This film is carried by Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Without them, I suspect the movie would have been more ordinary. John Sturges directs. He later came back to the Wyatt Earp story with his Hour of the Gun, which I found mediocre. Kirk Douglas adds substantial flair and emotional range to Doc Holliday. Burt Lancaster is just fine as Wyatt. We see an interesting friendship unfold between them throughout the film and relationship doesn't develop smoothly. Sturges starts out with Wyatt's time in Fort Griffin and Dodge City, in which he encounters Doc. Many of the names and places are legendary, but adherence to historical fact is lacking, especially in the actual gunfight at the OK Corral, which may be the most historically inaccurate one put to film. Tombstone's looks authentic by comparison.

For the first hour there's entertaining, old-fashioned Hollywood wild west drama in the saloons and streets. Lee van Cleef as Ed Bailey shows up looking for a fight with Doc. He has a Derringer concealed in his boot, which Wyatt warns him about, hoping to trade for information about Johnny Ringo, whom Doc had played cards with recently. Doc beats Bailey to the draw with a throwing knife; we see him earlier practicing his knife-throwing on a hotel room door. Kate is played by Jo Van Fleet who was about 40 and looks 50 on screen. Her performance is melodramatic and over-acted at times, bringing the film to a sag. Their intense relationship does showcase Kirk Douglas's acting depth and lends protagonist weight to his character. Too many of these scenes, however, disrupt the pacing of the film. Every time she's with Johnny Ringo (John Ireland) and then comes crawling back, it got tiresome and leans into soap opera material.

Otherwise, the film offers plenty to recommend itself: good dialogue, enjoyable action, decent tension and plot developments as we follow Wyatt and Doc who travel together from Dodge City to Tombstone and then encounter Ike Clanton and his gang. A young Dennis Hopper would have been about 20 years old in this and he did well as a conflicted Billy Clanton struggling to choose between the path of a gunfighter or leaving Ike's gang. There's a scene with Burt giving him a scared-straight talk about the gunfighter's life: "All gunfighter's are lonely. They live in fear. They die without a dime or a woman or a friend." Excellent stuff. All of the interplay in the saloons and the mounting suspense with Ike kept my interest, but sometimes I wanted more pep and urgency to it all. Seeing DeForrest Kelly (Star Trek's Bones) as Morgan was fascinating.

The final shootout is action-packed and yet oddly underwhelming. The Earps make their fateful procession to the corral and then immediately jump into a ditch, starting a shootout behind cover against the Clanton gang hiding behind a wagon. The gunplay needed serious reworking as cowboys are shooting six-shooters and firing more than six bullets without obvious reloads. Kirk Douglas seemed to have unlimited ammo. The way he dispatches Johnny Ringo here was parodied in Mad Magazine: Ringo retreats to the stable-like structure and sees the face of a bearded Kirk Douglas on the wall. Thinking it a portrait of Vincent van Gogh, he ignores it and is then blasted away. This is in reference to Kirk playing the artist in Lust for Life and the way he tricks Ringo in the film by sneaking up to the window to get the killing shot. Overall this shootout is remarkable when compared with other film depictions and shouldn't be criticized too much for the historical inaccuracy.