movie review my darling clementine

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Civil War Link to Civil War
• Monkey Man Link to Monkey Man
• The First Omen Link to The First Omen

New TV Tonight

• Chucky: Season 3
• Fallout: Season 1
• Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Season 1
• Franklin: Season 1
• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Dora: Season 1
• Good Times: Season 1
• Beacon 23: Season 2

Most Popular TV on RT

• Ripley: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• Parasyte: The Grey: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Sugar: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• The Gentlemen: Season 1
• The Regime: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Fallout Link to Fallout
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

25 Most Popular TV Shows Right Now: What to Watch on Streaming

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

CinemaCon 2024: Day 2 – Universal Showcases Nosferatu , Twisters , Wicked , and More

Fallout First Reviews: A ‘Violent, Fun, Emotional, Epic’ Video Game Adaptation, Critics Say

• Trending on RT
• Play Movie Trivia

My Darling Clementine Reviews

My Darling Clementines beauty settles in the emotional profundity of the action, how every bullet has meaning, and violence is paltry next to the fates of our heroes.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 21, 2022

My Darling Clementine continues to be a solid movie where the Western acquires a curious perspective of the ordinary. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 4, 2019

Slow-paced tale of Old West shootout has violence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2017

If less than its outsized reputation, this Western is still a fun view, particularly in Joe MacDonald's austere camerawork in Monument Valley.

Full Review | Apr 29, 2016

Simple in its storytelling while transcendent as a poem of rhythms, bonds and values.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 1, 2015

generally considered the Wyatt Earp film against which all others are judged

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 30, 2014

Ford the mythmaker was at the height of his powers in 1946's My Darling Clementine, but it's a remarkably relaxed and assured piece of work.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 13, 2014

If ever there was a gateway drug to the happy addiction of Hollywood oaters, this is it.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 21, 2014

The film subtly complicates viewer expectations early on, eschewing clear-cut character rivalries in favor of more complex emotional and social configurations.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 21, 2014

Launched the series of masterpieces in the late '40s and 1950s that forever after defined [Ford] as the greatest director of Westerns in history,

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 27, 2008

John Ford's last film as a contract director for Fox is a perfect western.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 30, 2007

The quintessential Wyatt Earp movie and one of the greatest westerns ever filmed.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Sep 13, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2007

Vintage John Ford.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 16, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 30, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2005

That the title mentions neither Earp nor the O.K. Corral is an indication of the lightness with which Clementine carries the legendary baggage of its subject matter.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 4, 2005

May be John Ford's most achingly beautiful Western.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2005

Wonderful, moving John Ford true classic western

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 19, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 2, 2004

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

My Darling Clementine review – making myths of American west into poetry

A stonishingly, this masterpiece starring Henry Fonda as the upright town-taming marshal Wyatt Earp, and culminating in the 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, was only Ford’s second western of the sound era (the first was Stagecoach in 1939) and the first he shot entirely among the now familiar sandstone buttes and mesas of Monument Valley, subsequently so closely associated with his world and its ethos that any other film-maker working there does so in a spirit of homage. It marks the director’s homecoming to Hollywood after distinguished war service.

Henry Fonda also returned from active service as a naval officer to play the part in the film, his fourth collaboration with Ford. Ford claimed to have known Earp (who died in 1929 shortly after spilling some dubious autobiographical beans to biographer Stuart Lake for the myth-making book Frontier Marshal ), but it is in virtually every verifiable respect inaccurate. However, it is a poetic movie about good and evil that rings true to the myths and aspirations of the west that the genre symbolised, celebrated and came to criticise.

Victor Mature gives his finest performance as Doc Holliday, Earp’s consumptive sidekick, though he’s a doctor here rather than a dentist, and over the years he has been played by Kirk Douglas, Jason Robards, Dennis Quaid and others. All films about the Earp family and Tombstone reflect the times in which they were produced, and this stately movie about civic values and the creation of a community out of the wilderness (significantly using as its title the name of the film’s civilising heroine) is an address to a nation emerging from the second world war by a team of film-makers on both sides of the camera who had served in that war. It provides a lesson in humanity, not history.

In an interesting comment on the times in which the film was shot, Kim Newman suggests in a booklet accompanying the film that the night sequences in Clementine are as nourishingly expressionistic as the nightmare vision of Pottersville in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and the daytime scenes of Monument Valley as lyrical as those of Bedford Falls in the same movie. They were being shot at exactly the same time.

In 1946 the story of the Earp family and the gunfight at the OK Corral was not well known, certainly not yet a legend as well established as that of Jesse James, Billy the Kid or General Custer. Essentially it was created by two popular authors who came to know Earp in his final days in Los Angeles, where he had settled after a wandering life of gambling, saloon-owning, crime, financial chicanery, pimping and law enforcement that took him around frontier boom-towns from Texas to Alaska and back. They were Walter Burns, whose Tombstone: An Iliad of the South West appeared in 1927, and Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal , published four years later, and they set the scene for an unattributed Hollywood film of the Earps in Arizona called Law and Order (Edward Cahn, 1932), scripted by John Huston and starring his father, Walter Huston, as a character called Frame Johnson, and in 1939 Frontier Marshal , starring Randolph Scott as Wyatt Earp.

It was this film that the head of 20th Century Fox, Darryl F Zanuck, suggested might be remade by Ford and screenwriter Winston Miller, and although both denied having seen it, it actually anticipates Ford’s film quite closely. There is for instance a minor role for Ward Bond, who plays Morgan Earp in Clementine , and most strikingly a sequence virtually repeated in Ford’s film in which Earp is offered the post as marshal by the town’s elders after confronting a drunken Native American, a racist moment that nowadays embarrasses most audiences.

