Doc (USA, 1971) 96 min color DIR-PROD: Frank Perry. SCR: Pete Hamill. MUSIC: Jimmy Webb. DOP: Enrique Bravo, Gerald Hirschfeld. CAST: Stacy Keach, Faye Dunaway, Harris Yulin, Michael Witney, Denver John Collins, Dan Greenburg. (United Artists)
Made during the period of so-called “revisionist” westerns a la The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Frank Perry’s Doc may not redefine the genre as those films, but presages other titles like Dirty Little Billy or The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, which paint historical figures in shades of grey, often against changing landscapes, rife with profanity, sex and violence for a new liberal audience. Perhaps these movies were closer to depicting the grubby reality of frontier life not necessarily seen in the classical pictures of John Ford, but even so they had an otherworldly quality.
Doc is perhaps closer than most films in painting an accurate picture of the Earps. By the time consumptive gambler and dentist Doc Holliday and his travelling companion Kate Elder (whom he won in a poker game) arrive in Tombstone, the tensions between the brothers Earp and the Clantons are well under way, and days away from escalating into the famed 1881 O.K. Corral gunfight, seen here more as a struggle for capital and opportunism than for law and order. Still, it takes some liberties with history– and if we’re going to take this film to task for that then it’s only fair to do the same with John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (usually regarded as the definitive movie about Wyatt Earp and the O.K. Corral). There are seven Clanton members at the famed battle: one of whom is a fictitious wannabe gunfighter, simply named The Kid (played by Denver John Collins, Judy’s brother), who befriends Holliday, and looks upon him as a mentor, while Doc views the Kid as an ugly reminder of his younger self.
The bug-eyed Harris Yulin (perhaps fittingly) portrays the screen’s least likeable Wyatt Earp in a cold, smug lawman whose frequent activity is sneakily hitting people on the head with his gun barrel. Faye Dunaway (like Julie Christie in McCabe) contradicts her glamourous image, seen here with bad teeth and well-placed mud on her cheeks. Doc Holliday is no Shakespeare-spouting dandy a la Victor Mature– instead, he’s an opium-addicted lout who coughs up blood in every other scene. Stacy Keach adds another title to his roster of unusual films made in this period (End of the Road, Watched, The Traveling Executioner, often with Yulin as his co-star) – his Doc Holliday is equal parts charismatic and caddish, dashing and disgusting.
Pete Hamill’s morally ambiguous script is a superlative, wonderfully vulgar look at the Old West: subverting the well-scrubbed white-hatted cowboys of previous movie lore, with frontier characters who curse, flatulate, fornicate and (it’s implied) fellate. The production was shot in Almeria, Spain, no doubt to emulate the Spaghetti Westerns of the time, giving the film a larger-than-life, perhaps mythic, feel (ironic for a movie that deflates the myths). Particularly striking are the moments in which Doc and Kate journey through the desert en route to Tombstone: the tone is nearly Biblical.
Frank Perry was surely one of commercial cinema’s most interesting figures in the 1960s and 70s. If his films (many scripted by his ex-wife Eleanor) were sometimes inconsistent, they nonetheless took chances. Whether he made dysfunctional love stories of David and Lisa or quirky rural adventures at Rancho Deluxe, his best work imploded screen conventions and often succeeded in studies of unusual human behaviour. Doc is surely one of his finest.