Ketrivie
It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Roman Sampson
One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.
Ezmae Chang
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Scott LeBrun
Instead of telling the familiar Wyatt Earp - Doc Holliday story as it leads up to the shootout at the OK Corral, this film actually *begins* with the shootout and shows us all that came after (it purports to be based on fact). Earp (James Garner) and Doc (Jason Robards) are targeted by ruthless businessman Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) and his minions. Earp, similarly, is motivated to strike back at Clanton and company when they target his brothers Morgan and Virgil.Once again, director John Sturges ("Bad Day at Black Rock", "The Magnificent Seven") is right at home in this genre, but the script by Edward Anhalt isn't terribly inspired. Ultimately, this plays like a pretty standard revenge saga, but it's helped by efficient filmmaking and a typically nice Jerry Goldsmith music score. There are certainly good moments throughout, especially in scenes with Garner and Robards, who are believable as friends, loyal to each other through thick and thin. Especially potent is when Doc has figured out Earps' agenda. Earp claims that the mission to go after Clantons' men is all mandated by the law, but Doc can see otherwise.The cast is stocked with highly recognizable faces (Albert Salmi, Charles Aidman, William Schallert, William Windom, Lonny Chapman, etc.), including a future star in the form of Jon Voight (cast as Curly Bill Brocius), who was two years away from "Midnight Cowboy" at this time. Garner and especially Robards are wonderful, although you won't ever see Garners' Earp show a lot of emotion. Ryan is excellent as always in one of his trademark villain roles. But it's the moving relationship between Earp and Doc that is the heart of the film.Not a great, or especially memorable experience, but it does entertain in solid enough fashion.Seven out of 10.
James Hitchcock
"Hour of the Gun" is one of two films John Sturges made about the notorious Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the first being "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" itself from ten years earlier. It is sometimes seen as a kind of sequel to the earlier film, but does not star any of the same actors. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were played by Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the earlier film and here by James Garner and Jason Robards. Also, there is no direct continuity between the two films. "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" had incorrectly shown Ike Clanton as dying in the Gunfight; here he is correctly shown as surviving it by running away. (Clanton himself claimed to have been unarmed at the time, a claim which has been disputed)."Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" the Gunfight comes as the final climax of the film; here it is the opening event, with the main part of the film detailing the subsequent feud between Earp, his brothers, Holliday and his other supporters and the Clanton gang. Sturges wanted the film to be more historically accurate than previous cinematic accounts of this subject, including his own previous effort and the notoriously inaccurate "My Darling Clementine". The Gunfight, therefore, is shown as a brief affair, lasting less than a minute with only three men (Billy Clanton and the two McLaurie brothers) killed. Earlier versions had made the shootout last for several minutes with a significantly higher death toll.After the Gunfight, Ike Clanton swears vengeance for the deaths of his friends and brother, possibly motivated by guilt at his own failure to protect them. He has the Earps and Holliday charged with murder, but they are acquitted by the court. He and his gang then ambush first Virgil Earp, seriously injuring him, and then Morgan, killing him. Now it is Wyatt Earp's turn to seek revenge for the death of a brother. He forms a posse to hunt down and kill the surviving members of the Clanton Gang in what has become known as the Earp Vendetta Ride. In the film's one major historical inaccuracy their last victim is Ike himself. (In reality Ike Clanton was killed by another lawman, Jonas Brighton, who had no connection to the Earps).I was not particularly impressed by Garner as Earp, who seemed to find it difficult to step into the shoes of Lancaster and Henry Fonda who had played the role in "My Darling Clementine". Modern audiences might also find him wanting when compared to Kevin Costner in "Wyatt Earp" from the nineties. I found that Garner was rather too taciturn and unemotional and that he did not really convey in any depth the psychological development which Earp undergoes during the film, from an upright, by- the-book lawman in the early scenes to the later man obsessed with revenge and quite prepared to go outside the law to avenge his dead brother. Robards was not too bad as Holliday if one can overlook the fact that he was too old for the role. (Robards was 45 at the time the film was made; Holliday was only 30 at the time of the Gunfight, and died at 36). Robert Ryan was quite good as Ike, crediting him with a certain intelligence and making him more than a mere thug (which is how he is sometimes portrayed).As a revenge Western, "Hour of the Gun" is a relatively good one, with some decent action sequences, but compared to the earlier "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" or the later "Wyatt Earp" it lacks the monumentality and the sense of the epic which I find appropriate to a story which is, after all, one of the great legends of the American West. 6/10
