My Darling Clementine
Made: 1946
Cast: Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan
Director: John Ford
Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald
Writer: Samuel Engel, Winston Miller, John Ford
“We ain’t burglars, we’re just hungry”
My Darling Clementine is unlike most westerns, and even unlike most action-packed films that John Ford made. The pace is slow, the action is happening in little bursts until the grand ending, and the characters are lost in poetry and daydreams. Characters are introduced and dispensed with quickly, and there is a lot of material crammed into a 95-minute movie. In all yes, this is a typical western set up, but the whole movie seems to be a take on not good vs evil, but patience vs hastiness.
On the side of “patience” we have Wyatt Earp, who’s name has become a legend of westerns but never quite as personally portrayed by anyone better then Henry Fonda. He is one of 4 brothers (among them Tim Holt and Ward Bond) at the start of the movie, who are just trying to get their cattle across the land on their way to California. They make an unfortunate stop in Tombstone, AZ which is known as a town without laws where no sheriff lasts very long without being shot or booed out of office. Around the local sights are the barber ( ) and the local salon patrons such as Thorndike, actor who loves Shakespeare and brings culture to the town, and Chiwawa (Linda Darnell ) who sings and sleeps around, a sort of tragic figure along with Doc Holiday (Victor Mature) who always does what he thinks is right whether it is obeying the law or not. He is sort of a sheriff, or a man everybody respects to uphold decency and has the ability to drawn his gun fast against anyone who disagrees. Holiday is a prototype for the antiheroes of Clint Eastwood or even the comic book heroes like Wolverine, who gives out rough justice when nobody else will.
Together Earp and Holiday eventually cross paths and come to an understanding of sorts, eventually gaining each others respect. Earp and his brothers find out Bad guys and sons led by Walter Brennen are responsible for stealing his cattle and the death of his brother. Brennan is a nasty type, with no redeeming qualities at all, he calls his own children fools and rules his family with a whip that keeps all of them under his thrall. Part of Brennan’s evil portrayal, which totally works by the way (he had won 3 oscars for acting at this point in his career) could be because he and director John Ford did not get along very well. Along the way, Earp meets up with Doc Holidays ex-girlfriend Clementine (Cathy Downs) who has followed him to Tombstone though Holiday did not want her too, and Earp immediately falls in love with the quiet school teacher. The town has a dance at the new church and a very corny scene takes place where Earp asks Clementine to dance; but this strange merging of light love story with threatening violence is at the heart of what makes this movie work so well. Everyone, even the criminals, have something worth fighting for. Also, no character can see beyond their reasoning ot the folly of their thinking, which leads to many unnecessary deaths.
A lot of the movie flows like clockwork, and even if you have seen western before, very few are as memorable as MDC even all these years later. Director John Ford is quite the enigma, being among the first movie directors back in the 1910s, but making over 100 movies going forward each with an air of “doing a job”. He did not believe in talking about his artistic process, he did not “Try” to make movies meaningful. In Ford’s option, yeah I made this thing and hey I like doing it; uit analyzing what I did and just enjoy it. Ford actually knew Wyatt Earp in his youth and Earp explained how the gunfight at Ok Corral actually happened, injecting a much needed realness into the movie. Long before the Auteur theory and the revaluation of everything before 1960, Ford just liked making westerns. Still, some are pretty good, some are really good, and some have really stood the test of time. His best work, at least in the top 5 pillars of various westerns on themes: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1949), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot the Liberty Valance (1962). Each show brutality followed by the revenge/reaction of the hero. Some heroes are flawed (Doc Holiday) where some are more pure and good (Earp), you see MY Darling Clementine shows both types of hero.
The story of Wyatt Earp meeting Doc Holiday is the subject of many other movies, the most famous being Gunfight at the Ok Corral (1957) and Tombstone (1993). John Ford, knowing event that really transpired, edit scenes out of his movie such as Earp having a lot of dialogue, Doc Holiday wearing an opera cape, and Doc’s two girlfriends having a sort of cat-fight. Its easy to see how these things. These edits made the movie much cleaner, as well as the omission of any flaws to Wyatt Earp and his brothers. Wyatt Earp is portrayed as a being of total and pure goodness when in reality, he and his bothers were just as wild and took the law into their own hands as much the Clanton bunch (though they never went as far as murders). The blurring of history and legend is something Ford portrays in all his movies, culminating in The Man Who Shot the Liberty Valance (1962), in a way Ford’s entire filmography reflects the topography of the mighty Monument Valley location where he liked to film. Mostly flat, filled with certain peaks that stand out above the rest. It is hard to say exactly what makes this one of the best westerns, beyond the fact that it just gets all aspects right of a classic Western motif.