Here's Paramount's production of the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, offering Richard Dix as Wyatt Earp, Kent Taylor as Doc Holliday, and after that, it departs from the legend, both in real characters, including third-billed Edgar Buchanan as Curly Bill Brocious, and fictional ones, like Don Castle's Johnny Duane. It offers the story as more complicated and nuanced than usual, and the usual big guns don't hold center stage as they typically do. The overall arc is a long-running feud between Wyatt Earp and Brocious; the Clantons are offered as Brocious' uppity henchmen, and the central character theme seems to be the redemption ofCastle's character, through a desire to court Frances Gifford, a saloon singer with a heart of gold; she sings one song, the anachronistic "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay".
It's one of Paramount's A Westerns, and it shows in Russell Harlan's brilliant outdoors photography -- although the final shootout in the Alabama Hills shows the exact same rocks western fans have seen two hundred times. The net effect is good -- with a cast like this, it's hard not to be engaging, but it's too diffuse to be great. Director William C. McGann had a hand directing two more features, then spent the last decade of his career working in the special effects department. He died in 1977, aged 84.
