Potshots at the O.K. Corral

By J.C.

"Doc" Holliday walks in out of the prairie dust. Kate Elder, now off the line and making a home, looks up from her work. "Hiya, bones," she says. Hello, bitch," he smiles.

Another western for swingers. Doc, Frank Perry's new film from a screen play by Columnist Pete Ham ill, is sup posed to pierce "the western myth's special heart of darkness."It covers all the familiar territory, right down to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But this time Holliday is not a tubercular dentist from the East turned gunslinger, he is an itinerant murderer whose morals are only slightly stronger than his lungs. Kate Elder is a morose, scurvy hooker.

Wyatt Earp becomes a craven politico who packs a long-barreled six-gun and a highly pragmatic regard for justice.

Running for office, Earp makes speeches about law-and-order, deliberate anachronisms with which Perry and Ham ill take a couple of potshots at political relevance.

Those are diverting conceits, good enough, perhaps, for a casual short story, but flimsy as a basis for an entire film. Moreover, Doc is so redolent of a kind of New York cafe society chic that the Tombstone sa loon might just as well have been re-christened Elaine's. A minor New York City official in Mayor Lindsay's administration named John Scanlon appears as the bartender, and Dan Greenburg, author of How to Be a Jewish Mother, plays the editor of the Tomb stone Epitaph. They stand out like two polo players at a rodeo.

The general air of charade is underscored by the sets, which were rendered in shades of brown and photographed with washes of white light so that the film looks like an under done French fry. The pace is so slow that the real Doc Holliday could have dealt a hand of poker during each halt in dialogue. But Stacy Keach manages to suggest some depth in the Holliday character, and Harris Yullin, as Earp, slithers through his scenes like a genuine sidewinder. Playing Kate Elder, Faye Dunaway is better than she has been since Bonnie and Clyde, raunchy and touchingly haunted by the always frustrated hope of a better life. The irony is that Doc is interesting bunk. mainly It is for the the stuff things of it is legend-- trying the to challenges, the brawls, the gunfights-- that sustains attention. Perry and Hamill are simply swallowed whole by the myth they hoped to destroy. J.C.

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