Review: Frank Perry’s Doc Gets KL Studio Classics Blu-ray Edition

Perry’s cynical western receives an impressive transfer and an illuminating commentary by Alex Cox.

DocFrom John Ford’s My Darling Clementine to George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone, the western is prone to building Wyatt Earp up as an honorable marshal who, with the help of his right-hand man, Doc Holliday, heroically brought justice and peace to one of the Wild West’s most lawless towns. “If it weren’t for bad people, what would you do for a living?” jokes Doc (Stacy Keach) to Wyatt (Harris Yulin) in Frank Perry’s Doc. The question, though, isn’t an earnest assessment of Wyatt’s selfless desire to dispel evil, as it speaks quite cynically to the lawman’s scheming and opportunism, and his tendency to use criminals as a means of furthering his political ambitions. Though screenwriter Pete Hamill based his version of Wyatt on Lyndon B. Johnson, Doc is truly a definitive Nixonian western, brewing with resentment, paranoia, and shameless power grabs executed under the guise of “law and order.”

Revisionist westerns were hardly a novelty by the time Doc was released in 1971; since the early 1960s, even John Ford had begun to question, most spectacularly with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the American myths that his earlier westerns had helped to solidify. But even the most brutal or melancholy of this new breed of western isn’t remotely as caustic as Perry’s film is when it comes to rejecting the notion that the powerful men of the 19th century are worthy of mythologizing. This intense mistrust of the legends of the past is weaved into nearly every frame of Doc. In everything from the focus on the dinginess of characters’ sweaty faces and Tombstone’s cramped saloons, to the foregrounding of Wyatt’s conniving and ruthless persona, to Doc being positioned as a lost soul trapped between a violent past and an impossible future with his new love, Kate (Faye Dunaway), the film cuts the legend of the Wild West down to size with a portrait that’s as realistic as it is fatalistic.

Even the moments of swooning romanticism that frame Doc and Kate’s love affair are instantly undercut by abrupt edits to two men leg-wrestling in the dirt and, later on, to three others brawling in a water trough. In this vision of the Wild West, love and sentimentality are fleeting, constantly and inevitably being swept aside by waves of violence. And the violence in Doc isn’t just ugly, it doesn’t adhere to the long-established honor codes that gunfighters typically stuck to in Hollywood westerns. No one in Perry’s Tombstone waits for the other guy to draw first in a gunfight, and the supposed villains, led by Ike Clanton (Michael Witney), are hunted down like dogs not for any actual misdeeds, but because of a longstanding grudge. Death, or the threat of it, is played like a hand of cards—sometimes a bluff, sometimes not—a means to an end, but the pot at stake isn’t justice, only pure, unquestioned power.

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Like almost ever film about the legendary figures at its center, Doc builds to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Yet rather than landing as a triumph of right over wrong, the gunfight is closer to an ambush and less about some kind of order returning to Tombstone than it is about our heroes settling old scores. If Yulin’s Wyatt is rapacious and vindictive from the get-go, Keach’s Doc is a more layered, sympathetic antihero, tortured by his past deeds and dying of tuberculosis but also hopeful that he may have a few years of happiness ahead of him with Kate. The pull of violence, though, is ultimately too strong, and Doc’s final gunshot in the O.K. Corral solidifies him as just as much a villain as Wyatt in the eyes of the film. But even more unsettling than Doc’s heel turn is the reaction to the men’s “victory,” which exemplifies the American public’s extraordinary ability to dismiss what they’ve witnessed with their own eyes and reframe injustice as a necessary step toward an ostensibly safer future. In that sense, Doc remains as frighteningly relevant today as it was in the Nixon era.

Image/Sound

Kino Lorber’s transfer of a brand new 2K master boasts a remarkable amount of detail, from the minutiae in the background of shots to every speck of dirt, sweat, and tears on the actors’ faces in the film’s many extreme close-ups. Doc’s earthy color palette is also very well-preserved here, with a nice variance within the limited range of colors and skin tones, which are consistently warm but always naturalistic. Nighttime scenes, such as when the nameless greenhorn played by Denver John Collins out of the shadows to ask Doc Holliday to teach him how to shoot, highlight the strong black levels. The stereo audio is surprisingly robust for a 16-bit track, and the mix is nicely balanced with a fairly strong differentiation between all the background hustle-and-bustle in Tombstone and the dialogue in conversations.

Extras

Aside from a few trailers, the lone extra on this Blu-ray is a commentary by filmmaker Alex Cox. It’s an extremely compelling track, in so small part because it’s obvious that Cox’s research for his 2009 book 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western provided him with an abundance of knowledge about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and westerns, like Doc, that were shot in Spain in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Cox consistently doles out fascinating, lesser-known tidbits about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, such as Wyatt never having been an actual marshal in Tombstone, and passionately speaks to the splendor of the film’s form, particularly Gerald Hirschfeld’s cinematography, with the authority of an experienced director and the excitement of a fan of the film.

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Overall

Frank Perry’s downbeat and cynical take on the Old West receives an impressive transfer and an illuminating commentary courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Score: 
 Cast: Stacy Keach, Faye Dunaway, Harris Yulin, Michael Witney, Denver John Collins, Dan Greenburg, John Scanlon, Richard McKenzie, Antonia Rey  Director: Frank Perry  Screenwriter: Pete Hamill  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: R  Year: 1971  Release Date: March 23, 2021  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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