Gunfight at the O.K.Corral

On 26 October 1881, Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and John “Doc” Holliday faced off against the Clanton and McLaury brothers. The gunfight occurred in a cramped lot six doors down from the O.K. corral. Based on the weaponry utilised and the number of shots fired, historians estimate the whole thing lasted no longer than thirty seconds. There was, all things considered, nothing particularly dramatic about it beyond the obvious dynamic of one bunch of guys trying to kill another bunch of guys. Stripped of hagiography, the gunfight at the O.K. corral – or, to be more realistic about it, the gunfight somewhere near the O.K. corral – boiled down to this: two antagonistic parties pulled iron, blasted away till they were out of ammo and those who were still standing at the end of it lived and those who weren’t didn’t.

But to quote a line from ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, “when the truth becomes the legend, print the legend”.

John Sturges’s ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral’ is the cinematic equivalent of the newspaperman printing the legend. From the time of the shoot-out (3pm in actuality, “at sun-up” in Sturges-ville) to the number of combatants (Johnny Ringo? dude wasn’t there) to the six minute gun battle that spills out from the corral and across half of Tombstone, Sturges’s film makes absolutely no pretence to realism. It also takes its sweet time getting to the gunfight.

Leon Uris’s script focuses on the relationship between Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas). Indeed, he and Sturges are so eager to spend time with the Old West’s most famous double act, that they’re pretty much rammed together during the opening sequence. Although the crossing of their paths from Dodge City to Tombstone calls for some degree of contrivance, this was probably a wise decision since Lancaster’s staunch, square-jawed lawman is a one-note character whose moral rectitude isn’t all that interesting. The alcoholic, tuberculosis-ridden Holliday is far more memorable, and Douglas has great fun playing him as a smooth bastard. Holliday is a man of fancy clothes, fine speech and a fast deck; he’s also an unblinking killer, whether using gun or knife, and – for all his faux courtly manners – not always the gentleman to long-suffering consort Kate Fisher (Jo Van Fleet). Their tempestuous relationship is contrasted against Earp’s ill-fated romance with lady gambler Laura Denbow (Rhonda Fleming).

Compared to these interrelationships, which spin around the core nucleus of the Earp/Holliday relationship, there’s not much room for other character dynamics. Virgil (John Hudson), Morgan (DeForrest Kelley) and James Earp (Martin Milner) barely get a look-in, nor do the Clantons or McLaurys fare much better in terms of screen time. Lyle Bettger’s curiously reserved performance as Ike Clanton leaves the film lacking a central villain, however John Ireland’s sneeringly nasty Johnny Ringo goes some way towards filling the gap. A youthful Dennis Hopper as the youngest of the Clanton clan also makes an impression.

Arguably the biggest strike against ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral’ is Dmitri Tiomkin’s horrible score, one of the few misfires in a career stippled with classic soundtracks, which recycles throughout the film an appalling ballad sung by Frankie Laine. Charles Lang’s dustily evocative cinematography certainly deserved a better aural accompaniment.

What remains, though, as the pace picks up in the second half, is what – essentially – audiences of the day wanted from a western; what, arguably, is an inimical to that genre as a black-gloved killer and a bottle of J&;B to the giallo: iconic images of tough guys striding purposefully towards their fate, hand on the gun. And a crowd-pleasing shoot-out when they draw.

The Heroes of Telemark

Anthony Mann’s last completed film – he died while 1967’s ‘A Dandy in Aspic’ was still shooting; star Laurence Harvey stood over directing duties – ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ was one of a tranche of high-profile war movies made during the 1960s. Unlike the perennially popular Alistair MacLean adaptations ‘Guns of Navarone’ and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ – which bookend the 60s and pretty much define this strand filmmaking – ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ was a true story and didn’t have a coterie of Brits and Yanks battling the Hun, but a small group of Norwegian resistance fighters.