The inclusion of Frontier Marshal is one of the major elements in this Arrow Academy box set, which also features an hour-length documentary on John Ford and Monument Valley, a pictorial essay on Ford by Tag Gallagher, two radio treatments of the film, a 35-page booklet, and a study of the differences between the version of Clementine originally shown at a sneak pre-preview and the release version. The most striking alterations in the versions of the film are the addition of more folk music, and the change (suggested by Zanuck) that Earp and Clementine part at the end with a chaste kiss rather than the friendly handshake that had drawn laughter at the first screening.

Alan Dwan, the veteran director whose career had begun before the first world war, did a decent job of Frontier Marshal and provided virtually all the key scenes that Ford transmuted. He even began his film with a montage that gave his film a historical setting by explaining the significance of the silver strike that accounted for Tombstone’s brief prosperity and its notoriety. But what it lacks is that magic touch that turned rough prose into breathtaking poetry and the Monument Valley setting that embodied Ford’s vision of the west.

My Darling Clementine , as I’ve suggested, became a text for film-makers to argue with and challenge over the next 70-odd years as times and morals changed and more information about the historical background became available. In Fort Apache , Ford’s next western after My Darling Clementine and later in the 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , he formulated his ironic view on history, mythology, truth and what we blithely and confidently call reality. “This is the west. When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” The remark is attributed to a drunken newspaper editor.

• Philip French's classic DVD
• DVD and video reviews

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

4 Star Films

Looking deeper at the best classic movies together.

Review: My Darling Clementine (1946)

The first time I ever saw My Darling Clementine I couldn’t get over how unimpressive it seemed. If nothing else it certainly didn’t give off any self-aware sense of its own importance. There was nothing that struck me as outright epic and monumental. And yet this western has been a heralded favorite since its initial release in 1946. People love this movie. I think this time around I understand it better.

Maybe it’s all those reruns of the M*A*S*H classic “Movie Tonight.” Colonel Potter (Harry Morgan) eases the camp’s aggravations with a showing of his favorite horse opera which, of course, is My Darling Clementine .

But while the reels are spliced and diced for poor Klinger (Jamie Farr), the audience still gets something impactful out of the experience spilling out into their shenanigans together which makes for a quality evening. Because for once My Darling Clementine is a western with many moments that feel unextraordinary in the most human of terms.

Surely there was no greater and more prominent mythmaker of the Old West than John Ford. The key is in the realization Ford need not push anything, allowing everything to unwind in a way that’s the cinematic equivalent of organic action. The director goes with his proclivities of narrative scope, pairing down dialogue, focusing the story instead around activity — and those moments don’t necessarily have to be the perfectly suited sequences for instigating incendiary drama.

Ford’s actual meeting with the real Wyatt Earp on a film set back in the 1920s was a seminal moment for him. One could say he was imparted the blueprint and the inspiration for this picture and that is enough. Because the western never thrived on facts but the embodiment of romanticized figures and ideals. Wyatt Earp was such a figure.

Here Earp (Henry Fonda) is herding some cattle with his brothers when they pass by the town of Tombstone and leave the baby of the family to hold down the fort. In the most simplistic terms, their cattle get rustled and there’s little need to guess who the perpetrators are. The grizzled Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) is right there with his boys, a most obvious culprit. He needn’t even bother denying it. He never does nor does Earp ever accuse him outright.

Instead, Earp decides to stick around for a while and takes up the tin star for marshaling in Tombstone, that illustrious hell hole, emblematic of western lawlessness. Straightaway he shows a bullish tenacity in running drunks and troublemakers out of town but there’s still something more to him.

Ward Bond and Tim Holt act as his brothers and his constant companions. They don’t have a whole lot to do but stand behind their brother at the bar or eat their vittles at dinner tables. But then again, you could make the case most everyone has a fairly unostentatious part.

There is no standout performance and that seems very purposeful. Surely Fonda is the glue holding it all together but it’s not due to flare so much as an ever-steady portrayal that never feels like it’s vying for attention. He leads by example and yet this does not mean the film doesn’t have moments that leave an impression.

Linda Darnell gives him a slap and he proceeds to dunk her handily in the watering trough for her part in a crooked poker game. She’s the devious, saucy, and unfortunately named Latina Chihuahua. There’s the introduction of her man Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) that clears the bar and would have ended in a gunfight in most any other picture. Wyatt Earp smooths things over allowing life to sink back into the status quo.

A local theater production evokes a particularly rowdy atmosphere where Fonda gets a hat thrown his way which he promptly tosses right back while Darnell looks to whop someone over the head. The locals are aiming to make their displeasure known to the actor who has run out on them on multiple occasions. Earp and Doc go to fetch the man who is being harried by the Clanton boys. In one of the most articulate and entrancing sequences in a western to date, we are treated to Hamlet on the range. You know the words but never have they come out of a man such as Doc Holliday — suggesting that there is a side of him even an amount of breeding that we fail to comprehend.

Finally, Clementine comes to town (Kathy Downs) and we begin to understand. She was Doc’s girl back east when he was still practicing and known in circles as Dr. John Holliday. He’s different now, plagued by illness and alcohol-fueled demons while emphatically wanting her to go back from whence she came. It’s Wyatt who stands by with all sincerity. Getting up, tipping hats, and opening doors for her. The peaceful countenance she wears coaxes him in the direction of the church bells and a dance social.

We know what must come in the end. It’s all but inevitable: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In all truth, My Darling Clementine’s shootout is not the most climactic and I could readily name numerous others I prefer. But in capturing it the way he has, Ford has remained true to the essence of the narrative thus far. What strikes me is it is by no means a sensationalized picture. It never even feels like drama or caters to the theatrical. But John Ford has made it cinematic and though it might sound like some form of paradox, I do not think it is.

We are acutely attuned to the moments with no music intuitively because there is little auditory manipulation or further distraction. Everything of import is derived from figures placed up against Monument Valley or staged in crisp interiors. Likewise, few words need to be put to any of it. Because we are fully aware, almost subconsciously. We have just seen a microcosm of the West being tamed and made livable for common folk. The old world is being undone and churches and schools now find a place in the new social order provided by men like Wyatt Earp — embodied by the likes of Clementine as the new schoolmarm. All of this is evoked not by dramatic shifts but a near meandering rhythm of scenes stacked one on top of another.

