Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

This peculiar film resembles Sturges' more famous The Magnificent Seven: not unlikeable, not uninteresting, but as many times as you see it, it gets neither better nor worse. Passion, certainly, is lacking, and being a 'town' Western, it's all very conventionally domestic. The Earp/Clanton family shootout is a Western legend, and was treated by Ford with romantic righteousness in My Darling Clementine a decade earlier. For Sturges, the shootout remains a kind of grudging necessity, and has no more relationship with any real historical truths than Ford's did. Curiously, Sturges returned to the Earp saga with Hour of the Gun (1967), which picked up where this one leaves off; but by then he was caught between a dying traditionalism and the growing audience need for the genre to criticise itself.