Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Three brothers stop off for a night in the town of Tombstone. The next morning they find one of their brothers dead and their cattle stolen. They decide to take revenge on the culprits.
John Ford's elegiac Western is elevated by Fonda's quietly magnetic performance as Wyatt Earp and stunning Monument Valley cinematography that turns the frontier into myth. The OK Corral showdown is one of cinema's most beautifully staged action climaxes. The plot itself is fairly standard revenge-and-justice material drawn from well-worn frontier legend, and the film treads familiar Western ground in its narrative bones, but Ford's poetic direction and the cast's collective gravitas — particularly Victor Mature's tortured Doc Holliday — lift it well above the genre norm. The film's novelty lies more in its melancholic, elegiac mood than any structural innovation.