2hotFeature
one of my absolute favorites!
Megamind
To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.
Myron Clemons
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
Skyler
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
mark.waltz
There are moments of silence in this avant garde western where you might find yourself reaching for aspirin because of a silence is deafening headache. As Doc Hollifay, Stacy Keach speaks in such low tones that you want to check his pulse to check if the life is fading out of him. The exquisitely beautiful Faye Dunaway is initially seen dirty and disgusting, a prostitute so filthy that disease seems to ooze off of her. Clean her up, and she's in a bridal gown, literately carrying Keach over the threshold. Harris Yulin is Doc's old friend, Marshal Wyatt Earp, determined to clean up Tombstone even if he has to steal the upcoming election to do so. These three try to hold together an obscure artistic western that fails to come together and retain interest.At times, it seems that Tombstone is built over dead ground, so bland and empty that it seems like those who live there are ghost already. The actors are directed to either speak slowly and softly with long pauses, or be so crude that they come off as walking slimebags who you just don't want to see on screen. I can see people either loving this or hating it, and while I just found it aggravating, I have to call myself annoyed by it. Sometimes a certain piece of artwork is a masterpiece to some while others don't want to invest time analyzing it. I finally got to the point where I just closed my eyes and let the purposely soothing voices steer me to sleep.
John Ratko
Before watching this movie I'd never seen a movie with Stacy Keach in it that I didn't like at least a little. If you know nothing about Old West history nor anything about any of the real life persons portrayed in this film, or it's just your wish to get all wildly conspiracy theoretical and therefore would like things to your own pleasing rather than the way they actually are known to be, then you may very well enjoy 'Doc' a great deal. However, real Old West history buffs will almost certainly be appalled by the way this film makes an extremely biased, painfully obvious attempt to rewrite history while completely disregarding all known facts. Heck, it doesn't even bother to even very loosely adhere to only the Cowboy's side of the story and then embellish it a little or even a lot; something which to my knowledge hasn't been done yet and which would have the potential to make for a very good movie, it just flat out ignores every single detail about everything, everyone and every event.Unfortunately, it would be impossible to explain the reasons this film is so unbelievably historically flawed without committing spoilers and ruining things for those who haven't yet watched. So we won't be going there. To sum it all up: Those who will watch this film purely for entertainment value, as well as those who have no knowledge whatsoever of the actual characters and events as well as those who desire history be rewritten to their own pleasing, may well enjoy this film. Alternately, those who are knowledgeable about the Old West and prefer films on the subject to be based at least a tiny bit on anything resembling reality may be very disappointed. As far as facts go the entire film is about as honest as Big Nose Kate's tiny little nose.
edwagreen
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.
dougbrode
The way director Frank Perry and screenwriter Pete Hamill must have figured it, if George Custer could go from a hero to a villain after the impact of one movie - Arthur Penn's Little Big Man - then they could similarly destroy the lofty reputation of Wyatt Earp with a degrading film portrait. Here's their problem: Little Big Man, however fair or unfair it is to Custer, is terrific film-making from beginning to end. Not so this utter disaster of an attempt to make a revisionist western of the type so popular in the early seventies, when the youth movement and hippie era allowed for nasty portraits of the military and the police on screen, just so long as they were set back in a period of history so that no one around today would get too offended. Harris Yulin is a lackluster Earp, who with Doc Holliday (Stacy Keach) and Kate Fisher/Elder (Fay Dunaway) head for Tombstone. In this version, they don't go there to provide true law in the best sense but to use the law to make money. There certainly is a certain amount of truth in that, but the film errs by trying to offer a corrective to the mythic Earp and Company and so, to alleviate all the whitewashing, paints them dirty colors instead. The people who like this movie are the ones who believe that anything 'negative' is also 'realistic,' which doesn't happen to be the case. In this anti-Earp diatribe, history is rewritten even more ludicrously than it was in the pro-Earp films that preceded and followed this one. "Hello, Bones" Kate says to Doc; "Hello, bitch," he replies. Think that's clever? If you do, this film's for you. On the other hand, if you want to see an absolutely brilliant revisionist film about law and order in the west, check out Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, made about the same time, and a truly great film that achieves what Doc tries and fails to do. The O.K. Corral gunfight has never bee so totally misrepresented as it is here, even though the attitude of the filmmakers is that "we're telling you the truth for the first time." They simply replace positive lies with negative ones. Another historical gaff: The Tombstone Epitaph is portrayed (along with its editor John Clum) as being anti-Earp, when they were pro-Earp; the Nugget, another paper, was the anti-Earp one.