Naturally, box office considerations decreed that a coterie of Brits and Yanks had to be prominent in the credits, hence the presence of Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris and Michael Redgrave. And on the subject of casting requirements, Anton Diffring shows up as a Nazi officer. I’d have to check, but I strongly suspect it was a legal requirement for Anton Diffring to play a Nazi officer in every war film made in the 60s.

‘The Heroes of Telemark’ suffers from two things: its over-familiarity as a Bank Holiday or rainy Sunday afternoon staple of British TV programming; and its overshadowing by many other war movies. It doesn’t have the action, the bombast and the unlikely but effective pairing of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood of ‘Where Eagles Dare’; it doesn’t have the infectious score and stirring aerial sequences of ‘633 Squadron’. Nor does it function as an anti-war commentary on a specific operation a la ‘A Bridge Too Far’.

And for all that it was obviously intended as something of a prestige picture – it’s billed as ‘Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark’, with Mann’s name filling half the screen signature-style, and boasts a score by Malcolm Arnold – there’s an occasional shoddiness to it, not to mention a lacklustre execution of the effects work that time has not been kind to. The worst example is a horrible sequence documenting Rjuken’s bombing which cuts in black and white footage of bombers and relies on ground-based explosions and cheesy sound effects to suggest a bombing run while there quite clearly isn’t a single plane in the sky.

Also, much as I hate to say it, Arnold’s score is something of a mishmash – effective when providing an aural accompaniment to DoP’s Robert Krasker’s surveys of the snowy, inhospitable Norwegian landscape, but unable to find a definite thematic statement when it comes to the big action scenes. Watch a triple bill of ‘The Heroes of Telemark’, ‘633 Squadron’ and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and it’s the two Ron Goodwin scores you’ll be humming afterwards, not Arnold’s.

Elsewhere, Douglas and Harris turn in the kind of granite-voiced, square-jawed performances you’d expect; Ulla Jacobson and – in a small role, but making it count – Jennifer Hilary bring some warmth and humanity to the proceedings; the location shooting, particularly around the electricity plant at Rjuken, is striking and makes from some starkly memorable images; and Ivan Moffat and Ben Barzman’s script manages to keep the sequence of events more or less in order but does make a few digressions into Hollywood hokum.

The story, it has to be said, is fascinating. With Norway under Nazi occupation, a heavy water operation at Rjuken was crucial to the Third Reich in the race to develop an atomic weapon. Three operations – codenamed Grouse, Freshman and Gunnerside – targeted the plant, with Freshman providing for British SOE troops to land by glider nearby and assist the resistance in a ground assault. When an SOE team were killed after a plane and a glider crashed, Operation Gunnerside took the form of an incursion into the plant and sabotage of the electrolysis chambers. The damage slowed Nazi efforts, but production continued. Bomber attacks caused damage to the plant but did not stop production. The final, decisive, act saw the resistance sink the ferry which was being used to ship consignments of heavy water on the first stage of transportation to Germany. Subsequently, however, analysis of a heavy water tank salvaged from Lake Tinnsjo has suggested that the production at Rjuken would have been insufficient for Nazi requirements. Still, hindsight was available to none of the participants and there can be no doubt that the Norwegian resistance were heroic in their tenacity, bravery and ingenuity.

The script truncates the timeline, barely bothers with the British participation, omits the arduous survivalist fieldcraft employed by the resistance after Operation Freshman went awry (Ray Mears’ TV documentary and accompanying book ‘The Real Heroes of Telemark’ provides a commendable account of this element of the operation), and spends rather too long on the squabbling between Douglas and Harris’s heavily fictionalized characters.

The story was first told on film in a 1948 Norwegian production, ‘Kampen om tungtvannet’ (trans. ‘The Fight for the Heavy Water’), which I’ve not seen but apparently features appearances by several of the actual resistance operatives. There have also been numerous books. Mann’s film wins points for its location work and its emphasis on what was at stake, but leaves you feeling like the full story has yet to be told.