It was the shootout that elevated the likes of Wyatt Earp and dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc Holiday to mythic status.
Several features have honored the fabled event, but John Sturges’ “Gunfight at the O.K.
Corral” stands tall as one of the most illustrious retellings of the infamous 1881 Tombstone, Arizona shootout.The classic western stars Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and a bristled Kirk Douglas as Holiday, in one of their several big-screen collaborations.
Stricken with tuberculosis, Holiday’s scenes are earmarked by an intermittent tickle in the throat that, over the runtime, progresses to a full-blown hack.
“This kind of cough doesn’t go away,” he tells the lawman, but he won’t resign himself to a slow, peaceful death.
Never cowering, whether by the bullet or by bacteria, Douglas keeps his character’s physical ailments wrapped under a thick cloak of steely-eyed grit.
Earp saves his life from a lynch mob, earning loyalty – and in his own estimation,
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