A Film Canon

Gunfight At The O.K. Corral dramatically departs from the sublimity of Ford's version, replacing his collapse of Tombstone into Monument Valley with a severe delimitation and exclusion of the natural world. Not only is the desert landscape condensed into a recurrent, threatening synecdoche - the Boot Hill graveyard - but the action takes place almost entirely inside, or on streetscapes that are sufficiently framed by verandas and porches to feel continuous with the lavish interior decoration. Although this produces a delightful transplantation of the heroic silhouette from widescreen horizons to expansive corridors and stairwells, it gradually subsumes individualism into a visceral, familial collectivity, as the world beyond the town confines becomes an amorphous, ambient menace to be superhumanly subdued, rather than a vision with which to dialectically commune. To this end, Sturges' 'brotherhood' - centring on the charismatic, volatile rapport between Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) - condenses and fuses the hyper-masculine, vigilantistic overtones of the 1950s Western into the first appearance of the neo-posse, which both anticipates The Magnificent Seven, and imbues the final gunfight with an unprecedented phallic potency, replete with saturated gore and acrobatic bravado; a self-consciously 'idiotic' celebration of machismo as pure, unthinking cinematic spectacle.