Again, we go back to the indelible image that everyone instantly conjures up of Henry Fonda with his feet propped up against the post leaning back and just resting his feet a spell. And of course, he’s our hero and the same man who will enact this change. But Ford makes him a laconic figure and one he seems content as anything just to relax.

He’d rather get a shave at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor or carry the bags of a pretty gal than get into a gunfight any day. True, he can be ornery when he wants. Still, only as a last resort. Fonda’s the perfect man for the part because there’s nothing burnished about him but he comes off honestly with a straightforward sense of integrity. This allows My Darling Clementine to induce a generally optimistic portrait of the West from a picture that could have otherwise dwelled in the depths of near noirish cynicism.

However, even with its strains of the mundane — far from feeling prosaic — the film is blessed by Ford’s mastery of the image. Because what is Film if not a visual medium? The West was by far the most American canvass and Ford one of the finest masters of the art form. There need not be a better reason to relish My Darling Clementine . Aside from my expatiating, I would be amiss not to acknowledge this film as good old-fashioned communal entertainment. M*A*S*H 4077 is the case and point.

4.5/5 Stars

Note: I watched the Pre-Release cut which was restored by UCLA with slight differences from the theatrical release (arguably closer to what Ford originally intended).

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

1 thought on “ Review: My Darling Clementine (1946) ”

“Surely there was no greater and more prominent mythmaker of the Old West as John Ford. ” Bravo. Truer words were never spoken.

Like Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment Cancel reply

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• Menu Item

David Reviews John Ford’s My Darling Clementine [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

Let me start this review with an acknowledgement that may benefit some readers, even at the risk of alienating others. There was a time, some years ago, when the “feel” of a classic American Western film just didn’t fit my mental template of what a Criterion Collection title ought to deliver. My infatuation with the imprint was based in the fascination I felt discovering the cinema of other nations, or in the case of movies originating in the USA, my expectation of something with a rowdy counter-cultural attitude that cut against the mainstream grain. Sam Fuller fit that template, of course. Terry Gilliam too. How about the Maysles, W.C. Fields, Stephen Soderberg, Wes Anderson? Most definitely! I could even buy into the arguments defending the two Michael Bay films, and Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy , for that matter. But Westerns? Horse operas tainted by all the traits of jingoist, triumphalist and occasionally racist baggage attached to the saddles? Not really my thing, to say the least. Blazing Saddles was more along the lines of a Western that I could get into – a movie that openly mocked the conventions, the sentimentality, the presumed ignorance and cornball buffoonery that I had a hard time digesting when I saw men in ten-gallon hats sauntering down dusty streets or pushing their way through the swinging doors of a high plains saloon.

Looking back now on what led to this bias on my part, I’ll assign responsibility to early childhood over-exposure to mediocre, formulaic TV Westerns that gave me a sense that these were just shows for the old folks. That youthful aversion was only compounded by the nausea I suffered back in 1980 when  Urban Cowboy was released in an effort to do for country music what  Saturday Night Fever had done for disco. That heavy-handed hard sell conflicted violently with my identity as a punk rocker at the time. When all that prejudice combined with the notorious brawls that erupted between the Sex Pistols and the drunken bunch of cowboys who accosted the band during their 1979 tour of the American South, it resulted in a colossal barrier between me and genuine appreciation of the genre that’s taken me a few decades to overcome. But lest I digress any further, let’s return to the subject at hand…

Back in the days when Young Mr. Lincoln was the sole Criterion entry helmed by John Ford, the man considered by many to be the USA’s greatest-ever movie director, it seemed like an anomaly to me, with its jaunty soundtrack music, a folksy sense of humor, the family-friendly appeal to wholesome, even downright nostalgic Americana and an apparent lack of that subversive cutting edge that made my discovery of a new Criterion film feel so refreshing from the standard cineplex fare that I’d grown accustomed to. Don’t get me wrong – I was able to enjoy  Young Mr. Lincoln , and later on, Stagecoach , for what they were – fine films that I could watch casually with my kids, friends and relatives when we were in the mood to enjoy a classic from yesteryear. But Ford’s basic approach to story telling lacked (to me, I’m just saying) that sense of the exotic and unfamiliar that I associated with Criterion.

I lead with that sentiment here in the hope that it might connect with readers who harbor some of those same reservations I expressed about going down the Western road that Criterion has been enthusiastically exploring over the past several years. Alongside the two John Ford offerings mentioned above, Anthony Mann’s  The Furies (2008) was the first true Western to get a Criterion spine number (though two early films by Samuel Fuller, I Shot Jesse James and The Baron of Arizona , both predated that release as part of the Eclipse Series .) It took awhile for Stagecoach (2010) to make it into the collection, but since then we’ve seen them add a pair of more modern takes (Ang Lee’s  Ride with the Devil and Michael Cimino’s  Heaven’s Gate ) to accompany a rapidly growing subset of titles from the genre’s heyday of the 1940s through 1960s – Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma and Jubal last year, and no less than four offerings in 2014: Howard Hawks’ Red River  was issued this past summer, a pair of Monte Hellman Westerns are coming up in the near future, and most recently, John Ford’s  My Darling Clementine .

Don’t get me wrong – I fully understand that these films have been met with an eager reception by quite a few Criterion fans who are thoroughly delighted by this development. And I’m now glad to count myself among this company. On our recent podcast discussing Red River , I noted my former ambivalence about Western films, but now I feel like I’m making up for lost time. And I’m convinced that My Darling Clementine delivers enough of the goods on multiple levels of cinematic excellence to persuade most, if not all, who hold “cowboy movies” at a distance to lower their defenses and give them a fresh look.

