I just watched this on TCM free on-demand. The story starts with the famous Gun Fight at the OK corral as Wyatt Earp (James Garner), Doc Holliday (Jason Robards) and the other Earp brothers confront Ike Clanton's gang (Robert Ryan). The story is in some ways a sequel to John Sturges previous film 'Gunfight at the O.K. Corral'(1957) with different actors. The plot here deals with the aftermath of the famous gun battle, the court trials, and the revenge killings that followed. I felt that Jason Robards' was the standout performance here by far. His fine depiction of hard drinking seriously ill Doc Holliday is both memorable and believable. One standout scene is after Doc has an argument with Wyatt Earp and gets punched for what he says, his reaction to that punch is one only a man of Mr. Robards' talents could express so well; he was hurt both physically and emotionally at the same time by the punch. The punch also revealed just how sick he was in spite of his hiding it. Mr. Robards is, in my opinion, one of the greatest screen actors and often underrated as such. James Garner was competent, yet only had to act like a tougher less good-natured version of his Bret Maverick TV persona, there really wasn't much range to his Wyatt Earp. Robert Ryan was also in the film, unfortunately he had very little screen time or decent scenes to show off his usually impressive talents; any decent actor could have played his role. Overall it was a good if formula western with no real surprises to brag about. The reason it's worth watching is for Jason Robards' stand out performance, some excellent dialog, and fine music by Jerry Goldsmith. At the end the TCM host said this was considered John Sturges finest western, I have to disagree, a few of his other works 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Last Train From Gun Hill' were at least as good or better. Don't get me wrong, this is a good western, just nothing special or different like some of his others works were. I give this film a 6 out of 10 stars.

Producer-director John Sturges decided to revisit his much better directed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) ten years later with a different cast of characters playing the historical figures - Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons et al. Whereas the famous shootout has been told and retold countless times throughout cinema's history, writer Edward Anhalt picks up the story where the others have left off to relate what happened between Earp (James Garner), Holliday (Jason Robards), and (specifically) Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) after the dust had settled in Tombstone, Arizona. Ironically, Sturges had shown a fictional six minute long version of the gun battle in his original telling; he directs a more accurate 30 second version of it in this one, whose opening credits claim "this is how it really happened".After the gunfight, city marshal come U.S. marshal Earp and gambler Holliday are accused of being cold blooded killers by Ike Clanton, who'd lost his son Billy in the exchange, and his paid for county sheriff Jimmy Bryan (Bill Fletcher). But Judge Spicer (William Schallert) finds them not guilty. However, the personal feud continues as Earp's lawmen brothers - Morgan and Virgil - are gunned down one by one by Clanton's hired hands (including Jon Voight in only his second film and an uncredited Ben Johnson) while the new city marshal (Michael Tolan) watches from the shadows. Assisted by Holliday, who's gotten remarkably healthier since suffering a near collapse from his fight with tuberculosis in Sturges's earlier film, and the Tucson Sheriff (Monte Markham) among others, Earp pursues each of the perpetrators under federal orders to bring them in for prosecution. But of course, circumstances prevent this so that each of the accused can be eliminated by various means which are more dramatically pleasing to the director and Western movie audiences. But it's not over yet! Finally, evidence of Holliday's condition is revealed and Earp still has to track down Ike in Mexico; whether historically accurate or not, I think both of these story lines could have been cut or better incorporated in the final release. Also absent in this Sturges film is any reference to the stigma attached to Earp for his association with his gambling gunfighter friend Holliday.

Released in 1967, "Hour of the Gun" is John Sturges' sequel to his 1957 film "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral." Although he used the same production team he had to use different actors due to the length of time between the movies. Unlike other films covering the Earp/Clanton conflict, "Hour" starts with the famous gunfight and details the aftermath, focusing on Wyatt's avenging the Clanton's cowardly attacks on Virgil and Morgan. "Hour" has so much going for it that I expected a better film. For one thing, how can you go wrong with James Garner as Wyatt? Unfortunately, his performance is decidedly one-note stoical, but it's not James' fault as he was just following the script (I suggest catching him in a Western from a year earlier, the excellent "Duel at Diablo"). The opening is great with the notable score by Jerry Goldsmith and the well-done gunfight at the OK Corral which, true to history, lasts only 30 seconds, unlike the elongated version of the previous film. But the story immediately bogs down with the complexities of the Earp/Clanton feud. As such, the rest of the film is essentially talk, talk, someone gets shot, talk, talk, someone gets shot, more talk, someone else gets shot, all combined with a lot of traveling across the Arizona countryside in one way or another (horse, train, carriage). I don't mind talk if it's interesting in one way or another, but this talk all centers around the complex conflict at hand.Jason Robards is quite good as Holliday, but he's too old for the part; in real life Holliday was 30 years-old at the time of the gunfight and died six years later. The Mexican locations are magnificent, but the story is rather convoluted and is only engaging if you're up on the two factions and the characters thereof. Another problem is that there are NO WOMEN, except for a brief flash of the Earp's wives. Nevertheless, "Hour of the Gun" is certainly worth catching if you're interested in the Tombstone story and favor the quality cast. Speaking of which, Garner is laconically stalwart while Robert Ryan almost steals the show as the main heavy, Ike Clanton. But the film bombed at the box office and understandably so since the previous film with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas was a long fading memory; people were naturally lost concerning the complicated Earp/Clanton conflict. So I suggest viewing "Gunfight at the OK Corral" or, better yet, "Tombstone" (1993) or "Wyatt Earp" (1994) before viewing this one. That's what I just did and it helped me savor this version more than on my previous viewing. On a side note, look closely and you'll spot Jon Voight as Curly Bill in one of his first feature films.The film runs 100 minutes.GRADE: B-

