Tombstone, Arizona Tombstone to Benson, Arizona, the nearest railroad freight terminal. Near Drew's Station, just outside Contention City, the popular and well-known driver Eli "Budd" Philpot and a passenger named Peter Roerig riding in the rear dickey seat were both shot and killed. Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp and his temporary deputies and brothers Wyatt Earp and Morgan Earp pursued the Cowboys suspected of the murders. This set off a chain of events that culminated on October 26, 1881, in a gunfight in a vacant lot owned by famous photographer C. S. Fly near, not in or at the O. K. Corral,
Hour of the Gun not only survives the gunfight, but is a major antagonist thereafter. Where "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" is more about the main gun battle, this film begins with the gunfight and moves forward from there. Because Hal B. Wallis had scripted everything in the earlier "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", Sturges was disappointed with that film. "Hour of the Gun" is more of a psychological "melancholy character study". James Garner also played the lead as Wyatt Earp in a different movie filmed more than two decades later, Blake Edwards's "Sunset" (1988), a comedy thriller based on the 1920s period during