Coastal Cruiser ([email protected])
Oh we do love our westerns, do we not? So many fine, articulate reviews posted for this installment of the Wyatt Earp legend. As it happens I am currently accumulating a collection of two great -almost mythological- stories that are told again and again on celluloid; the saga of Wyatt Earp, and Alice in Wonderland.Although Wyatt and Alice may seem to occupy disparate niches in the archives of story telling, I propose that they are similar in that each tale acts as something of a template -or even an archetype- from which various interpretations of the core story can be rendered. It seems somehow OK that liberties have been taken with the exact way the events, either in reality or in the mind of the author, originally occurred in either story. The concepts of good, evil, morality, the impetus to do the right thing (The Wyatt Earp story), as well as the need to make sense of our dreams where the logic and proportion so often fall away… are foundational to the human experience. To tell the story of Wyatt Earp or Alice in Wonderland with the characters and events re-imagined by the current story teller allows us to examine these same core concepts through the fresh perspective of an individual's own interpretation.In Hour of the Gun, it seems that director John Sturges is asking us to compare the morality of the two key players; Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton. Such a comparison is of course done with regularity, but in this case we have the events as they are laid out by Sturges to judge. For example, in this telling of the story Earp kills Clanton. We know it did not actually go down this way, but let's take this version at face value and see where it leads us.It occurs to me that we are being asked whether Wyatt and Ike are in essence the same man. Ike Clanton is described not as a mindless killer, but rather a man with a goal --rule the world he is creating on his own terms, free of the interference of the Easterners. Clanton would prefer to work within the "law" ("if this were back east I could make law the way they do"), but in the end Clanton is willing to use death and violence to reach his goal.It is the same with Wyatt Earp, is it not? Wyatt generally works within the law. He's even willing to 'make law', such as prohibiting the carrying of firearms within city limits. But once the blood of his kin is in play, Wyatt forms up a goal that becomes more important than the moral code he has been living by. Still, he attempts to work within the framework of the law. He stretches his morality to the very brink when he goads his adversaries into drawing down on him. Yet even near the end, when he and Doc track down Ike Clanton in Mexico, Wyatt at first tries to work with the local authorities to apprehend Clanton. Only when the witnesses are killed and there's no chance of a trial to see justice done does Earp -for the first time really- step completely outside the law.So, is Mr. Sturges telling us that when push came to shove Wyatt and Ike were exactly alike? And perhaps by inference, that all humans, under the right circumstances, will sacrifice their core beliefs… a juxtaposition of the old adage "Every man has his price"?No. I don't think so. Hour of the Gun leaves intact a key difference between Ike Clanton's actions and the actions of Wyatt Earp. Ike was willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people to reach his goal. He appears to care nothing of either the loss of his own brother or the deaths he sponsored of the innocents who would testify against him.Sturges's Wyatt does not go that far. Even when Earp tricks his adversaries into gun-play over arrest, the argument can be made he did so because there was no hope of a fair trial. To support that idea we have Doc Holliday's line; "You couldn't get a conviction in a Federal court or a local one…". And Wyatt never killed an innocent man to get to the men guilty of assaulting his brothers. For Wyatt Earp, blood was thicker than law, but even then he did not place himself above the law out of pure self-interest. Vengeance carried out in the name of another rises a few clicks above that. And when Wyatt 'made law' it was for the common good.Therein lies the difference, and I would insert that when asked how this tale of the Old West applies in modern life I would suggest that sometimes men, standing in judgment of one another, don't always take this further step of looking beyond a person's actions to their core motivations.Of course at then end of the day every film that tells the Wyatt Earp saga, from Frontier Marshall in 1934 to Wyatt Earp's Revenge in 2012, begs the question; What would be the right thing to do in such circumstances? What would YOU do?
milwhitt702
There must have been 20 actors or more playing Wyatt Earp. The first one I saw was Richard Dix "Tombstone, the town too tough to Die", then Randolph Scott Frontier Marshal, and many to follow. A lot of recent movies indicate that Virgil and Morgan were shot the same night, when actually Virgil was December 1881, and Morgan killed three months later in March. In this movie with James Garner, I noticed there was no mention of Sheriff Johnny Behan, a large character in the true story. Also Wyatt did not kill Ike Clanton and it showed at the end of the movie. From my info Ike was killed rustling cattle years later after Wyatt had left Tombstone for good. The character Doc and Wyatt were alway played by older men, actually Wyatt was 33 at the time and Doc was about 35. The best one was Bruce Boxleitner "I married Whatt Earp". Also there was no mention of any women, Mattie Earp, Josephine Marcus Earp, Allie Earp (Virgil's wife) or Big Nose Kate Elder. A lot was left out.
