my darling clementine movie review

My Darling Clementine

“What kind of town is this?” Wyatt Earp asks on his first night in Tombstone. “A man can’t get a shave without gettin’ his head blowed off.” He gets up out of the newfangled barber’s chair at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor and climbs through the second-story window of a saloon, his face still half lathered, to konk a gun-toting drunk on the head and drag him out by the heels.

Earp ( Henry Fonda ) already knows what kind of town it is. In the opening scenes of John Ford’s greatest Western, “My Darling Clementine” (1946), he and his brothers are driving cattle east to Kansas. Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan leave their kid brother James in charge of the herd and go into town for a shave and a beer. As they ride down the main street of Tombstone, under a vast and lowering evening sky, gunshots and raucous laughter are heard in the saloons, and we don’t have to ask why the town has the biggest graveyard west of the Rockies.

Ford’s story reenacts the central morality play of the Western. Wyatt Earp becomes the town’s new marshal, there’s a showdown between law and anarchy, the law wins and the last shot features the new schoolmarm–who represents the arrival of civilization. Most Westerns put the emphasis on the showdown. “My Darling Clementine” builds up to the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, but it is more about everyday things–haircuts, romance, friendship, poker and illness.

At the center is Henry Fonda’s performance as Wyatt Earp. He’s usually shown as a man of action, but Fonda makes him the new-style Westerner, who stands up when a woman comes into the room and knows how to carve a chicken and dance a reel. Like a teenager, he sits in a chair on the veranda of his office, tilts back to balance on the back legs and pushes off against a post with one boot and then the other. He’s thinking of Clementine, and Fonda shows his happiness with body language.

Earp has accepted the marshal’s badge because when he and his brothers returned to their herd, they found the cattle rustled and James dead. There is every reason to believe the crime was committed by Old Man Clanton ( Walter Brennan ) and his “boys” (grown, bearded and mean). An early scene ends with Clanton baring his teeth like an animal showing its fangs. Earp buries James in a touching scene. (“You didn’t get much of a chance, did you, James?”) Then, instead of riding into town and shooting the Clantons, he tells the mayor he’ll become the new marshal. He wants revenge, but legally.

The most important relationship is between Earp and Doc Holliday ( Victor Mature ), the gambler who runs Tombstone but is dying of tuberculosis. They are natural enemies, but a quiet, unspoken regard grows up between the two men, maybe because Earp senses the sadness at Holliday’s core. Holliday’s rented room has his medical diploma on the wall and his doctor’s bag beneath it, but he doesn’t practice anymore. Something went wrong back East, and now he gambles for a living, and drinks himself into oblivion. His lover is a prostitute, Chihuahua ( Linda Darnell ), and he talks about leaving for Mexico with her. But as he coughs up blood, he knows what his prognosis is.

The marshal’s first showdown with Holliday is a classic Ford scene. The saloon grows quiet when Doc walks in, and the bar clears when he walks up to it. He tells Earp, “Draw!” Earp says he can’t–doesn’t have a gun. Doc calls for a gun, and a man down the bar slides him one. Earp looks at the gun, and says, “Brother Morg’s gun. The other one, the good-lookin’ fellow–that’s my brother, Virg.” Doc registers this information and returns his own gun to its holster. He realizes Earp’s brothers have the drop on him. “Howdy,” says Doc. “Have a drink.”

Twice Doc tells someone to get out of town, and twice Earp reminds him that’s the marshal’s job. Although the Clantons are the first order of business, Doc and Earp seem headed for a showdown. Yet they have a scene together that is one of the strangest and most beautiful in all of John Ford’s work. A British actor ( Alan Mowbray ) has come to town to put on a play, and when he doesn’t show up at the theater, Earp and Holliday find him in the saloon, on top of a table, being tormented by the Clantons. The actor begins Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, but is too drunk and frightened to continue. Doc Holliday, from memory, completes the speech, and could be speaking of himself: “ … but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will … .”

The gentlest moments in the movie involve Earp’s feelings for Clementine (Cathy Downs), who arrives on the stage from the East, looking for “Dr. John Holliday.” She is the girl Doc left behind. Earp, sitting outside the hotel, rises quickly to his feet as she gets out of the stage, and his movements show that he’s in awe of this graceful vision. Clementine has been seeking Doc all over the West, we learn, and wants to bring him home. Doc tells her to get out of town. And Chihuahua monitors the situation jealously.

Clementine is packed to go the next morning when the marshal, awkward and shy, asks her to join him at the church service and dance. They walk in stately procession down the covered boardwalk, while Ford’s favorite hymn plays: “Shall We Gather at the River?” When the fiddler strikes up, Wyatt and Clementine dance–he clumsy but enthusiastic, and with great joy. This dance is the turning point of the movie, and marks the end of the Old West. There are still shots to be fired, but civilization has arrived.

The legendary gunfight at the OK Corral has been the subject of many films, including “Frontier Marshal” (1939), “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957), “Tombstone” (1993, with Val Kilmer’s brilliant performance as Doc) and “ Wyatt Earp ” (1994). Usually the gunfight is the centerpiece of the film. Here it plays more like the dispatch of unfinished business; Ford doesn’t linger over the violence.