For starters, the images on this new Blu-ray disc are transcendentally beautiful. Having seen the stunning quality of the restored theatrical release in comparison with the scuffed and scratchy pre-release version also included in this package, I’m confident that those who own the film’s earlier DVD versions would find the experience quite refreshing, despite its familiarity. I mean, in an era of utterly gorgeous HD transfers of films old and new, there is a quality to the play of light and shadow in My Darling Clementine that struck me as quite unique, riveting my eye to the screen to such an extent that I occasionally found myself losing track of the finer points of the story as I got lost in the sumptuous landscapes, majestic cloud textures and strikingly illuminated profiles of the characters.

Not that the story is especially complicated or hard to track, by any means. For those new to the film, My Darling Clementine is still the definitive, if not strictly the first or most historically accurate, cinematic telling of the tale of Wyatt Earp and the celebrated gunfight at the O.K. Corral that occurred in Tombstone, Arizona back in 1881. That legendary showdown went on to serve as the basis for dozens of film and literary adaptations and variations over the subsequent decades, to the point that the story is firmly embedded in the subconscious of American popular culture. This movie’s title, based on an old folk song lament about the beloved daughter of a “miner, Forty-Niner,” is at first glance a bit perplexing, since the lyrics have nothing to do with the familiar set-up of white hats poised against black hats in a grim showdown of good versus evil. Latter day retellings are a lot more upfront about their focus: 1994’s Wyatt Earp and 1993’s Tombstone were both big budget Hollywood efforts to re-establish the myth for modern audiences that achieved mix success. As their instant name-brand titles indicate, today’s studios would never allow such indirectness in naming a film aimed at the contemporary action/adventure audience as Daryl Zanuck granted to John Ford back in 1946.

As it turns out, that title is indeed a highly significant indicator of just where Ford wanted to place his emphasis in the storytelling, even as he expertly built the suspense and drama leading up to the inevitable shoot-out. Yes, we do eventually get a hearty blast of six-guns a-blazin’ at the end, along with a powerfully kinetic stagecoach chase, some palpable moments of drawn handgun tension and a few outbursts of sadistic, deadly violence scattered throughout. But as big a jolt as those moments provoke, the meatiest portions of the narrative are found in the four-way emotional tangle that develops between Marshal Wyatt Earp, his adversary-turned-ally Doc Holliday and the two women, Chihuahua and Clementine, who have each staked their romantic claims to the Doc, a tubercular would-be boss man in Tombstone who considers himself above the law. It’s to Ford’s everlasting credit that this rather sensitive, humanizing portrayal of Wyatt Earp never loses its balance to become either mawkishly sentimental or excessively grim in its posturing. For those who’ve come to regard Earp as a wily, no-nonsense hard ass who’s not above mixing vengeful personal motives into his enforcement of the law (based on more recent portrayals in the movies), Henry Fonda’s impeccably measured performance is a revelation of subtle nobility. Ford and Fonda sifted through the artifacts left behind by the real Wyatt Earp’s own self-mythologizing efforts (books, interviews, Ford’s own personal acquaintance with the man himself), taking what they found useful for their own purposes and freely reconfiguring whatever elements they needed to add in order to craft a universally accessible tale that was nevertheless far from cliched or predictable.

So we’re presented with a Wyatt Earp who harbors difficult emotions (regret for the part that his negligence played in his younger brother’s violent death, romantic attraction – doomed to remain unrequited – to the demure young woman who arrives in Tombstone to pursue the man she loves) but manages them with a patient, taciturn humility that is unquestionably manly even as he refrains from imposing his own will prematurely on the problems that present all around him. Though there are other excellent turns delivered by Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, Linda Darnell as the alluring bar floozy Chihuahua and Walter Brennan as the tyrannical patriarch of the outlaw Clanton family, it’s Fonda’s mastery that allows the rest of the elements to come together in a story that is deeply enduring and poignantly soul-stirring. For those who’ve already come to regard My Darling Clementine as one of the high points of American cinema (whether they be genre aficionados or not), this new edition is a crucial “must own” release. For those who, like me, have some reservations about our ability to identify with and feel challenged by old-time cowboy movies, spending an hour and a half in Marshal Earp’s company will most likely prove to be positively persuasive.

David Blakeslee

David hosts the Criterion Reflections podcast, a series that reviews the films of the Criterion Collection in their chronological order of release. The series began in 2009 and those essays (covering the years 1921-1967) can be found via the website link provided below. In March 2016, the blog transferred to this site, and in August 2017, the blog changed over to a podcast format. David also contributes to other reviews and podcasts on this site. He lives near Grand Rapids, Michigan and works in social services. Twitter / Criterion Reflections

Just Announced!

CRITERION ON AMAZON COMING SOON BOX SETS ESSENTIALS CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD AWARD WINNERS

A podcast network and website for fans of quality theatrical and home video releases.

• Support us on Patreon
• Best of the Year
• Blu-ray Upgrade Wishlists
• Episodes 001-050
• Episodes 051-100
• Episodes 101-150
• Episodes 151-200
• Episodes 201-250
• Disc 2 Episodes
• Disc 3 Episodes
• Cinema Gadfly
• Criterion Channel Surfing
• Criterion Close-Up
• Criterion Completion
• Criterion Now
• Criterion Reflections
• The Eclipse Viewer
• Inside the Box
• The Newsstand
• Off The Shelf
• On The Screen
• Masters Of Cinema Cast
• Armchair Vacation
• A Journey Through The Eclipse Series
• Blogging Through The Collection
• Criterion Channel Programming
• Crossing the Streams
• Kick Start This Film
• On The Hulu Channel
• New Home Video Releases
• Theatrical Film Reviews
• Blu-ray Reviews
• DVD Reviews
• Press Notes
• Fantastic Fest
• New York Film Festival
• Portland International Film Festival

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine , like Errol Flynn as Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood , is something of an oddity. Neither actor is anyone’s abstract idea of the icon he plays, yet each owns the role he plays so completely that he transforms it.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/spiritual value, age appropriateness, mpaa rating, caveat spectator.

