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
The Gunfighter turned it down, despite having expressed a strong desire to play the part, because of his longstanding hatred for Columbia's president, Harry Cohn. Columbia sold the rights to Twentieth Century Fox, where the role went to Peck. Wayne's final film, "The Shootist" (1976), is often compared to "The Gunfighter" and contains numerous plot similarities. The script was loosely based on the purported exploits of an actual western gunfighter named Johnny Ringo, a distant cousin of the outlaw Younger family and a purported survivor of the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral against Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers. As in