There is the quiet tenseness in the marshal’s office as Earp prepares to face the Clantons, who’ve shouted their challenge that they’d be waiting for him at the corral. Earp’s brothers are with him, because this is “family business.” Earp turns down other volunteers, but when Doc turns up, he lets him take part, because Doc has family business, too (one of the Clanton boys has killed Chihuahua). Under the merciless clear sky of a desert dawn, in silence except for far-off horse whinnies and dog barks, the men walk down the street and take care of business.

John Ford (1895-1973) was, many believe, the greatest of all American directors. Certainly he did more than any other to document the passages of American history. For him, a Western was not quite such a “period film” as it would be for later directors. He shot on location in the desert and prairie, his cast and crew living as if they were on a cattle drive, eating out of the chuckwagon, sleeping in tents. He filmed “My Darling Clementine” in his beloved Monument Valley, on the Arizona-Utah border.

He made dozens of silent Westerns, met the real Wyatt Earp on the set of a movie and heard the story of the OK Corral directly from him (even so, history tells a story much different from this film). Ford worked repeatedly with the same actors (his “stock company”) and it is interesting that he chose Fonda rather than John Wayne , his other favorite, for Wyatt Earp. Maybe he saw Wayne as the embodiment of the Old West, and the gentler Fonda as one of the new men who would tame the wilderness.

“My Darling Clementine” must be one of the sweetest and most good-hearted of all Westerns. The giveaway is the title, which is not about Wyatt or Doc or the gunfight, but about Clementine, certainly the most important thing to happen to Marshal Earp during the story. There is a moment, soon after she arrives, when Earp gets a haircut and a quick spray of perfume at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor. Clem stands close to him and says she loves “the scent of the desert flowers.” “That’s me,” says Earp. “Barber.”

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Alan Mowbray as Granville Thorndyke
John Ireland as Billy Clanton
Ward Bond as Morgan Earp
Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp
Cathy Downs as Clementine
J. Farrell MacDonald as Mac the Bartender
Victor Mature as Doc Holliday
Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton
Linda Darnell as Chihuahua
Tim Holt as Virgil Earp
Cyril J. Mockridge
David Buttolph
Dorothy Spencer

Screenplay by

Winston Miller

Directed by

Photographed by.

Joseph MacDonald

Produced by

Samuel G. Engel

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My Darling Clementine Reviews

Filmed in black-and-white against Monument Valley locations, the film combines both the grandeur and the folksiness so typical of its director.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 17, 2024

Regardless of whether or not there’s something more romantic to the relationship of Earp and Holliday, there’s no denying the fact that My Darling Clementine is an important picture.

Full Review | Jul 31, 2024

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

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My darling clementine.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 0 Reviews
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Common Sense Media Review

Slow-paced tale of Old West shoot-out has violence.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 10+?

Adults smoke tobacco and consume beer, champagne, and alcohol. A lively saloon s

A number of people die violently. Two are shot in the back by a cattle rustler.

A bar singer lifts her skirt and places her stocking-ed leg on the table where W

Any Positive Content?

Wyatt Earp is a fair man who tries to avoid violence unless absolutely necessary

An evil and violent father raises evil and violent sons. The Old West was a hars

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults smoke tobacco and consume beer, champagne, and alcohol. A lively saloon scene is fueled by alcohol. A drunk starts shooting randomly. A bartender begs a customer not to start drinking whisky again, warning that it will kill him. Later, the bartender happily pours the same man a glass of whisky. A man drinks when he is depressed. An actor is seen drunk.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

A number of people die violently. Two are shot in the back by a cattle rustler. A father advises his sons not to wave guns around unless they plan to kill someone. Disputes are often handled using gun violence. A woman is shot and surgery is performed on her without anesthetic. A drunk shoots up a saloon.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A bar singer lifts her skirt and places her stocking-ed leg on the table where Wyatt is playing poker to elicit his sexual interest. Wyatt ignores her. He does show interest in a far more genteel, less sexually obvious woman. The movie clearly labels one kind of woman -- whose sexuality is open -- as inferior to the other kind of woman -- the demure and seemingly sexually innocent. An ungroomed man lets a barber style his hair and spray him with perfume to impress a woman. A woman has invited a man to her room, implying their connection is sexual.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Wyatt Earp is a fair man who tries to avoid violence unless absolutely necessary. He represents decency and doing the right thing. On the other hand, he is bent on violently avenging his brother's death. The movie suggests the Clantons are uncivilized. Doc Holliday falls somewhere in between: a good man fallen. A saloon singer cheats on her boyfriend. Players cheat at cards. A man walks out on his hotel bill.

Positive Messages

An evil and violent father raises evil and violent sons. The Old West was a harsh place but decency sometimes prevailed. Native Americans are viewed by the white town folk as dangerous and irresponsible.

