There is something to be said for watching a film out of its time, specifically 45 or so years after its debut. DOC is many things besides not historically factual. True, it is a revisionist western. It may be a comment on Viet-Nam at the time or it may be a metaphor on American cultural icons having feet of clay. Other reviewers have dissected the film with keener insight than I. Having never seen the film until this weekend, there was something about the relationship scenes between Doc and Wyatt that felt uncomfortable for me: The touching, the caring, the glancing, the prolonged camera shifts between the eyes of these two friends who once had a "history" (unexplored), a separation (also unexplored), and now a reconciliation of sorts (semi-explored). There's no love, or even, like lost between Wyatt and Katie. Wyatt watches his friend and a woman move into their "honeymoon cottage" with a knowing sorrow. There's a femininity that pervades this film that doesn't just come from Dunaway's Katie Elder. Even the roll-on-the-ground fight scenes are somehow less than violent. The camera lingers just a bit too long on the wrestling Earp brothers scenes at the ranch. The fight between Ike and Wyatt reminded me more of gay-bashing incidents in NYC that I've read about than any "street-fight" I've witnessed in a HS corridor over the years .... Film history is replete with subtle nods to non-heterosexual sublimity. Hollywood even made a documentary to that effect. I suppose if you know you're going to revise western history you may as well do it with panache ...
Review of 'Doc'
