The old story of the Earps cleaning up Tombstone with Doc Holliday, with Henry Fonda as Wyatt and Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. But hey, Walter Brennan as the Clanton patriarch. Which gave my dad and I plenty of excuse to use/abuse quotes from Support Your Local Sheriff!
At least in this version, the actual struggle between the Earps and the Clantons is almost background noise. The Clantons kill the youngest Earp and rustle their cattle, prompting Wyatt to accept the marshal position, but for a long stretch after that, there's nothing happening. Wyatt seems to be spending more time investigating Holliday, or more specifically, Holliday's ex, Clementine Carter who shows up looking for Doc.
The movie seems more interested on the love quadrangle with Wyatt, Clementine, Doc, and Doc's current lady, the tavern singer Chihuahua (Linda Darnell). The latter's actually the one I feel worst for, because she seems to love Doc, but he treats her pretty lousy. Presumably he thinks she's all a man like him deserves, unlike Clementine, the pretty white nurse, but he just jerks Chihuahua around. Promises to marry her, then bails on her. Maybe that's him trying to protect her the same way he tells Clementine to go back East, but it plays more like Doc's just being an asshole.
Probably because that's how Mature plays him. The first time Doc shows up, he interrupts a card game Wyatt's in to tell the guy doing the best that he better leave town. Out the back door, because the front is for women and gentleman, even though Holliday used it and he's neither. That's pretty much Doc's pattern, bullying or trying to bully anyone he takes a notion out of his own self-loathing. It's hard to feel bad for him when Chihuahua inadvertently implicates him in a murder because she's pissed at how he treats her like some consolation prize he doesn't even really want. Which might be why John Ford doesn't let Holliday survive the gunfight.
The climactic gunfight plays out rather oddly. Ford almost takes an approach I would have expected from a Sergio Leone movie. There's a lot of time spent on the slow approach of the Earps and Holliday to the corral, the way they use cover as the Clantons wait at the corral gates. The sound of the approaching wagon that plays a role when the first shots are fired. It's a lengthy set-up, but the actual fight is over in a minute or so. Once people start shooting, there's not a lot of misses. The most surprising twist is Wyatt letting the elder Clanton leave, so he can experience what the Earps' father has felt, losing two sons. It's not a merciful gift, and Clanton knows it, but I was not expecting that.
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