Parents need to know that My Darling Clementine is a 1946 classic that features the lawlessness, vengeance, and gunplay typical of movies about the Old West. Considered to be one of director John Ford's masterpieces, the story mythologizes Marshall Wyatt Earp and the infamous shootout at the OK Corral. The movie helped promote many of the visual and narrative ploys now thought of as clichés of the genre, and young students of film may appreciate seeing their roots. Native Americans are viewed by the white town folk as dangerous and irresponsible. Language is tame by today's standards, but men here engage in violent, antisocial behavior, gambling, drinking, and consorting with prostitutes. (The last activity will probably go over the heads of younger children.) Kids used to quick-paced, computer-enhanced visuals may find the black-and-white photography and lyrical pace unattractively retro. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, four brothers are driving cattle through desolate Arizona country in 1881 when they are hijacked by murderous rustlers. The eldest cattleman, Wyatt Earp ( Henry Fonda ), is a former federal marshal renowned across the West for cleaning up lawlessness and imposing civilized behavior on rowdy Western towns. After discovering his brother's death, he takes the job as marshal of the rough and tumble Tombstone, Arizona as a way of exacting revenge against the killer. The infamous Doc Holliday (Victor Mature at his most likable) is a renegade from his Eastern education and now ruthlessly runs the local gambling operation. As a professional criminal, his erudite lawlessness is posed in deliberate contradiction to Earp's Aw Shucks moral rectitude and sets up the basis of a deep mutual admiration. Linda Darnell plays the floozy saloon singer, Chihuahua, who sets her sites on Wyatt in the absence of her on-again-off-again lover, Doc. Her moral "looseness" is also given a counterpart, the virtuous Clementine (Cathy Downs), a remnant of Doc's decent Back East past, now looking for her disappeared sweetheart. When Wyatt finds proof that Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) killed his brothers, the action culminates in the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Is It Any Good?

This movie is director John Ford's lyrical love poem to the Old West. He manages to convey both simplicity and complexity at once, showing empathy and admiration for the courage of the Western pioneers, but also standing back and watching, from an almost god-like, uninvolved distance, as bad things happen, sometimes to good people. My Darling Clementine is willing to portray the gray areas of human nature, but still promotes a sense that despite those inherent complexities and ambiguities, right and wrong are distinct and knowable. The challenge for first-time viewers is setting aside experiences with the movie's many imitators and trying to watch it as if it were new. Ford's Old West is dusty and dirty, a place where everyone drops their final g's and the big sky shrinks men down to small, indefensible creatures who are no match for nature's power and harshness. He makes the connection between the West's cruel terrain and what it did to the men and women who survived in that world. Those survivors whoop it up in saloons wild with drunks, prostitutes, and cheap tunes. In mythologizing the heroic Earp, and casting a tough yet boyish Fonda, Ford urges that such men are the only hope for establishing civility and decency, as men like Doc, who have gone bad under the Western influence, need to be shown the way back toward righteousness.

Setting aside its many historical inaccuracies, the movie has its weaknesses. "What kinda town is this?" Wyatt keeps asking when he arrives in the disreputable Tombstone. But Ford is being cutesy and dishonest here because Wyatt has already cleared out other outposts just as demoralized -- surely he knows exactly what kind of town he's in. The sweeping visuals approve of the West's stark beauty but do so with a tinge of sentimentality and nostalgia for a simpler time that wasn't really that simple. Clementine's timely arrival is a creaky and obvious device designed to reiterate what we already know, that Doc was once the kind of educated and cultivated man such a lady would fall for. Clementine's presence also sets up an unnecessary rivalry between the fallen Doc and the romantically timid Wyatt. That the movie is named after her feels at once like overkill and also a distraction from the movie's central story. But it also speaks to Ford's romanticization of the period famous for its villains and heroes, especially in light of the fact that it's the director's first film after he served four years fighting fascist villains overseas during World War II. In a courtly manner, Wyatt tells Clementine, "I sure like that name." Ford certainly knew that names are representations of things. What's important is that Wyatt liked the kind of "good," marriageable woman Clementine represented.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how families are presented in My Darling Clementine . Wyatt is peaceably working cattle with his three brothers. The Earps are compared to the Clantons, a father and three sons who live by violence and menace. How are the family units different and how the same? The Clanton father values violence. What do you think the Earp brothers value?

The movie is not as fast-paced as current movies. Do you think the director deliberately told the story slowly, perhaps to mimic the slower, un-electronic era depicted in the story? Do you think the movie would work as well if the pace were faster?

How do you think the black-and-white photography affects the viewing experience? Since life is in color, does the lack of color remind viewers that what they are watching is not reality? Do you think movies should try to seem real?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 3, 1946
On DVD or streaming : December 4, 2007
Cast : Henry Fonda , Victor Mature , Linda Darnell , Walter Brennan
Director : John Ford
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment
Genre : Western
Run time : 97 minutes
MPAA rating : NR
Last updated : July 14, 2024

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My Darling Clementine (1946)

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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

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> My Darling Clementine (1946) Film Review

My darling clementine.

Reviewed by: Angus Wolfe Murray

John Ford had a talent for ordinariness, despite a penchant for iconic leading men. He liked to drag everyone up to the same level, so that a bit player had the same standing as a supporting actor. His Westerns, without exception, are so rich in character there is infinite pleasure in the detail.

My Darling Clementine isn't a frothy rom-com, with musical interludes, as the title suggests, but the story of Wyatt Earp, Tombstone and the gunfight at the OK Corral. It wears the accolade of Classic Western with nonchalant ease. Unlike later incarnations (Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Burt Lancaster), there is nothing showy about Henry Fonda's Wyatt. He is the ex-marshal of Dodge City, now a cattleman who takes the job that no one wants - marshal of Tombstone, a rowdy, dangerous, uncontrolled frontier town - because his cows have been rustled and his 18-year-old brother murdered and he's doggone gonna find the men responsible.

