Hour of the Gun

Hour of the Gun is a 1967 American Western directed and produced by John Sturges, written by Edward Anhalt, and starring James Garner as Wyatt Earp, Jason Robards Jr. as Doc Holliday, and Robert Ryan as Ike Clanton. It dramatizes the aftermath of the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, following the Earp family's revenge campaign against the Clanton faction, and it is a continuation of Sturges's own 1957 film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.¹

Relationship to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Contemporary sources, including the 11 October 1967 Los Angeles Times review, identified Hour of the Gun as a continuation of Sturges's 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which had starred Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Sturges's intention to develop a story about the events after the 1881 shootout was reported as early as 25 September 1963, when the project circulated under the titles Law and Tombstone and The Law and Tombstone, and Sturges hoped to have Douglas and Lancaster reprise their roles. Development began at the Mirisch Co. rather than Paramount, which had released the earlier film.²

Edward Anhalt signed on to write the script in 1964 after collaborating with Sturges on The Satan Bug (1965). James Garner agreed to play Wyatt Earp in July 1966, after starring in Sturges's The Great Escape (1963), and Jason Robards Jr. later took the Doc Holliday role.² Garner had already played the lawman once before and would return to him in Blake Edwards's Sunset 21 years later.⁶

Production

Principal photography ran from 9 November 1966 to 4 or 5 February 1967.¹ The production shot in Mexico, with locations in Durango, Torreón in Coahuila, and Mexico City.¹ Filming moved to Churusbusco Studios in Mexico City on December 20, and production wrapped four weeks later after exteriors at a hacienda near San Miguel de Allende for the face-off with Ike Clanton.⁷

Casting in Mexico produced an unexpected result: having expected to import most of the featured cast from Hollywood, the producers found that six of the ten other featured parts went to Mexican actors after extensive auditions.⁷ The supporting cast included Frank Converse as Virgil Earp, Sam Melville as Morgan Earp, Michael Tolan as Pete Spence, William Schallert as Judge Herman Spicer, and Jon Voight as Curly Bill Brocius, in an early role.^{2 • 8}

Reception and assessment

Roger Ebert, then the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that the performances and plot were sound but that the story lacked "the perfect sense of poetic justice" of Gunfight; he added that the memory of the Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster performances "haunts the sequel like a ghost," but that Hour of the Gun "pretty much manages to stand on its own."⁹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 88% Tomatometer from 8 critics and a 52% audience score.³

A Turner Classic Movies essay calls the film a realistic look at the conflict between moral righteousness and the temptation of personal revenge, an undercurrent more sinister than typical cowboy fare, and describes it as a film whose social relevance grew in the decades after release.¹⁰ Sturges himself later reflected on the film's cool reception: "My mistake," he said, "was that I thought people would be fascinated by the real story about the quarrel between the Earps and the Clantons."⁷

Later commentators place the film among the revisionist treatments of the Earp legend. A survey of Earp films describes it as mid-accurate on the broad strokes of the gunfight and the Vendetta Ride, with invented dialogue and dramatized relationships, and closer to history than the 1957 film, which followed the mythologizing Stuart Lake biography.¹¹ Film scholarship groups it with Doc (1971) as a depiction that questions the celebratory Earp legend rather than echoing it.¹²

Availability

The film streams in the United States on Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Free, Plex, and Tubi, among other services, and can be rented or purchased on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and Fandango at Home.¹³

References

1. Hour of the Gun (1967), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Hour of the Gun (1967), AFI Catalog, History section
3. Hour of the Gun, Rotten Tomatoes
4. García Sánchez et al., "The tuberculosis of 'Doc' Holliday in the cinema," J Med Mov 2 (2006): 29-39
5. Hour of the Gun, AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center program note
6. James Garner: Tribute to a Marvelous Maverick, TIME
7. Behind the Scenes – "Hour of the Gun" (1967), The Magnificent 60s
8. Hour of the Gun: Full Cast & Crew, Rotten Tomatoes
9. Roger Ebert, review of Hour of the Gun (1967), Chicago Sun-Times
10. Hour of the Gun, Turner Classic Movies article
11. The Real Wyatt Earp: Separating the Man from the Myth, Western Firearms
12. Revisionist Westerns and the Earp legend, Sheffield Hallam University research repository
13. Hour of the Gun streaming, JustWatch

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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