'Doc'

source: 'Doc'

Trailer—'Doc'

'Doc'

It all looks good at first especially with Stacy Keach, he is 'Doc' and Faye Dunaway splendid, he wins her in a very fast card game. For about half an hour all is good but when he get to Tombstone, covering for Almeria in Spain, everything goes wrong. Actually, it is just that it is so very slow and really nothing for a story except the couple seem to set up house which is uninteresting and of course the OK Corral to come. Dunaway seems to love the bordello but then she likes the little hovel and Keach even if he has tuberculosis and coughing all the time. Harris Yulin plays Wyatt Earp rather poor but then so is everyone by the end and I'm amazed I stayed awake.

Very slow, brooding peace. You often wonder where the slow plot is going to. Stacy Keach stars as the legendary Doc. Faye Dunaway, is a young Katie Elder, who he wins in a card game. She kisses him in the mouth despite his tuberculosis. Didn't the audience flinch at that? He introduces a young guy to shooting. The 18 year old goes on to gun down a man who annoyed him. There is the usual shoot out at the end with the bad guys. You know what the result is. Harris Yulin plays an engaging Wyatt Earp. By the middle of the film, you're rooting for a quick ending so that you can exit the theater.

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday did go to Tombstone to get rich, but this film badly represents the "truth". This is typical of the time (Vietnam era) where law enforcement,traditions, and America were questioned and debunked whenever possible. Liberalism at it's finest. This film may have been thought-provoking (although inaccurate) for it's time, but we've grown up from those days, as we did from the overly-romaticized days that produced "My Darling Clementine" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Those films were polar opposites of this one, and both were inaccurate. The best film of the Vietnam era on this subject was "Hour of the Gun" made 4 years prior to this one.Add that to "Tombstone" and Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp" as perhaps the most close to accurate on this subject as Hollywood will come.

"Doc" is similar to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," in that it is a revisionist Western attempting to explode some mythology of the American West, which earlier Hollywood Westerns would glamourize. Here, Doc Holliday and Marshall Wyatt Earp are shown as not quite the good guys Hollywood has long portrayed them to be. The story of "Doc" follows the legendary outlaw Dr. John Henry "Doc" Holliday and his lover "Big Nose Kate" Elder on their way to the storied Gunfight at the OK Corral. Doc Holliday is played by Stacy Keach, as a soft-spoken gent who is deadly with a six-shooter. The film is gritty and dirty, but the profane dialogue seems like it was added just because the screenwriter could. My biggest problem is that the scenes look like they cut away too soon, and should go on at least a few seconds longer. "Doc" may not tell the true story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but at least tries to keep an enduring Western legend alive.