Unlike another landmark Western, High Noon, the climactic showdown is not what the film is about and if you compare My Darling Clementine with John Sturges's monumental Gunfight At The OK Corral 11 years later, it may appear dramatically weakened by a casually choreographed shootout, culminating in Wyatt's extraordinary generosity towards Boss Clanton (Walter Brennan).

Victor Mature, who would go on to become a Fifties heartthrob in such sand'n'sandals epics as Samson & Delilah and The Robe, is a very creditable Doc Holliday, the consumptive alcoholic, whose self loathing creates its own destructive legacy. The film belongs to Fonda as much as the entire cast. Wyatt's modest authority, based upon an independence of spirit that respects, rather than condemns, the weakness in others is Fonda's forte and he is magnificent here.

This is prime Ford, a perfect example of his understated humanity, with a crackling script (Sam Engel, Winston Miller) that doesn't waste breath ("When you pull a gun, kill a man!" Boss Clanton rebukes one of his sons), or let a good line go to waste ("Mac, have you ever been in love?" "No, I've been a bartender all my life").

Director: John Ford

Writer: Samuel G Engel, Winston Miller

Starring: Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Cathy Downs, Tim Holt, Ward Bond, Alan Mowbray, John Ireland, Jane Darwell

Runtime: 97 minutes

Country: US

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Review: my darling clementine.

The film eschews clear-cut character rivalries in favor of more complex emotional and social configurations.

“What kind of a town is this?” shouts Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) shortly after entering Tombstone, the rough-and-tumble Arizona municipality at the heart of My Darling Clementine . Earp’s incredulousness is certainly warranted, as his shave at the local “tonsorial parlor” has just been interrupted by stray bullets coming in from the adjoining saloon, but it’s a question that hangs over the entirety of John Ford’s masterpiece. How, in the Wild West of 1882, is a community to operate? What values, institutions, and individuals come out on top, and which are left to rot in the dustbin of history? These concerns can be felt throughout Ford’s filmography, which returns again and again to the potentials and pitfalls of group formation at a moment in American history—and within a genre of American cinema—defined by the collisions between people of varying classes, ethnicities, and visions of the nation’s future. Rarely have these weighty queries been explored with such elegance, poignancy, and dexterous economy as in My Darling Clementine .

The film subtly complicates viewer expectations early on, eschewing clear-cut character rivalries in favor of more complex emotional and social configurations. Earp and his two brothers indefinitely extend their stay in Tombstone after discovering their cattle stolen and other brother murdered, most likely by another all-male familial clan, the Clantons. Revenge against the Clantons soon quickly takes a back seat, however, as newly minted town sheriff Earp soon finds himself embroiled in a ever-fluctuating friendship-cum-rivalry with Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), a black-clad local powerbroker. Prone to heavy boozing and intimidation of local riffraff, Holliday also appreciates the finer things in life, like sipping champagne and reciting Shakespearean soliloquies from memory, signs of a more-cultured past back East that he mysteriously abandoned for the anonymity of the West. This history catches up with Holliday soon enough in the form of Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), a nurse and former lover who has scoured the frontier in search of him. Their reunion is complicated by Holliday’s self-destructive rejection of his former life and his present romance with local saloon singer Chihuahua (Linda Darnell)—not to mention Earp’s tentative interest in Carter.

These ever-shifting arrangements reflect My Darling Clementine ’s broader understanding of how the frontier community itself rests in a state of flux. From a classically trained yet perennially soused tragedian breezing through town to the skeletal beginnings of a house of worship, signs of the “civilizing” East arrive in Tombstone containing both the glimmer of progress and the shadows of the past. Locations that seem to have a fixed meaning become more-amorphous sites of social and emotional negotiation—no more so than the town saloon’s late-film transformation into a makeshift operating room, with the physical well-being of one character and the spiritual fate of another hanging precariously in the balance. (Ford and cinematographer Joe MacDonald’s use of depth staging and chiaroscuro lighting here is a master class in how physical space can be transformed to evoke the psychological landscape of the characters inhabiting it.)

The film sketches its mirrored couples in similar shades of gray. This quartet of frontier archetypes—the “good” woman vs. the “wild” lady, the sheriff vs. the outlaw—move within a complex web of sexual attraction, shared history, principled camaraderie, and pained resentment. Holliday and Chihuahua’s would-be “sordid” romance becomes a richly emotional and mature study of two damaged souls achieving peace with the other’s flaws, while Earp and Clementine’s seemingly “respectable” courtship contains a roiling and poignant eroticism just beneath the surface. To watch Earp take Clementine by the arm and walk her to the town’s church social, with Ford-favorite “Shall We Gather at the River?” sung by the townspeople just off screen, is to witness one of cinema’s most remarkable evocations of burgeoning love; it’s as heartrending in its delicate understanding of interpersonal attraction as it is keenly aware of how romance is shaped by social codes and communal expectations.

Those nefarious Clanton boys eventually roar back into My Darling Clementine , prompting the classic shoot-out sequence seemingly embedded within the DNA of the American western. In keeping with the ambivalence that defines the entirety of the film, Ford films the confrontation between Earp (joined by Holliday and others) and the Clantons as a swirl of riled horses, kicked-up dust, jutting fence posts, and erratic pistol blasts. Lives are lost and fates determined, but this is the most uncertain of showdowns—the necessary purging of a societal contaminant so that a community may continue on its search for identity and wholeness. It’s only right, then, that My Darling Clementine ends only with the possibility of a romantic clinch somewhere down the road. Death still hangs in the air and the wounds of emotional (as well as actual) crossfire remain to be healed. Until then, there’s a school to be built, grieving parents to be consoled, cattle to rustle. Within such day-to-day tasks, decisions, and negotiations, Ford insists, one begins to finally decide just what kind of town this will be.

