Hour of the Gun [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Hour of the Gun is easily my favorite take on the Wyatt Earp legend, with John Sturges making amends for the strangely rather unsatisfying Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with this dark, revisionist take of the aftermath that seeps with post-Kennedy cynicism. People aren't killed, they're assassinated by riflemen hiding in shadows, trials fail to see justice done, the good townspeople buy off bad guys and the motives for the Clanton-Earp feud are more political and economic than personal (Robert Ryan's Clanton is more of a calculating businessman trying to fend off encroaching Eastern conglomerates and willing to sacrifice his family to do it than the usual crooked pater familias). Throughout, James Garner's Wyatt Earp moves further away from the law as an increasingly cold-blooded desire for vengeance takes over from his principles while Jason Robards bitter Doc Holliday can do little but watch and stand dying by his side.

With a terrific script by Edward Anhalt (who gives himself a good cameo as Doc's doc) there's a neat symmetry running through the film - Clanton slinks away from the O.K Corral before the lead starts flying only to find his gang deserting him the same way at the end - enhanced by Sturges' strong visual sense, with locations always sparsely populated or streets often completely empty to emphasise the narrow focus of the conflict. Sturges' usually effortless mastery of Scope frame seems a bit forced in a couple of set-ups where you can see him lining up his actors as if blocking them onstage, but you can forgive him when he throws in an opening sequence that Sam Peckinpah borrowed for The Wild Bunch - the unscripted moment Peckinpah referred to as `the Walk thing' when the Bunch go to their final fate (Peckinpah was a great admirer of Sturges, and as even used Hour's cinematographer Lucien Ballard on Bunch). Throw in a terrific score from Jerry Goldsmith just as he entered his prime, and it's a winner.

While the US version offers both 2.35:1 widescreen and fullscreen versions along with the trailer, the PAL DVD only offers the widescreen version.

When John Sturges directed Gunfight At The O.K. Corral in 1957, it quickly came to be seen as a classic telling of one of the most famous events in American frontier history, along with John Ford's earlier staging of the occasion in My Darling Clementine (1946) still the version filmgoers remember best. Given the esteem in which his work held today, it's interesting to note that Sturges had a relatively low view of the film, seeing it principally as a job of work for producer Hal B. Wallis. In addition, nagged by some criticisms over Gunfight At The O.K. Corral's historical inaccuracies and obviously feeling that there was more drama to discover in the Wyatt-Clanton feud, he opted to return to the subject a decade later. The loose sequel Hour Of The Gun was the result, a western dealing with events immediately after the famous shootout.

Sturges originally attempted to cast Hour Of The Gun with some of the same actors with whom he worked back in 1957, ensuring a natural degree of continuity. (Sergio Leone planned the same creative economy two years later by initially casting the famous station opening of Once Upon A Time In The West with a reunited Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood.) Various factors made Sturges' scheme impossible, but leading parts were still secured by some fine actors: James Garner (as Wyatt Earp), Jason Robards (Doc Holliday) and Robert Ryan (Ike Clanton) as well as, way down the cast list, a young Jon Voight. Music was commissioned from Jerry Goldsmith and cinematography was from Lucien Ballard, who contributed so much to several Sam Peckinpah films.

In the event the reception afforded the results was lukewarm. Hour Of The Gun was seen as too cynical and with a bitter tone that, though reflecting changing times, was less welcome in a conservative genre still a couple of years away from the controversies of The Wild Bunch. Audiences who had enjoyed the less complex moralities of such Sturges movies as Bad Day At Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven, or The Law And Jake Wade, and so on, were perturbed by the portrait of a lawman who, in the event as his best friend says could either be seen "as a hero with a badge - or a cold blooded killer." Garner's usually genial screen persona was subsumed in a portrayal of Earp as someone who eventually loses sight of his own guiding principals in an obsessive pursuit of personal vengeance. Adding to the uncertainties was the sight of a Doc Holiday whose own moral trajectory went unexpectedly the other way to such an extent it brings the two pals to blows.

"This picture is based on fact. This is the way it happened," announces Sturges' movie at its start, a complete antithesis to John Ford's often quoted dictum from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to 'print the legend'. Scriptwriter Edward Anhalt (who has an apt cameo in the picture as Holiday's resigned doctor in the sanatorium) reduced the level of historical inaccuracy noticed in Gunfight At The O.K. Corral even if, as events moved further along from the OK fight and its effects, matters still tended to drift (the elder Clanton, for instance, did not end up shot in Mexico). And ironically, most weaknesses in Hour Of The Gun can be put down to its avowed intentions to stick closer to the twists and turns of history. Whereas Gunfight At The O.K. Corral has a largely simple, arching structure leading to an inevitable climax, its successor is more episodic. A good deal of running time is devoted to the various face-offs of its survivors - in courtrooms, in the townships or on the range, as animosities were carried further. In Sturges' original crack at the legend, Earp defends society and the law and can be more objective in the process, even though it also concerns family; in the new film, in the light of the aftermath, he takes it far more personally. Legalities become ever more precarious until the changed, if still honourable, lawman confesses, "I don't care about the rules anymore. I'm not that much of a hypocrite." The classicism perceived in the earlier film, the moral clarity characteristic of cinema of the times (and demanded by the producer), is replaced by a more baroque narrative, which paints a much darker psychology.

