Jason Robards co-stars as the legendary Doc Holliday, and Robert Ryan appears as the notorious Ike Clanton.
Now available on streaming platforms: Hour of the Gun, a 1967 drama directed by John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape), and starring James Garner, Jason Robards, and Robert Ryan.
Garner went grim and gritty for Sturges’ revisionist western, a semi-sequel to the filmmaker’s earlier, more romanticized Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Long after the legendary 1881 shootout, Wyatt Earp (Garner) and buddy Doc Holliday (Robards) continue to clash with Ike Clanton (Ryan) and his murderous flunkies in and around Tombstone, Arizona. For Earp, the peacekeeping process devolves into a personal vendetta after Clanton's men maim one of his brothers and kill another.
Garner told Sturges biographer Glenn Lovell that he welcomed the chance to portray the iconic lawman as something more ambiguous than an untarnished hero: “I saw [Wyatt Earp] as a vigilante out for revenge. He was a guy taken with his own power, who nobody could defy. He had no qualms about shooting those boys.
“I think the movie’s as accurate on that as any that’s been done.”
On the other hand: Garner took an appreciably more humorous approach to playing Earp in Sunset, writer-director Blake Edwards’ fanciful 1988 comedy-drama that had the storied lawman working as a technical advisor for western movies in 1920s Hollywood, and teaming with cowboy star Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) to solve a murder mystery.
Based on the book Tombstone’s Epitaph by historian Douglas D. Martin, Hour of the Gun was scripted by Edward Anhalt (Becket, Jeremiah Johnson), and features a supporting cast that includes Jon Voight, Albert Salmi, William Windom, William Schallert, Frank Converse, and Monte Markham.