Ford, who met the real Wyatt Earp, could easily have cast John Wayne in the role; Roger Ebert, in his “Great Movies” essay on the film, speculates that Ford perhaps “saw Wayne as the embodiment of the Old West, and the gentler Fonda as one of the new men who would tame the wilderness.”

That the film’s title mentions neither Wyatt Earp or the O.K. Corral is an indication of the lightness with which My Darling Clementine carries the legendary baggage of its subject matter. Unlike such self-conscious later films as Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (or, more recently, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone ), nothing about My Darling Clementine betrays any awareness that the viewer is supposed to know these names and events. My Darling Clementine exemplifies the mythology of the old West, but it never feels like an act of myth-making — or demythologizing. As Battleground is to The Battle of the Bulge , My Darling Clementine is to Shootout at the O.K. Corral .

The title also puts the emphasis not on the shootout or the hero, but on a schoolmarm, Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), and thus on the coming of civilization to the frontier. For Fonda’s Earp, as for Ford, the shootout at the O.K. Corral isn’t the defining moment of Earp’s life, but only a necessary bit of business; the Sunday morning dance on the floor of the unfinished church — at once a celebration of joie de vivre , community and civilization in the rough, and faith and church as social institutions — represents the film’s real high point.

• The face of God in Cabrini
• Cabrini celebrates human dignity and solidarity; the saint remains an enigma
• Dune: Part Two exceeds expectations in every way — except humanity
• Dune and The Lord of the Rings
• Ethan Hunt’s second act and Tom Cruise’s third: The unending impossible mission

Now Playing

• View featured posts
• View sidebar

Cinema from the Spectrum

Your guide to cinema from the eyes of autistic individuals..

‘Io Capitano’ Review: A Fine Line Between Empathy and Spectacle

‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Review: Pleasing Everyone Can Only Get You So Far

‘Society of the Snow’ Review: Is Survival Worth It?

‘Saltburn’ Review: Pretty but Hollow Provocation

‘Ferrari’ Review: Chasing the Shrinking Spotlight

‘Hit Man’ TIFF Review: An Action Story Too Good to be True

‘All of Us Strangers’ Review: Capturing All of the Heartbreak

‘Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire’ Review: A Truncated Space Epic

‘About Dry Grasses’ TIFF Review: A Meditative Breakdown of Selfishness

‘Godzilla Minus One’ Review: A Thundering Lizard

My Darling Clementine – Review

• 5 Stars , Jaime's Reviews
• 1946 , cathy downs , drama , henry fonda , john ford , linda darnell , samuel g. endel , stuart n. lake , tim holt , victor mature , walter brennan , western , winston miller
• Leave a comment

It goes without hesitation that John Ford perfected the western genre for all of American cinema especially when films like The Searchers exist, but going more into the great filmmaker’s body of work, we come down to My Darling Clementine which showcases some of the director’s very best capabilities. With My Darling Clementine , what John Ford presents on the screen are the director’s own abilities with moving forward stories and in turn what he leaves behind is one of the most compelling westerns to have been put to the screen. However, when it comes down to Ford’s manners of looking upon the story of what happened on the O. K. Corral (the finest interpretation of the story to have been put on film), a sort of genre-blending wonder comes into play and it soon becomes all the more remarkable.

Henry Fonda as John Ford’s interpretation of Wyatt Earp in  My Darling Clementine .

Some may expect something typical out of a film that documents the gun battle on O. K. Corral but what John Ford creates here is something that does not play with the normal conventions of the story. With John Ford behind the camera, it is clear that he places elements of film-noir into observing what took place on the setting and in turn, it adds more to the beauty that the black-and-white cinematography were already able to capture. Ford’s image of the aptly named town of Tombstone carries many themes that recur throughout film-noir, in which the darkest depths of the towns are flooded with the fuel, to speak most importantly we have the violence and corruption all throughout the town. Ford works around the tension so vividly and in turn it forms an atmosphere all so perfect for My Darling Clementine .

With Ford’s buildup of the character of Wyatt Earp, one can already ask where can we get a better interpretation of the character. Granted we already have the entertaining Tombstone and the dreadfully overlong Wyatt Earp , but we have never seen the exact same character built up in the same way that Ford chooses to do so in here – it is possibly his most accomplished character piece yet. Ford builds up Wyatt Earp not as a western hero, but a broken man, reminiscent of the protagonist of a classic noir. Ford’s experimentation with blending the atmospheres of both the western and the noir from a unique understanding of their pathos is something of its own kind – and it still has never been repeated in the same way.

Interestingly, My Darling Clementine chooses to explore the themes to which it tackles inside of a much more passive manner especially with how Ford chooses to handle Henry Fonda’s portrayal of Wyatt Earp. Although once in a while the handling is more explicit, what remains intact is how the film just goes about with its picture of the exterior. From Ford’s insights into the sort of world which his characters are occupying, the rather short running time becomes an entire package of ideas that are hinted so cleverly – and always explored. No matter where Ford wishes to tackle, whether it comes from the friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday from a mutual interest in the titular Clementine, or the damage from corruption and its impact upon Tombstone, everything about where My Darling Clementine goes is beyond satisfactory – it is simply one of the best American westerns to have ever graced the screen. The lawfulness of such a civilization adds more to the wonders which such a film creates.

Henry Fonda’s performance as Wyatt Earp also something that stands apart from other portrayals of the character. He embodies one who is not your typical western hero, which is also helpful upon distinguishing a film like My Darling Clementine from many others. He is captivating in this role, which is easily his best ever since Ford’s prior The Grapes of Wrath and Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident , and prior to two of his most famous roles: 12 Angry Men and Once Upon a Time in the West . There’s so much one can say about Ford’s role I can ramble for hours already. Wyatt Earp has never been broken down to this level before and only John Ford could have gotten such a performance, one that was given out by none other than the always great Henry Fonda.

