I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

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 ...

'Doc', from 1971, is an odd take on the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in 1881. It is more ambiguous than usual, and you really don't think that Doc Holliday was that willing to go along with his Earp friends in this version. It's vague and subdued and has some low-key acting, but I thought it was better than average and not a bad find.Faye Dunaway's added as a trollop domestic love interest of Doc Holliday.One thing to point out is that Wyatt Earp is portrayed by the characteristically unhandsome, "bug eyed" actor Harris Yulin ( Scarface (1983), Night Moves (1975), Clear and Present Danger (1994)). He's a bit odd and doesn't have the necessary power or gravitas to give him that punch that the character so richly deserves. Stacy Keach is fine as Doc Holliday, a bit of a rambler here.The "Cowboys", the Earps' enemies, are the weak link, as they are just basically rude and not very interesting.Still, it's worth a look.Also recommended: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) Hour of the Gun (1967) Wyatt Earp (1994) Tombstone (1993)

Dentist, gambler, and gun man this is the story of Doc Holiday and the gunfight in Tombstone, AZ. Stacy Keach does a good job in brining the historical character to life, and the movie does show him suffering from consumption (which is what he eventually died from). Faye Dunaway does an good job in bringing Kate Elder to life as Doc's lover. The movie does take some liberties though in the Kate knew and was a companion of John Holiday long before they arrived in Tombstone.The main downfall of the movie is its some what slow pace, and glaring inaccuracies of the actual gunfight. For this reason I have down graded the movie.Grade C

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.