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Matthew Connolly

Matt Connolly is an assistant professor of film studies in the Department of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His criticism has also appeared in Reverse Shot and Film Comment .

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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.

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My Darling Clementine

Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
October 13 2014

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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

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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.

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My Darling Clementine

Time out says, release details.

Duration: 97 mins

Cast and crew

Director: John Ford
Screenwriter: Winston Miller, Samuel G Engel
Cathy Downs
John Ireland
Victor Mature
Henry Fonda
Linda Darnell
Walter Brennan
Jane Darwell
Alan Mowbray

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My darling clementine.

Directed by John Ford

She was everything the West was - young, fiery, exciting!

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.

Henry Fonda Linda Darnell Victor Mature Cathy Downs Walter Brennan Tim Holt Ward Bond Alan Mowbray John Ireland Roy Roberts Jane Darwell Grant Withers J. Farrell MacDonald Russell Simpson Robert Adler C.E. Anderson Don Barclay Hank Bell Danny Borzage Ruth Clifford Frank Conlan Tex Cooper Jack Curtis William B. Davidson James Dime Tex Driscoll Frank Ellis Francis Ford Earle Foxe Show All… Don Garner Ben Hall Aleth Hansen Jack Kenny Duke R. Lee Fred Libby Mae Marsh Margarita Martín Kermit Maynard Louis Mercier Jack Montgomery Jack Pennick Mickey Simpson Charles Stevens Arthur Walsh Harry Woods

Director Director

Co-director co-director.

Lloyd Bacon

Producer Producer

Samuel G. Engel

Writers Writers

Samuel G. Engel Winston Miller

Original Writer Original Writer

Stuart N. Lake

Story Story

Sam Hellman

Editor Editor

Dorothy Spencer

Cinematography Cinematography

Joseph MacDonald

Art Direction Art Direction

James Basevi Lyle R. Wheeler

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Thomas Little

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Fred Sersen

Composer Composer

Cyril J. Mockridge

Sound Sound

Roger Heman Sr. Eugene Grossman

Costume Design Costume Design

René Hubert

Makeup Makeup

20th Century Fox

Releases by Date

16 oct 1946.

Theatrical limited

17 Oct 1946

22 oct 1946, 03 dec 1946, 01 jan 1947, 03 feb 1947, 30 apr 1947, 29 aug 1947, 27 apr 1948, 10 sep 1948, 01 nov 1949, 09 mar 2012, releases by country.

Theatrical e 12
Theatrical TP Visa CNC 5694
Theatrical 12

Netherlands

Physical 12 DVD
Theatrical M/12

South Korea

Theatrical 7
Theatrical U
Premiere NR San Francisco, California

97 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

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Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 3

Here it is folks: the one film that single-handedly justifies every single one of those stupid "One Perfect Shot" accounts. You have to watch this one to achieve Movie Mindset (TM) because there is no American film that has ever used light and shadow on black and white film more masterfully than what Ford does here. The shots of Henry Fonda sitting on a porch leaning back on a chair are probably the most artfully composed frames of film in movie history.

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 2

A bleak, post-war western that is so filled to the brim with the warmth of its character's yearning that it feels passive, relaxed, and dreamy even as it waits for the inevitable doom. As with most Ford's (though I was pleased to find this notably more shadowy than usual) there are individual scenes in this that contain more breathtaking compositions than most directors achieve in their entire careers.

Full discussion on ep 233 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS .

Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 5

"When ya pull a gun, kill a man."

So goddamned fresh. John Ford depicts an entire community - a town at the edge of the world, the skies of Monument Valley as encasement for the unknown - with spectral simplicity, unleashing a strong-willed presence of law and order into a population surrounded by death. And if residents are defined by their environment, then Tombstone is barren in every facet; a ghost town kept alive through alcohol, gambling, and the looming threat of savagery. Ford's images are boundless in more ways than one, delivering direct, uncluttered information via human placement as well as evoking fluid, expansive landscapes with searing poetic flourish. In particular, the gunfights in My Darling Clementine end…

Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

One of Ford's most harrowing, depicting a land mired in the messy turmoil of civilizing, where gunfights interrupt shaves and Shakespeare is bewilderingly spoken aloud, albeit slowly, the way someone condescends to speak English to a foreigner, as if enunciating everything will make it clearer to these savages. The iconic image of Fonda in this film sees him pressing his foot against a patio beam, tilting his chair back as he relaxes against Tombstone's outer rim. It depicts the hero, and his surroundings, on a precipice, having found an uneasy balance between lawlessness and order that is about to crash into the modern age. As is often the case in Ford's films, that development can only occur through a violent…

Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 1

hard to put my thoughts into words. one of the most magnificent looking films ever made; henry fonda's performance is stunning, quintessential. each moment feels like a microcosm for everything that the western was, is, and would become. echoes of longing and loves that couldn't be; absolute melancholy. we've always been in this country, undiscovered, searching for something eternal. wyatt earp is marshall for just four days, and somehow, a century passes between them.

