Hour of the Gun and says goodbye to his unlikely friend, telling him this time he really is returning to Tombstone. As he leaves, though, Earp admits that he's leaving the Southwest altogether, intending never to be involved in law enforcement again. This is the second film by John Sturges about these events, following the fictionalized film from ten years earlier, "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", which had featured Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Holliday. However, Ike Clanton is killed at the end of the earlier film (during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral itself). In "Hour of the Gun", Clanton
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