Sturges originally attempted to cast Hour Of The Gun - a loose sequel to his Gunfight at the OK Corral - with some of the same actors with whom he worked back in 1957, ensuring a natural degree of continuity. (Sergio Leone planned the same creative economy two years later by initially casting the famous station opening of Once Upon A Time In The West with a reunited Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood.) Various factors made Sturges' scheme impossible, but leading parts were still secured by some fine actors: James Garner (as Wyatt Earp), Jason Robards (Doc Holliday) and Robert Ryan (Ike Clanton) as well as, way down the cast list, a young Jon Voight. Music was commissioned from Jerry Goldsmith and cinematography was from Lucien Ballard, who contributed so much to several Sam Peckinpah films.In the event the reception afforded the results was lukewarm. Hour Of The Gun was seen as too cynical and with a bitter tone that, though reflecting changing times, was less welcome in a conservative genre still a couple of years away from the controversies of The Wild Bunch. Audiences who had enjoyed the less complex moralities of such Sturges movies as Bad Day At Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven, or The Law And Jake Wade, and so on, were perturbed by the portrait of a lawman who, in the event as his best friend says could either be seen "as a hero with a badge - or a cold blooded killer." Garner's usually genial screen persona was subsumed in a portrayal of Earp as someone who eventually loses sight of his own guiding principals in an obsessive pursuit of personal vengeance. Adding to the uncertainties was the sight of a Doc Holiday whose own moral trajectory went unexpectedly the other way to such an extent it brings the two pals to blows."This picture is based on fact. This is the way it happened," announces Sturges' movie at its start, a complete antithesis to John Ford's often quoted dictum from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to 'print the legend'. Scriptwriter Edward Anhalt (who has an apt cameo in the picture as Holiday's resigned doctor in the sanatorium) reduced the level of historical inaccuracy noticed in Gunfight At The O.K. Corral even if, as events moved further along from the OK fight and its effects, matters still tended to drift (the elder Clanton, for instance, did not end up shot in Mexico). And ironically, most weaknesses in Hour Of The Gun can be put down to its avowed intentions to stick closer to the twists and turns of history. Whereas Gunfight At The O.K. Corral has a largely simple, arching structure leading to an inevitable climax, its successor is more episodic. A good deal of running time is devoted to the various face-offs of its survivors - in courtrooms, in the townships or on the range, as animosities were carried further. In Sturges' original crack at the legend, Earp defends society and the law and can be more objective in the process, even though it also concerns family; in the new film, in the light of the aftermath, he takes it far more personally. Legalities become ever more precarious until the changed, if still honourable, lawman confesses, "I don't care about the rules anymore. I'm not that much of a hypocrite." The classicism perceived in the earlier film, the moral clarity characteristic of cinema of the times (and demanded by the producer), is replaced by a more baroque narrative, which paints a much darker psychology.Hour Of The Gun begins with one of the finest of all western openings. The combination of a fine Goldsmith score (its main theme a combination of a reluctant growl and world-weary call to arms), the director's characteristically assured staging of action within the widescreen frame, as well as the tension brought by imminent events, are striking. The long, largely wordless moments as the Earps walk shoulder to shoulder, resolutely facing destiny, derive their power almost entirely from Sturges' powerful mise-en-scène - a sequence which, incidentally, may have inspired Peckinpah when staging the climax of The Wild Bunch. After such a start any narrative would be hard pushed to sustain such tension, and the episodic nature of what follows, as mentioned above, does not always work to the director's advantage. But Garner, Robards and Ryan (who also appeared in Peckinpah's film) are excellent enough to keep matters on track, whilst the turning of various events gives Sturges plenty of chances to stage smaller gunplay between individuals. There is no distracting love interest and the sentimentality brought by the Frankie Laine ballad which echoes through Gunfight At The O.K. Corral - a hangover, perhaps of the singing cowboy tradition - has been discarded.Today the particular mood of Hour Of The Gun seems better attuned to our cynical times than Gunfight At The O.K. Corral, which glows with a nostalgia not thought of when it was made: the lasting comfort of clean heroes and clean lines of plot. Garner's Earp is not afraid to get his hands dirty in matters of personal revenge even if it means, ultimately, he feels unable to accept promotion to adjutant general, chief lawman of the territory. By setting his later film in the times after a notorious gunfight, Sturges pre-empted such later directors as Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, who have also been concerned with the consequences of violence in such films as Unforgiven and Open Range. To the extent that Hour Of The Gun is all about the lasting turmoil and personal costs brought by the fatal encounter by a dusty horse lot on 25th October 1881, it has much to say that is relevant today.