Review by reibureibu ★★★★ 7

Purgatorial similitude in the town of Tombstone, everything slurred down as if of daydream. There is a knowing, sleepy awareness of its natural denouement once outside actors disturb the balance within, but hardly a rush to arrive there once everyone's settled in. The history of violence will come, as it circuits the town, as it always does, but in the meantime why not pursue a new romance? Darkness encroaches from the edges of the image while the light shines through in the little moments of joy. Purgatory is made up of both, and so the resolution of these two occurs outside its borders. Tombstone goes back to what it once was, the actors then wake and leave this town.

Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 46

Tombstone, Arizona lies on the celestial border between a fool’s heaven and a wise man’s hell in John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine.”

Ford wove the legend of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral straight from the horse wrangler’s mouth. Lawman Wyatt Earp evidentially used to visit the sets of Ford’s early films, and would relate the story of the notorious shootout to the entertainment of all within earshot.

Pedants might pick apart temporal inconsistencies, made-up characters, and fabricated grudges. But why would anyone busy themselves with trying to logic-test a creation myth? Because that’s just what Ford makes the tale of gunfight out to be.

Tombstone is a fitting Eden for Ford’s frontier. It is all promise, all revelry. But…

Review by Willow Maclay

Writing any sort of film criticism about a film like this one is essentially impossible, because you cannot build upon what history has already done for the film. The roots of its greatness are planted so firmly in its poetry of the skyline and the simple things that are greater because they are simple. It is a perfect movie. It is what the movies are made for and what they should aspire to become. Ford's images are sublime, obviously, but I am struck by the earliest death of the Earp brother who puts this story in motion. Three shots. A horse stranded in the rain, then the dead rider on the ground, followed by the men who are there to…

Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★★

More or less the fundamental Ford text, and as I argue here (as part of its Criterion debut), a cinematic representation containing the ethos of American poetry.

"Mac, you ever been in love?" "Nope, I've been a bartender all my life."

Review by eddie ★★★★★

one of the best films, and yet just another stanza in Ford’s epic poem of American history. the “to be or not to be” scene is my favorite of them all; the traveling player has abandoned his stage to get drunk with some rowdy boys in a saloon who harass him. when Doc picks up the monologue where the stumbling actor leaves off, Earp’s entire perspective on him changes. Ford is using art as the great leveler here, bringing together any two types of people through the transcendence of poetry. he’s also equating the immortal work of WS with cowboy folklore, making high art in low places. Shakespeare, he’s in the alley .

Victor Mature’s sadness stuck out to me on…

Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★½ 2

A.V. Club review . Makes sense that my most vivid memory from a previous viewing 20+ years ago was Henry Fonda leaning back in his chair—this is a gloriously lazy movie, in a very different way from Hawks' (equally wonderful) digressive '50s Westerns. Also turned me around on day-for-night, which I hadn't realized could look so evocative.

Review by Brian Tallerico ★★★★★ 1

"Mac, you ever been in love?" "No, I've been a bartender all me life."

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The Criterion Collection

My Collection

My Darling Clementine: The Great Beyond

By David Jenkins

Oct 14, 2014

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“W hat you see is what you get.” So said Winston Miller, coscreenwriter of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), in a terse rejoinder aimed at those searching for motivation, commentary, or other subtextual delights in the work. Miller bellyached that critics tended to read things into his script that simply weren’t there, a line that Ford was also known to toe. Were one to abide by the wishes of its no-muss-no-fuss creators, a gentle wallow in the film’s superficial pleasures (which are ample) would be all that was required. But that would be selling the film, and yourself, short.

My Darling Clementine is often labeled an “antiwestern,” largely, one assumes, owing to its drowsy, death-waltz tempo, its absence of dust-kicking six-shooter showdowns (the climax notwithstanding), and its hero who, for a surprising portion of the film’s run time, sits jack-legged on a porch, waiting patiently for those around him to meet with their own inexorable demise. It deals in such boilerplate genre fundamentals as blood revenge, existential torment, and the cultivation of an enlightened (read possibly nonviolent) American idyll, but does so in a manner that is at once explicit and passive. The latter is an epithet that could apply just as easily to Henry Fonda’s protoslacker/Droopy-like monotone performance in the lead role. He plays the character of Wyatt Earp as a man who appears insusceptible to high emotion and remains casually unperturbed by the changing world around him.

Yet there may be another reason the film has the reputation it does, one that would placate the literalist sensibilities of Messrs. Miller and Ford and also help to open up this coolly enigmatic work. The “anti” assignation could refer not to the film’s oppositional manner—that is, its inversion of the roistering traits of the classical horse opera—but to its use of negative space, both geographic and temporal. The low-slung genius of this film is that its every nuance appears loaded with information about a world ( the world) that exists outside the confines of the frame.

One example: Its extraordinary centerpiece finds Wyatt Earp and the sad-eyed china doll Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) joining a hoedown at the grand opening of the first church in Tombstone. The entire sequence, which is preceded by a charming boardwalk promenade, frames Earp as something of a blundering novice in the domain of female courtship. Later, just before the showdown, Earp clumsily demands of the town bartender, “Mac, you ever been in love?” Our hero’s romantic yearnings resonate because these are clearly the words of a man who is experiencing these emotions for the first time. They speak to a cloistered life of dedication, possibly to family, probably to justice.