Ford makes use of the folk song in its title as a means of representing the haunting effect left behind by such a film. The western genre has never been grounded to such a degree where what has been established is a society that could very much be damaged like our own. It’s something that lays within the shadows and seeps through the cracks for the light a sense of civilization. It is the fact that My Darling Clementine is not telling a tale of what happened on the O. K. Corral that makes it the best interpretation of such a story. It is from how John Ford uses it as a backdrop to explore the damaged soul that is carried from Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp where its haunting effect comes, and how the only way for a solution is an act of violence. Ford doesn’t make this into any ordinary retelling of what happened on the O. K. Corral, it’s the downfall of human civilization and the devastating impact that forms it.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Fox.

Directed by John Ford Screenplay by Samuel G. Engel, Winston Miller, from  Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart N. Lake Produced by Samuel G. Engel Starring Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, Cathy Downs Release Year: 1946 Running Time: 97 minutes

Share this:

Leave a comment cancel reply.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

My Darling Clementine

• Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
• October 13 2014

See more details, packaging, or compare

John Ford takes on the legend of the O.K. Corral shoot-out in this multilayered, exceptionally well-constructed western, one of the director’s very best films. Henry Fonda cuts an iconic figure as Wyatt Earp, the sturdy lawman who sets about the task of shaping up the disorderly Arizona town of Tombstone, and Victor Mature gives the performance of his career as the boozy, tubercular gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. Though initially at cross-purposes, the pair ultimately team up to confront the violent Clanton gang. Affecting and stunningly photographed, My Darling Clementine is a story of the triumph of civilization over the Wild West from American cinema’s consummate mythmaker.

Picture 9/10

Extras 10/10

You Might Like

Young Mr. Lincoln (Blu-ray)

Fail Safe (Blu-ray)

Unfaithfully Yours (DVD)

MPAA Rating

Produced by, my darling clementine (1946), directed by john ford.

• AllMovie Rating 10
• User Ratings ( 0 )
• Your Rating
• Overview ↓
• AllMovie Review Review ↓
• User Reviews ↓
• Cast & Crew ↓
• Releases ↓
• Related ↓

Review by Lucia Bozzola

Considered one of the greatest classical Westerns, John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) turns an idealized version of the Earp/Clanton shootout at the OK Corral into a story of how the West was won for the good of civilization. Shot on location in Monument Valley in crisp, deep-focus black-and-white, the film opens as Henry Fonda's upstanding yet slightly (and humorously) awkward Wyatt Earp arrives in Tombstone to settle a family score with the murderous Clantons, staying long enough to make the untamed town safe for the new church and schoolmarm-to-be Clementine and enable corrupt, tubercular Easterner Doc Holliday to find a bit of redemption. Yet even as Ford celebrates the possibilities of the new West, he also engages the post-war tendency for Westerns to examine their own myths: for instance, in the expressionistic photography and in Earp's contradictory place between civilization and the wilderness. He knows the way Tombstone ought to be, but he can't settle there himself; the final shootout begins as an orderly ritual but becomes a chaotic montage of death. The "director's cut" discovered in 1994 contains several minutes of excised footage; the ending was reportedly changed due to the reaction of a 1946 preview audience.

The Ace Black Movie Blog

Reviews of Classic and Current Movies

• Movie Review Index
• Movie Star Index
• 300 All-Time Greatest Movies
• About + Contact + Subscribe

Sunday 17 July 2016

Movie review: my darling clementine (1946).

No comments:

Post a comment.

We welcome reader comments about this post.

Latest Content

review | My Darling Clementine

also on Cineluxe

Amazon Prime | Hail the Conquering Hero

Kaleidescape | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Kaleidescape | Casablanca

Kaleidescape | The Godfather

see more in Reviews

Sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay up to date on Cineluxe

Often eclipsed by the more iconic Stagecoach and The Searchers , this lower-key approach to the western proves to be John Ford’s most satisfying take on the genre

by Michael Gaughn November 14, 2022

I’m always wary of “best of” lists because they’re near always just a way to coerce a consensus, usually for institutional or marketing purposes, and rarely have much to do with the actual quality of whatever’s listed. But it’s hard to understand the importance of My Darling Clementine without going there, even if just a little. My favorite John Ford film, I would place Clementine just slightly above Young Mr. Lincoln and Fort Apache , partly because of its deceptively loose, almost documentary style and episodic structure, which have helped keep it limber and relevant. While I admire Stagecoach and The Searchers , I just don’t have the unalloyed affection for them that I have for those other three.

I would also humbly suggest that Clementine is the best western ever made—exactly because it isn’t epic and mythic but intimate and, that dread word, poetic. Anything shot in Monument Valley is inevitably going to have an epic feel, and there are moments when Ford gives the Academy-ratio frame the grandeur of widescreen. But he never lingers there for the sake of effect, instead devoting almost all his attention to developing his core group of characters, making sure they’re never eclipsed by the setting and that nothing allegorical or mythic distorts their human scale.  

He also keeps the film rooted in history, having it revolve around the actual town of Tombstone and the actual figures of the Earps, Clantons, and Doc Holliday, being careful to keep all the elements in proportion. Is it accurate? Not really—or not much at all. But rather than stay pedantically true to the facts, it stays true to the feel of the facts. This isn’t how history actually was but how we want it and need it to be.

Maybe the biggest reason for the film’s strength and durability, its glue, is its grounding in process. Ford doesn’t underline it but Clementine ’s not just armature but foundation lies in its portrayal of Tombstone’s evolution from frontier outpost to something resembling a civilized town and of how Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday both effect and are affected by that maturation, which makes the film much richer than if the town had just been used as a backdrop.

The most startling thing about Clementine , though, might be its look, which is often stark and gritty with naturalistic light but filled with grace notes and, especially in nighttime shots, both exteriors and interiors, venturing into chiaroscuro. I suspect this was partly inspired by the documentaries Ford had been making for the government during the wartime years leading up to the filming, and that he deployed that style here to, again, keep things immediate, rooted in the characters, and seemingly real.  

