everybody (including a spineless Lon Chaney Jr.) and finish them all off to avenge Doc. (Halliday even gets the closing shot, as his saloon girlfriend rides off to her future past his grave in Boot Hill. No dying in bed for this Georgia gunman.) In my opinion, if you're going to fictionalize history this much? Change the names.

How does Romero stack up on the Doc Holliday list? Pretty low, actually; about the same level Randolph Scott stands on the Wyatt Earp list. Stolid would be a compliment. Neither actor has the chops to give the camera more than a surface portrayal of his character. Scott makes you wish you were watching Ride The High Country or Seven Men From Now; Romero makes you wish that you were watching Anthony Quinn. And, all in all, the movie itself makes you wish you were watching My Darling Clementine.

The Mountain of Health. Victor Mature, My Darling Clementine (1946).

Primarily a John Ford movie with some pretty jarring David Selznick-authorized post-production inserts (they jump out at you like salmon when you know what to look for), this film feels and looks older than it is, like it was made in '39 or '40, rather than just after WWII. But the Clanton family scenes are a dead giveaway that we're a femme fatale short of a noir movie here (is there anything more noir than the line "When you pull a gun, kill a man?"). And if we're talking dark? Look no further than the man mountain playing Doc Holliday:

Don't mess with me or I'll fall on you.

He wears black like a bad guy, and he coughs about once every ten minutes to remind you that he's supposed to be wasting away from consumption, but I'm sorry, Victor Mature has consumption like grizzly bears have anorexia. There's no way this guy is being eaten away by anything, except maybe pride because he's stealing the movie from Henry Fonda. And boy, does he. When Mature is on screen, you can't take your eyes off him. This is where the tradition of Holliday Trumps Earp in Tombstone movies begins.

I am drinking Henry Fonda's milk shake.

Historically, we're no closer to the real Doc Holliday than we are in Frontier Marshal. He's still a medical doctor and not a dentist, and in Clementine he got his degree in Harvard. But there's something in Mature's performance (the sweat that never seems to leave his face? The sense that there are rocks and avalanches grinding beneath his cheekbones?) that prefigures every doomed thug and gunsel from No Way Out to Night And The City. This guy has a jumbo-sized death wish, and the camera loves every second of it, nowhere more than when he's reciting Shakespeare like Edwin Booth on steroids:

Historically, Mature's Holliday is as fictional as Romero's Halliday, but because Mature is larger than life, his performance conforms to the Liberty Valance Law ("When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"), and works on a mythic level above history. The gunshot victim he operates on? Dies in the night. His Boston girl? So obviously in love with the town Marshal. What else can this hulk do but take his boots off, sneak into a stable, and then start coughing so he gets himself shot? One of the top five Hollidays for sure.

Cold Update

Matthew: Still wheezing like a Welsh coal miner.

Ava: Poor Doc. Still got that cough, hmm? Mine's not great either.

Matthew: Not so much a cough now as an eternal wheeze, like there's something crouching at the bottom of my lungs waiting to grab my face if I peer over the side to see what it is.

I've Got The Bungee Cold

The Bungee Cold is that endless double-barrelled congestion that bounces back and forth between your lungs and your sinuses. When your chest is clear, then your eyes are watering, your cheeks ache, and your brain is sodden with backed-up snot. And when your sinuses are clear and your brain is back to normal, you're wheezing like a Stanley Steamer and coughing up a lung like Doc Holliday.

-- of a Bungee Cold, probably.

On the flip suide, the one good thing about being Doc Holliday is you get to have Linda Darnell chase you.

For you? I'd cough up three lungs.