Another: Earp and his (remaining) brothers, alongside Victor Mature’s tubercular outlaw, John “Doc” Holliday (Mature’s first non-musical- comedy role since 1941’s The Shanghai Gesture ), confront their destiny at the O.K. Corral at the behest of the nefarious Clanton brood. The sequence takes place in near silence, with scant dialogue and no musical accompaniment. As the men sashay and leap into position, a stagecoach suddenly cuts across the field of play. Wyatt uses the resultant dust cloud to his strategic advantage. Though easy to dismiss as a rudimentary mechanism to build tension, it’s also a lovely reminder of the multitudes who remain untroubled by this fateful showdown, another drama playing out on the same turf. Another narrative. Another film.

So the film we see is merely a cozy point of convergence, with swirling metaphysical gravity and back-porch nostalgia attained through the way in which Ford frames the story as a curious detail on an epic canvas, or a single, gorgeous constellation amid a blanket of stars. The characters are rounded, rootsy products of lives lived and knowledge procured, and this story little more than a juncture of souls or a random point of communal progression. It’s not our duty, per Miller, to read things into the film that aren’t there. It is to know what the things that aren’t there are.

Ford famously wandered from the trail when it came to matters of historical accuracy. But straight docu-fiction or biography were seldom part of his creative purview. Hollywood legend says that Earp, a regular on the Fox lot, regaled Ford with a detailed breakdown of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a fact often used to refute accusations that My Darling Clementine has no basis in reality. And yet layers of myth and misdirection obscure quaint notions of the truth about this story. Stuart N. Lake’s salty 1931 biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal became the basis for a number of filmed works, most famously this one but also Allan Dwan’s curt, skillful 1939 Frontier Marshal. But the book was later revealed as an unabashed romanticization of life and events in Tombstone. Still, Ford is doing something more provocative than simply printing the legend. He instead recalibrates the legend in the service of his own poetic ends. One might even read this film as a Brechtian statement underscoring the story’s fictional provenance. This gentle remove from the historical continuum is what makes My Darling Clementine such a deeply melancholy film, particularly as it shuns any sense of down-home triumphalism and goes out of its way to suppress anything that might be deemed a glamorization of cowpoke lore. The remove also justifies the invention of context not included in Lake’s book.

At the beginning, Wyatt and his three brothers, Virgil (Tim Holt), Morgan (Ward Bond), and James (Don Garner), saunter wearily across an open plain in search of sweet water for the herd of cattle they’re driving west to California. Swiftly coaxed into the flytrap jaws of, per Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan), the “wide-awake, wide-open” town of Tombstone, Wyatt loses young James and the herd, not realizing that “wide-open” was perhaps not meant in the sense he first understood. Following his skillful dispatching of a hog-wild barroom Indian, Wyatt discovers his loss and bullishly decides to accept the job of local marshal, chiefly, it appears, to settle his personal scores from within the bounds of official law.

Having already plied his violent skills years before in Dodge City, Earp finds his legend precedes him. His demeanor is of near-ethereal calm, as if he knows what’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen before it does. This is the confidence of a man of experience, but one who may be destined to repeat the same heroic, liberating actions ad infinitum. Before this, in the 1858 Springfield, Illinois, of Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Fonda had performed a courtroom-bound trial run for Earp’s lead-powered emancipation of the region’s opportunist scallywags. He also perfected the art of balancing precariously on the hind legs of a chair and delivering a touching graveside soliloquy, though the dancing was still a work in progress. And later that year he starred as a wet-behind-the-ears newlywed in Drums Along the Mohawk, stepping up to fight the good fight for a decrepit band of American colonists in New York’s Mohawk Valley.

Drums Along the Mohawk was Ford’s first film in color, and glorious and vibrant it was, too. And yet with My Darling Clementine, he opted for black and white. In early cinema, the use of monochrome was a technical necessity, but here it is the schema of denial, of allusion, of presenting the world as a foggy blueprint. Atmospheric signifiers such as weather are muffled when compared with, say, the eloquent and expressive use of color for seasonal shifts in The Searchers (1956) or the shadows and fog of The Long Voyage Home (1940), as is any trite pictorial beauty that might sully this game of fill-in-the-blanks—though the skies look exquisite, as always in Ford’s films, with the wispy clouds appearing as if they’ve been choreographed by the director himself, inspired by western painters but resembling a particularly foreboding marine landscape by Turner. The absence of color marks an overall tenor of natural and spiritual indifference. When the Clantons are wiped out, Ford offers a conciliatory low-angle peek at the heavens, but the bunched clouds provide only cruel ambiguity as to whether salvation awaits them. In key scenes, Victor Mature’s face is bathed in shadow, his frustration cloaked in Toland-esque high-contrast chiaroscuro. He glances ruefully at his medical diplomas, hanging proudly on the wall of his snug—physical symbols of mental strain and time passing, but also of his relationship with Clementine, a relationship, a time of contentment, that we are left to conceive for ourselves.