I was struck this time around by just how fluid film grammar had become by 1946 and by how the ‘40s represented its crestline. Every movie pre 1939, no matter how well done otherwise, feels a little awkward, hesitant, because the language was still forming, only to click suddenly and a little miraculously into place right at the end of that decade. The most confident expressions of American film followed, 10 years during which the core genres were forged and the execution of movies, for all its contrivance, felt effortless, with the results speaking with both power and grace, economically and, often, with surprising subtlety. Everything since has been a reaction to, a mostly futile rebellion against, what was established then.  

You can even see this in the lighting—something seemingly secondary but actually core since it subliminally has a huge impact on how we experience a film as a whole. The technique had become so refined by the mid ‘40s that no moment in Clementine feels tainted by what we would usually think of us as the high-key Studio Era style. That doesn’t mean its look isn’t inherently theatrical, and there are times when Ford ventures surprisingly close to Expressionism, but it never draws attention to itself in a negative way—which makes it all the more curious that the next few decades—well into the ‘80s—would be defined by a much flatter technique often populated by numerous, blatantly artificial shadows.  

Clementine adopts a variety of visual styles, but it shows the maturity of both film grammar and of Ford as a director that their use and juxtaposition are never jarring. Large sections of the film feel like he was back working with Greg Toland, with significant swaths of deep black, faces in shadow, and low muslin ceilings. But then there are those starker passages with their documentary immediacy, which Ford never tries to make feel vérité, instead carefully using composition and light—especially the consistently dramatic western skies—to style his tale.  

Joe MacDonald’s mostly undistinguished résumé keeps him from being considered a top-rank cinematographer but he did have his moments, shooting Samuel Fuller’s classic noir Pickup on South Street and probably the two best color noirs, Fuller’s House of Bamboo and Henry Hathaway’s almost Sirkian Niagara . He also did outstanding work on Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life and probably the best Frank Tashlin film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? What he and Ford came up with for Clementine feels almost experimental, so fresh and responsive that you won’t encounter anything similar until more than a decade later with the emergence of the Nouvelle Vague.

Ford even extends that approach to the music. There are only a handful of cues and the ones that are there are just brief accents, not the usual wall-to-wall wash. Most effectively, there’s no score during the big dramatic scenes when almost any other filmmaker would be amassing great gobs of turgid Late Romantic noodling, relying on sheer musical tonnage to prop up their material. Fonda’s horseback pursuit of the stagecoach is just accompanied by the sound of charging hoofs, and the big shootout at the O.K. Corral is just isolated gunfire, spare dialogue, some whinnying from the corral, a passing stagecoach, and the wind.

This is probably Henry Fonda’s best performance, angular and laconic, of course, but making each line, look, movement, and gesture ring true—except in the somewhat discordant coda, which feels like a studio-mandated reshoot. It’s hard to believe a film this good could have Victor Mature near the top of the bill, and it’s a huge testament to Ford’s abilities that Mature’s presence doesn’t sink the whole thing. Linda Darnell specialized in playing what were once known as loose women, and she really works her patented trashiness here, but Ford even finds ways to draw expression from that laboriously manufactured erotic heat. (To Darnell’s credit, she pulls off Rex Harrison’s elegant, befuddled wife in Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours beautifully.) Walter Brennan, usually typecast as the cantankerous but lovable sidekick, is disturbingly strong as Clementine ’s villain, his sadism all the more unsettling because Ford bases it in a believable devotion to his sons.  

So, to sum up, you’ve got a western that’s likely the best in the genre primarily because it doesn’t use epic sweep, mythic iconography, or fussy pedantry to distance you from the action but instead creates a compelling you-are-there effect with disarming moments of grace. Its technique is still fresh and engaging because its nut has never been cracked. And the characters are finely and distinctly drawn while still feeling like organic members of a burgeoning community. (I just realized I could be describing a Robert Altman film, but this is 1946, not 1976, and Altman was too much of a cynic to ever lend his characters the warmth and rough charm and unexpected but apt layers Ford used to bestow on big and small alike like a benediction.)

Michael Gaughn —The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision,  The Rayva Roundtable ,  marketing, product design, some theater designs, a  couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

CLEMENTINE ON PRIME I realize that, watching Clementine in its current form, you have to take a decent amount—but hopefully not too much—of what I wrote in the main text on faith. The transfer available in HD on Amazon Prime is, like so many older films, a bit of a visual mess, with some sequences sharp and with the proper tonal gradation and others great blotchy blobs of black and white. (One brief shot of a stagecoach racing through the desert is so blurry, contrasty, and stuttering it looks like badly damaged 8mm film.) I can only make assumptions here, but it would be hard to believe most of this was present in the movie as originally released and is likely a product of having to cobble together the transfer out of disparate elements, some of dubious quality.  

That said, I also have to wonder if Clementine isn’t suffering a bit of the neglect that comes with manufactured consensus. Because The Searchers is big, widescreen, and Technicolor, unabashedly mythic and not afraid to beat its chest—and conspicuously, although mostly dubiously, influential—it’s been doted on in ways My Darling Clementine never has. True, Searchers is the more recent film (though by only 10 years), but it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to think more can be done to steer Clementine back in the direction of the movie John Ford and Joe MacDonald created. (The recent 4K HDR releases of Casablanca and The Godfather show the downside of being iconic, so thoroughly scrubbed they no longer look much like film. Clementine even in its current state is the better experience because at least it still feels, from beginning to end, like a movie.)

Lastly, there’s something strange going on with the sound, with the music and effects track often mixed way higher than the dialogue. In the quiet scene where Henry Fonda delivers a monologue at the graveside of his younger brother, he’s almost completely drowned out by some strumming on a solo acoustic guitar. I don’t remember that being a problem with previous releases.

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

sign up for our newsletter

receive a monthly recap of everything that’s new on Cineluxe

Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

My Darling Clementine

They shoot pictures, don't they 2008 edition - #869, connect with us.

