Doc (1971)

Just perfect...

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There is something to be said for watching a film out of its time, specifically 45 or so years after its debut. DOC is many things besides not historically factual. True, it is a revisionist western. It may be a comment on Viet-Nam at the time or it may be a metaphor on American cultural icons having feet of clay. Other reviewers have dissected the film with keener insight than I. Having never seen the film until this weekend, there was something about the relationship scenes between Doc and Wyatt that felt uncomfortable for me: The touching, the caring, the glancing, the prolonged camera shifts between the eyes of these two friends who once had a "history" (unexplored), a separation (also unexplored), and now a reconciliation of sorts (semi-explored). There's no love, or even, like lost between Wyatt and Katie. Wyatt watches his friend and a woman move into their "honeymoon cottage" with a knowing sorrow. There's a femininity that pervades this film that doesn't just come from Dunaway's Katie Elder. Even the roll-on-the-ground fight scenes are somehow less than violent. The camera lingers just a bit too long on the wrestling Earp brothers scenes at the ranch. The fight between Ike and Wyatt reminded me more of gay-bashing incidents in NYC that I've read about than any "street-fight" I've witnessed in a HS corridor over the years .... Film history is replete with subtle nods to non-heterosexual sublimity. Hollywood even made a documentary to that effect. I suppose if you know you're going to revise western history you may as well do it with panache ...

I saw Doc when originally released and did not like it, I thought it was demythifying the West and I was against those films. The other day I saw it on cable TV and my opinion changed completely. First, instead of demythifying it was just showing the story from another angle, more favorable to the Clantons. And second, it rang true even though it might not have been true, who knows? There is a certain beauty in truth even though truth might be ugly. And it is certainly ugly in this film. And if we think of all the westerns where we admire the gunfighters and where killing seems necessary and in self defense, Doc shows the dark side of killing . Just for that it is worth seeing.

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.

Stacy Keach, who plays Doc Holliday in this film, made some incredible films between 1968 and 1974 and this is a Western epic (where he's the lead for a change) and kicks some Western butt on an old legend about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the west and Faye Dunaway plays Kate. Check out this early 70's GOOD FILM about America.Harris Yulin (who nobody knows) did plays and other films with Keach in the good old days - I'm not even into westerns since The Wild Bunch and The Man With No Name fllms, this script was Pretty Much on the mark about these cats! The old west, no guns allowed in Tombstone (SAYS WHO?) These guys, with worthy adversaries, and great dialogue in a movie nobody saw (unless, in 1971, you were a revisionist like Squint Eastwood did 20 years later in Unforgiven (a great film). Anyway, if you can find it (and Judy Collins' kid brother plays Billy in this) the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral will never be the same (no matter what your fantasies are concerning Western fact). Keach was the man for seven years. Trust me - I saw him on stage in New York and London. Well worth your time (Keach, Dunaway, and Harris Yulin fans), especially if you like Westerns cutting against the grade (even then); highly recommended (resembles The Hired Hand by Peter Fonda).