Hour of the Gun

Hour of the Gun (1967) is a John Sturges western you can watch online on iFILM. It opens on the moment most films save for the finale: the shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. Marshal Wyatt Earp and his men cut down several of Ike Clanton's gunmen — and that first volley is where the story actually starts.

Clanton answers in kind, and one of Earp's brothers ends up dead. With the courts unable to touch the gang, the marshal rides out with consumptive gambler Doc Holliday on a hunt that keeps blurring the line between justice and plain revenge. James Garner plays Wyatt, Jason Robards is Doc, Robert Ryan is the man pulling the gang's strings, and a young Jon Voight slips by in a tiny early role. The poster asks it straight: lawman with a badge, or a killer with a clean conscience?

Sturges, the man behind The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, comes back to the Earp legend stripped of romance, leaning closer to the cold record of what happened in early-1880s Arizona. A hard, unsentimental western about what payback costs. Stream Hour of the Gun (1967) online on iFILM.