Support The Show

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

My Darling Clementine

• After their cattle are stolen and their brother murdered, the Earp brothers have a score to settle with the Clanton family.
• Wyatt Earp and his brothers Morgan and Virgil ride into Tombstone and leave brother James in charge of their cattle herd. On their return they find their cattle stolen and James dead. Wyatt takes on the job of town marshal, making his brothers deputies, and vows to stay in Tombstone until James' killers are found. He soon runs into the brooding, coughing, hard-drinking Doc Holliday as well as the sullen and vicious Clanton clan. Wyatt discovers the owner of a trinket stolen from James' dead body and the stage is set for the Earps' long-awaited revenge. — Doug Sederberg <[email protected]>
• 1882. The four Earp brothers are driving cattle through Arizona towards California when they stop outside the town of Tombstone. While Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan are in the town their cattle is stolen and James is murdered. Wyatt suspects that the Clanton family were responsible but has no proof. Wyatt volunteers for and is offered the position of town marshal and immediately makes his brothers deputies. However, before he can settle the score with the Clantons, Wyatt has to deal with another prickly inhabitant of Tombstone, Doc Holliday. — grantss
• "My Darling Clementine" is John Ford's retelling of the Earp/Clanton feud, and the famous show down at the OK Corral. Ford embellishes on the story by centering the plot on the fictional character Clementine (Doc Holliday's schoolteacher flame from back east). — Jeff Walker <[email protected]>
• In 1882, Wyatt Earp and his brothers decide to settle in Tombstone after their cattle are rustled out from under them and their baby brother James is killed. Wyatt is a former town marshal and he gladly accepts that position in Tombstone along with his brothers as deputies. He soon becomes friends with the local saloon keeper Doc Holliday and he dispenses justice calmly and coolly. The Marshal has several run-ins with Ike Clanton and his four sons. When he is forced to kill Billy Clanton, it leads to the famous shoot-out at the OK Corral. — garykmcd

It looks like we don't have any synopsis for this title yet. Be the first to contribute.

Contribute to this page

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More from this title

More to explore.

Recently viewed

EMPIRE ESSAY: My Darling Clementine Review

19 Aug 2016

EMPIRE ESSAY: My Darling Clementine

There's not much history in this version of the events leading up to the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral — there was no Clementine Carter; Virgil Earp wasn't gunned down in cold

blood; and Old Man Clanton died weeks before the showdown, which Doc Holliday survived.

Yet, while on the surface this is clearly a paean to a lost era, some critics have identified allegorical parallels to the world in 1946, a world very much tainted by Ford's experiences making combat documentaries overseas. Wyatt Earp thought he'd done enough as marshal of Dodge City to justify his retirement (post-Great War US isolationism). But he needed to strap on his six-shooters again (World War II) to wipe out the threat to civilisation posed by the Clantons (the Axis). However, victory was to come at a price and a happy ending was by no means guaranteed (the looming Cold War). Instantly conjuring a sense of freedom and opportunity, the action opens in Monument Valley — Ford's first visit since Stagecoach in 1939—with the familiar landmarks and the vast expanse of sky prompting critic-director Lindsay Anderson to claim that this single scene marked Ford's stylistic transition from prose to poetry.

But Wyatt Earp's terse conversation with Pa Clanton establishes a new blend of brooding themes and Expressionist compositions that give this tale of treachery and revenge the texture of a Western noir. It's easy to see Chihuahua (Darnell) as the femme fatale who lures her lover, Doc Holliday (Mature), to his death. Embittered, tubercular and clad in black, he is a classic noir anti-hero, repenting too late a wasted life after he fails to save Chihuahua when she is shot by Billy (John Ireland), the man with whom she two-timed Doc while he was terminating his engagement. The Earp side of the story seems much more straightforward. Wyatt (Fonda), Virgil (Holt) and Morgan (Bond) agree to become Tombstone lawmen after their younger brother is murdered in a cattle raid. But, while his mission is vengeance pure and simple, Wyatt's character is anything but clear-cut. Setting more store by family than community and by the unspoken code of the plains than the written law, he gives the impression of being a wanderer. Yet he derives immense satisfaction from a game of cards and being able to lounge on the back legs of a porch chair. His dress may be neat, his walk deliberate and his actions invariably clinical (viz the citizen's arrest of the drunken Indian shooting up the town), yet when it comes to avenging his brother's death he stalls. Hence drunken actor Granville Thorndike's rambling rendition of "To be or not to be..." for Wyatt is the Hamlet of the West — a man seeking revenge, but too easily deflected from his purpose by the tide of events.

When he does finally act, it's with ruthless precision. He strides down the main street with a murderous intent that his cursory reference to an arrest warrant barely conceals. His aim is unerring and Clantons fall around him, along with Holliday. Yet he registers no emotion as he sees his friend's corpse nor as Morgan shoots Pa in the back. Wyatt had already condemned him to a life haunted by the knowledge that he led his boys to their deaths. The scene is played out to the sounds of gunfire and whinnying horses. The lack of music ensures that we see it as a battle to the death and not a cinematic set-piece.

Violence on this scale was unusual for a Ford film, and the fact that it climaxed what had been a largely meditative narrative makes it all the more disturbing. What's also intriguing, considering his obvious affinity for the character, is how briefly Ford dwells on Doc Holliday's demise. He may be a womanising, gambling rascal, but he has a dignity and a sense of duty that chimes with the principled brusqueness of so many other Ford heroes.

Earp (whose relationship with Doc has, of course, been interpreted as homoerotic) is less flawed and, therefore, less human. Ford would return to Wyatt and Doc (this time played by James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy) in his farewell western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Their depiction as cynical, self-interested rogues could not be more different, however, and suggests that he had drastically revised his opinion of the legend.

My Darling Clementine (1946) Directed by John Ford

Film review, film synopsis, similar films.

• Giant (1956)
• Jesse James (1939)
• Le Gardian (1946)
• Stagecoach (1939)
• The Outlaw (1943)

Film Credits

Other things to look at.

• Terms of use