Metacritic reviews

Solid, expert "town" Western, but lacking the fuel of passion. Still it's a landmark Western--more than any other of its era, it gave the genre major film status.

It's not as poetic as My Darling Clementine or as historically accurate as Sturges' sequel-remake, Hour Of The Gun, but it is a wonderful evocation of the brassy Westerns of the 50s, when Burt and Kirk demonstrated more machismo than a whole posse of Arnies or Slys.

It is firmly directed by John Sturges (of Bad Day at Black Rock fame), and it is ruggedly acted by all and sundry—of which there is quit[e] a heap.

Producer Hal Wallis has taken the historic meeting of Wyatt Earp, a celebrated lawman of the West, his brothers and Doc Holliday, with the Clanton gang in the O.K. Corral of Tombstone, Arizona, and fashioned an absorbing yarn [suggested by an article by George Scullin] in action leading up to the gory gunfight.

Despite a curiously disjointed narrative and Frankie Laine on the soundtrack, it's well-staged, turning what in real life was a brief skirmish into a mythic confrontation. [29 Jun 2014, p.48]

Passion, certainly, is lacking, and being a 'town' Western, it's all very conventionally domestic.

The most famous and (naturally) least engaging film on the subject, John Sturges' melodrama about the friendship between Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Holliday (Kirk Douglas) is handsomely mounted and as dull as a dish. [02 Jan 1994, p.D06]

It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.