Hour of the Gun (1967)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) Hollywood’s determination to make an endless number of movies about the O.K. Corral gunfight is no match for my determination to not care about any of them (well, maybe except for Tombstone). In Hour of the Gun, we find ourselves once again at the Corral — but taking a slightly different direction, the film begins with the shootout, then follows the aftermath of the events as the Clanton gang is run down. Much of the films’ interest comes from featuring James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday — as a capable duo of actors, they can hold our interest longer than the script. Otherwise, much of Hour of the Gun feels like a feature-film length epilogue to another story, and one that’s powered more by American West mythology than intrinsic storytelling qualities. I’m sure that within a few decades, machine learning will be good enough that we’ll be able to point a moviemaking engine to the dozen O.K. Corral movies and generate a mash-up combining the best elements of all. That will probably be more interesting than watching the source movies themselves.