Leon Uris’ screenplay for “O.Okay. Corral,” primarily based on George Scullinwas’ 1954 article “The Killer” in Vacation Journal, was a far cry from the actual historic occasions. A handful of options have chronicled the showdown between the Earp brothers, Vacation, and the cattle-rustling Clanton gang, every one the definitive model of the story till the subsequent one emerged. There’s Allan Dwan’s 1939 monochrome effort “Frontier Marshall,” adopted up by John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine” in 1946. Following “Gunfight” in 1957, additional accounts embrace “Hour of the Gun,” “Wyatt Earp,” and the extensively lauded “Tombstone,” the latter starring a wan however lively-in-spirit Val Kilmer because the lethal Doc.
In his memoir, Kilmer seems again on his iteration of Vacation as “defiance within the face of demise,” an angle that crops up by means of his color-drained face, just like Douglas’ resolute stoicism by means of sheens of sweat. The latter’s autobiography “A Ragman’s Son” explains that Douglas took pains to make sure that his character’s hacking did not dominate his personal model of stoicism:
“I needed to cough so much in ‘Gunfight on the O.Okay. Corral,’ and I needed to choreograph each cough. Since motion pictures aren’t shot in sequence, I needed to plan the place I used to be going to cough, how frivolously or deeply, and the place I used to be going to have an assault. In some scenes, I did not cough in any respect. Nothing can be extra annoying than to be coughing in each scene. A film isn’t actual. You create the phantasm you need to create.”
The outcome was considered one of distance and unflagging valiance, just like the William Holdens and Montgomery Clifts of the period, occupied not a lot with profitable an viewers over as delivering “the phantasm” and, like Vacation paying off his life debt to Earp, getting the job accomplished.