Mary Doria Russell, Doc

One of the most curious friendships in the Old West is the one between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Each of them was so different from the other, Doc a well-educated and cultured Southern gentleman and Wyatt a hardheaded, unpolished Yankee of apparently no more than average intelligence.

Russell takes us back a few years from that fateful day in 1881 in the streets of Tombstone to the Kansas town where the two men became acquainted. In the pages of her novel, we’re in Dodge City, and the year is 1878. Wyatt has a temporary job as a keeper of the peace, and Doc has followed the money from Texas, using his skill at cards to make a living as a gambler.

The others we know from history are here, too. Wyatt’s brothers Morgan and James, and their women, including Kate Harony, the prostitute who is both bane and comfort for the ailing Doc. The town fathers are here as well, Bob Wright, George Hoover, and others. Entertainer Eddie Foy provides bawdy comedy and song at the Comique (pronounced “Commy-Q”).

Doc Holliday

Plot. Readers looking for Old West action will not find much of it in this story of people living day-to-day lives in a frontier railroad town. The excitement to be found tends to be of the unwelcome kind, as rowdy, young cattle drovers fill the saloons in the summer months. The job of keeping the peace falls to the likes of the Earp brothers and another legend in the making, Bat Masterson.

Doc’s poor health is treated with a graphic attention likely to surprise readers who think of TB as a quietly wasting disease, as we typically see it portrayed in film. Doc’s cough and bloody handkerchiefs are a motif throughout the novel, and a crisis point is reached near the end as his condition sharply worsens until he’s almost near death.

His recovery—one of several—is observed with a Christmas party at which he sits down at a newly tuned piano and plays the entire Emperor Concerto. It is a spellbinding performance that holds the assembled guests in a state of awe. Then with the coming of the new year, the Earps and Doc decide to pull up stakes and head for Tombstone. Prospects, they believe, are better there. We know what they don’t, that it’s an appointment with destiny.

Dodge City police officers

If there’s a plot thread at all, it concerns the mysterious death of a young, black faro dealer found in the smoldering remains of a livery barn burned to the ground. Doc suspects foul play and eventually unravels the mystery.

History. Russell gives credit to several sources as the historical basis of the novel, notably Karen Holliday Tanner’s biography, Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait. She takes imaginative liberties in filling in the details and clarifies in the opening pages of the book the few characters who are fiction and those that are not.

What gives the novel its particular point of view is her belief that the deepest friendship among these men was the one between Doc and Morgan, Wyatt’s younger brother. And Morgan is surely the most endearing, good humored, and likeably intelligent of the Earps. Wyatt, by comparison, is stolid, rigid in his Methodist beliefs, and no smarter than he needs to be.

Hour of the Gun (1967)

Historians may object to the liberties taken in this story about the aftermath of the gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881. But in its broad outlines, it doesn’t depart too widely from the record. The feud between Ike Clanton and the Earp Brothers did not end on that October day in Tombstone. More lives were to be taken, including that of Wyatt’s brother Morgan.

The surprise of the film is the performance of James Garner, who plays Wyatt Earp straight, without the actor’s usual wry irony. Opposite him as Doc Holliday is Jason Robards, who gets all the irony and gives a memorable portrayal of the consumptive gambler and killer who befriended Wyatt.

Smooth and surly Robert Ryan plays Ike Clanton, a little old for the part at 58. Ike was in his mid-30s then and didn’t live past 40. Robards at 45 was fifteen years older than Doc Holliday, who was only 30 that day in 1881. A film with three actors in their 30s would be closer to history—and also a different kind of western.

Doc Holliday

Story vs history. The film tries to represent the complicated political situation in Tombstone, with a sheriff more or less on the payroll of the Clantons. No model family, their income came from smuggling and reselling cattle out of Mexico. Virgil Earp was city marshal and his brothers his deputies. Residents of the growing town of Tombstone supported the Earps, while the Clantons with their gang of “cowboys” fought the interference of the law.

There are trials, elections, and competing agencies of the law, with a large cast of characters. Anyone without some previous knowledge could be excused for getting confused by the details of the plot. But there’s a strong central thread holding the film together, as one by one Wyatt hunts down the men responsible for the death of Morgan and the crippling of Virgil. That thread wraps up with the biggest departure from historical fact in the movie—Wyatt’s shooting of Ike Clanton.

Ike died a violent death, all right, while actively rustling cattle out of Mexico, but it wasn’t Wyatt who killed him. I don’t know, but I also doubt that Wyatt visited the dying Doc in his Denver sanatorium before parting company for the last time, as the film would have us believe. What is true in his last scene is that Wyatt was done with being a lawman.

Earp biographer Casey Tefertiller says Hour of the Gun was a debunking of the heroic figure handed down to us in legend. I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment. It suggests that Earp deserves better, though given what we know of his life, the film actually goes out of its way to justify his actions.

Ike Clanton, 1881

Wrapping up. Director John Sturges had also directed the earlier Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, plus Rhonda Fleming and Jo Van Fleet for romantic interest. This film has no women characters. The 25 roles listed at imdb.com are all male, which makes it almost a one-of-a-kind western.

The film begins with a re-enactment of the 1881 gunfight, this time rather closer to fact than the protracted firefight we get at the end of the earlier movie. One error is that the three men mortally wounded—the McLaurys and Billy Clanton—are standing inside the corral rather than in the open lot near it, where the actual exchange of gunfire took place. The film was shot entirely in Mexico, where the raw landscape suggests more than most westerns the isolation and inhospitable terrain of the desert Southwest.

Writer Edward Anhalt has a long list of screenwriting credits, including the script for Jeremiah Johnson (1972). James Garner portrayed Wyatt Earp again in Blake Edwards’ comedy Sunset (1988) opposite Bruce Willis as Tom Mix. Soon to be known for his role in Midnight Cowboy (1969), Jon Voight appears in this film as Curly Bill Brocius.

Hour of the Gun is currently available at netflix and amazon, where it is also streamable. Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies is the much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons 

Coming up: Gwendolen Overton, The Heritage of Unrest (1901)