Hour Of The Gun begins with one of the finest of all western openings. The combination of a fine Goldsmith score (its main theme a combination of a reluctant growl and world-weary call to arms), the director's characteristically assured staging of action within the widescreen frame, as well as the tension brought by imminent events, are striking. The long, largely wordless moments as the Earps walk shoulder to shoulder, resolutely facing destiny, derive their power almost entirely from Sturges' powerful mise-en-scène - a sequence which, incidentally, may have inspired Peckinpah when staging the climax of The Wild Bunch. After such a start any narrative would be hard pushed to sustain such tension, and the episodic nature of what follows, as mentioned above, does not always work to the director's advantage. But Garner, Robards and Ryan (who also appeared in Peckinpah's film) are excellent enough to keep matters on track, whilst the turning of various events gives Sturges plenty of chances to stage smaller gunplay between individuals. There is no distracting love interest and the sentimentality brought by the Frankie Laine ballad which echoes through Gunfight At The O.K. Corral - a hangover, perhaps of the singing cowboy tradition - has been discarded.

Today the particular mood of Hour Of The Gun seems better attuned to our cynical times than Gunfight At The O.K. Corral, which glows with a nostalgia not thought of when it was made: the lasting comfort of clean heroes and clean lines of plot. Garner's Earp is not afraid to get his hands dirty in matters of personal revenge even if it means, ultimately, he feels unable to accept promotion to adjutant general, chief lawman of the territory. By setting his later film in the times after a notorious gunfight, Sturges pre-empted such later directors as Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, who have also been concerned with the consequences of violence in such films as Unforgiven and Open Range. To the extent that Hour Of The Gun is all about the lasting turmoil and personal costs brought by the fatal encounter by a dusty horse lot on 25th October 1881, it has a lot to say that is relevant today.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral is just over. Bodies lie in the dust. Now the killing really begins. Please note that elements of the plot are discussed, but first, a civics lesson. Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) is determined to buy or shoot his way into power in Arizona. The territory sooner or later will be a state. Clanton knows all those "Easterners" are moving in with their own ideas of law, order and who should be in control. Standing in his way is Wyatt Earp (James Garner). Earp is a no-nonsense lawman who'll take down anyone who breaks the law. He's fast enough with a gun and ready enough to use it that he keeps getting in Clanton's way. If that doesn't frustrate Clanton enough, Earp has his two brothers to back him up, along with his good friend, Doc Holliday (Jason Robards). Clanton makes his play to eliminate the Earps with the shootout at the corral. By now the movie is only ten minutes over. The gunfight itself takes 30 seconds, just as it did in real life.

Hour of the Gun tells us what happened next. Clanton brings charges of murder against Earp and Holliday. They are narrowly acquitted. Clanton follows up with back shootings of Earp's brothers, leaving Virgil crippled and Morgan dead. Earp is not going to back down and now the grudge is personal. Holliday will stick with Earp. Clanton is going to use the law as well as his gang to run Earp out of the Territory or see him dead. Earp is going to legally go after the men he suspects attacked his brothers. Legally, he has warrants for their arrest. Legally, Doc Holliday points out to Earp, "Those aren't warrants you have there...those are hunting licenses." That's exactly how Earp sees things. There may be a legal posse set up by Clanton to run down Earp, but Earp is on a hunt of his own, aided by Holliday and a small group of "deputies."

Hour of the Gun is just as linear as that. It's also one of the grimmest and best directed Westerns most people have never seen. Too bad, because James Garner may have given the best performances of his career. He plays a man of deadly commitment to the law, and doesn't hesitate to use the law to justify his own brand of capital punishment before trial. Robards almost seems to recognize the weight of the role and what Garner is doing with it. There's no competition from Robards, just masterly support. As far as Robert Ryan goes, we don't see much of him, but when he's on he gives a lot of authority to Ike Clanton. Ryan provides the believable ruthlessness that leads to what turns out to be Earp's Vendetta Ride, the hunting down and killing of those who attacked his brothers.

Yet toward the end of the movie when Earp is determined to bring retribution directly to Clanton one way or another, Hour of the Gun slips down a notch on the old gun belt. Earp has given up any pretense of enforcing the law. With Clanton in Mexico, Earp is just going to kill him. It depends on Doc Holliday, of all people, to provide a bit of law-abiding morality. "The whole thing's hypocrisy," Doc tells Earp. "The rules they tack on say unless you're wearing that badge or a soldier's uniform, you can't kill. But they're the only rules there are. They're more important to you than you think. Play it that way, Wyatt, or you'll destroy yourself. I know you. You can't live like me." Wyatt Earp shows that he can.

This is a good movie that just happens to be a western. John Sturges directed it ten years after he turned out the Lancaster/Douglas big hit, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. As a lean, mean piece of movie making, Hour of the Gun puts the earlier film in the shade. Even so, Hour of the Gun was a flop. It is unrelentingly grim. There is no romance and almost no females, just lots of tension, a number of quick gunfights, several great line deliveries from Robards and Garner's performance. I think it's a better movie.

For another version of the famous gunfight, watch My Darling Clementine. It's more of John Ford's western myth-making and it's a great film.