Doc Holliday

"Doc" is similar to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," in that it is a revisionist Western attempting to explode some mythology of the American West, which earlier Hollywood Westerns would glamourize. Here, Doc Holliday and Marshall Wyatt Earp are shown as not quite the good guys Hollywood has long portrayed them to be. The story of "Doc" follows the legendary outlaw Dr. John Henry "Doc" Holliday and his lover "Big Nose Kate" Elder on their way to the storied Gunfight at the OK Corral. Doc Holliday is played by Stacy Keach, as a soft-spoken gent who is deadly with a six-shooter. The film is gritty and dirty, but the profane dialogue seems like it was added just because the screenwriter could. My biggest problem is that the scenes look like they cut away too soon, and should go on at least a few seconds longer. "Doc" may not tell the true story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but at least tries to keep an enduring Western legend alive.

The best thing about this film is the first half hour, the classic posturing in the first scene ("We ain't got no cold beer"), Doc and Kate Elder's damaged courtship, a stark, music-less ride across scorching desert. The first glimpse of Tombstone (the town, not the movie) is equally exhilarating, everything is dirty and chaotic, men are fighting in the streets. From that point on, much of the film is boring and slow, though there was enough to hold my attention throughout. Seeing how the story will unfold is the most riveting aspect. The ending is satisfying enough, as is the script's odd take on how and why Doc wound up in the fateful gunfight at the coral. The performances are good all around. It warrants mentioning here that this movie is no more historically accurate than other films on the subject. Two major inconsistencies were already mentioned, and most historians' and witnesses' accounts have Doc playing a much more active role in events leading up to the fight. The overall feel of the film, though, is much more believable than your average Hollywood western. That's probably the most satisfying thing here next to the cast: the physical details, the look and feel. Just pretend the characters are all made up. And don't watch it if you're already in a bad mood.

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday did go to Tombstone to get rich, but this film badly represents the "truth". This is typical of the time (Vietnam era) where law enforcement,traditions, and America were questioned and debunked whenever possible. Liberalism at it's finest.

This film may have been thought-provoking (although inaccurate) for it's time, but we've grown up from those days, as we did from the overly-romaticized days that produced "My Darling Clementine" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Those films were polar opposites of this one, and both were inaccurate. The best film of the Vietnam era on this subject was "Hour of the Gun" made 4 years prior to this one.Add that to "Tombstone" and Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp" as perhaps the most close to accurate on this subject as Hollywood will come.

At the very least, the Western drama 'Doc' manages to be somewhat interesting from start to finish, if not exactly factual. It tells the very familiar story of Marshal Wyatt Earp and John "Doc" Holiday in revisionist terms, and takes a very gritty, moody, psychological approach to the material, courtesy screenwriter Pete Hamill. It traces the journey of Doc (Stacy Keach) as he makes the acquaintance of prostitute Katie Elder (a de-glamorized Faye Dunaway) and rides into Tombstone to hook up with his old friend Wyatt (Harris Yulin), and to deal with the problem of such trouble making characters as Ike Clanton (Michael Witney).

Keach is the main reason to catch this film. Deliberately paced by cult filmmaker Frank Perry (best known for the 1981 camp classic "Mommie Dearest"), who produced and directed, it attempts to be as un-Hollywood as possible, and show darker aspects to these real life people, especially Earp, played as an opportunist. Perry's film begins on a very atmospheric note, as Doc arrives at an isolated inn / saloon during a windstorm. Ways in which the script humanizes Doc are how it charts his unusual courtship of Ms. Elder (appealingly portrayed by Dunaway) and his relationship with the well meaning "Kid" (Denver John Collins), who is the nephew of the Clanton brothers.

Keachs' engaging, melancholy performance is something to see. Veteran character actor Yulin is also quite good, in a rare above the title role for him. The supporting cast is comprised of less well known but still solid character players like John Scanlon, Richard McKenzie, Penelope Allen, Antonia Rey, Marshall Efron, and Bruce M. Fischer. That's writer Dan Greenburg as Clum the journalist, who in this fictionalization is decidedly anti-Earp.

It might be worth considering pairing this film with another gritty Western from the same time period, "Dirty Little Billy", which similarly took an offbeat approach to telling a familiar real life tale (in that case, that of Billy the Kid).

Seven out of 10.

Stacy Keach is Doc Holliday in the umpteenth retelling of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Faye Dunaway is Big Nose Kate, the woman he runs into in a bordello and falls in love with. Harris Yukon is Wyatt Earp, various other people play various other people, and if there's a point to director Frank Perry's handling of Pete Hamill's script, it's that the Old West was a dirty place. Not figuratively, but literally so in need of a good cleaning that cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld shoots all the interiors with a sepia tint. Even Miss Dunaway's white wedding dress looks ivory,

It's not presented as a story, but more as a series of events that happen to some ill-defined people. Of course, in many stories, it's the actions which tell us the characters, but Kerch seems to be just going along with things. I suppose that's a character, and it seems likely that a man who has been dying for years of tuberculosis might adopt the attitude. Still, it gives the impression that any random character at these events could have been the subject. One of the horses, perhaps.