Ford had a general interest in exploring the vicissitudes of nascent societies, be it the pioneers of American steam train travel (1924’s The Iron Horse ), Mormon nomads intent on forging a town of their own (1950’s musical-western Wagon Master ), or the tragic, dirt-poor hayseeds of Tobacco Road (1941). Tombstone is wide open. Structure has yet to be imposed. Everything is in a state of flux. Nothing is ever finished. People are always just passing through. They build toward an idyll that they will perhaps never see. It’s an enlivening and affirmative view of history—especially compared with some later westerns in which the march of progress is framed as an almost apocalyptic reckoning for the cowboy way—that the possibility of civic betterment is omnipresent. American flags whip in the wind near the skeletal structure of the church. We see enough to imagine what it will look like and the people who will go there to worship. At the end of the film, Clementine announces her intention to become the town’s new schoolmarm and bring education to a savage land—another tantalizing battle that Ford leaves for another day.

Just as Ford’s cinematic worlds are constantly under construction, so too is the drama in My Darling Clementine, sometimes literally so. A traveling ham actor arrives in town and is forced by the Clantons to drunkenly intone the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet while perched inelegantly on a saloon table. (Shakespeare, another master of elision and allusion.) Despite the performer’s fragile state, the sequence is emblematic of the film’s overall design, an example of high drama, meaningful drama, primal drama, shorn of the unnecessary trinkets and context of the stage. The speech is executed in such a way that actor Alan Mowbray’s impassioned line readings quell the parallel production that’s occurring within the bar. There are no footlights or stage props, but Ford invites you to accept them without seeing them.

Purely for the purposes of sport, let’s round things off by examining a detail that is literally (rather than figuratively) obscured from view. Had Ford’s wishes been followed, Wyatt Earp would have parted ways with Clementine at the foot of that winding dust road out of Tombstone with a genial shake of the hand. A cursory brush of skin on skin and nothing more. But test audiences didn’t go for it. They laughed. Perhaps the gesture seemed too effete for this gentleman gunfighter who had just decisively expunged the Clanton scourge from the township. As detailed in a memo to My Darling Clementine coscreenwriter Sam G. Engel, producer Darryl F. Zanuck personally preferred the shake but relented to the desires of the test audience and had extra footage produced, replacing it with a more emotionally finite gesture: a kiss. This ensured an altogether more generic form of closure, but Ford wasn’t happy.

It may appear to be a superficial switch, one token expression for another, but there’s something more precise, more achingly bittersweet, about the original ending. Fonda intones this line, the final one of the film: “Ma’am, I sure like that name . . . Clementine,” which is heartbreaking in its puppy-dog inanity, as if he’s stalling for more time, like he wants to start the relationship again, to create a new cycle. He then drifts off, dutifully, into the hills, to inform his father of the recent death tally. The kiss signifies a certitude about their continuing relationship; it seals a desire for return, even if he flounders in picking up on her volley of naked, come-hither utterances. There’s the sense that this love will naturally blossom, that Wyatt will see his old pops and then one day return for his prize. The tragedy of family is what it all boils down to. It also implies that Clementine might feel more contented to remain in Tombstone until that day, and not embark on another ad hoc tour of the American “cow towns” that led her to the original object of her affections, Doc Holliday. The shake conforms to the theory of spiraling cosmic cycles, that Wyatt would like to return but most probably won’t. He’ll arrive at another Tombstone and lope through the motions. Yet the kiss does evoke something simpler and possibly more beautiful: that Wyatt’s cycle has finally reached some kind of closure.

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My Darling Clementine Reviews

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Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday clean up Tombstone by taking on the Clanton clan at the O.K. Corral. Meanwhile, Earp becomes smitten with a pretty schoolteacher as Holliday romances a saloon girl.

Perhaps the best orchestrated western of all time, courtesy of the modest Mr. Ford. No western figure inspired more cinematic lore than the indomitable Wyatt Earp, and Fonda, back from WWII, gives a definitive portrayal of the famous frontier lawman. Earp and his brothers (Bond, Holt and Don Garner) have driven their cattle to the outskirts of rough-and-tumble Tombstone, Arizona. Coming upon their campsite is Old Man Clanton (Brennan), who offers the Earps a cut-rate price for their herd. Wyatt rejects the offer and heads into town, leaving his youngest brother as watchman. In Tombstone Earp manages to rid the town of a bothersome drunken Indian, and the grateful townsfolk offer him the job of sheriff. He doesn't accept the position until he discovers the Clantons have stolen his cattle and killed his brother. Then it's time for the remaining Earps to strap on their guns, shore up Wyatt's mysterious, alcoholic friend Doc Holliday (Mature), and head for the OK Corral. Dramatic and brooding, with shadows at night and blinding light at day under a sky that never ends, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE doesn't follow history exactly, but Ford is much more concerned with the myth of the West. The scene where Wyatt brings harmony to Tombstone by eliminating the disruptive element--notably, a Native American--is almost a prototypical expression of the genre's obsession with the formation of community. The most famous scene in this regard, however, is the dance at the church-founding social, where Wyatt and Clementine (Downs) walk down the street like it was a wedding aisle. Fonda was rarely better, his Midwest accent and measured delivery perfect for the part. His chair-balancing makes wonderful use of his lanky body, and his deliberately stiff but gracefully folksy dance with Clementine is a brilliant bit of acting. The often underrated Mature is also outstanding, acting out the tormented Holliday with amazing passion and restraint. Darnell's luscious noir persona is effective, even if she is too glamorized and seems about as Latina as "My Wild Irish Rose." Downs, meanwhile, cast as a refined parallel to Darnell, isn't much of an actress, but then this isn't much of a part; schoolteacher Clementine is less a character than the embodiment of civilization from the East, and the ingenue fills the bill admirably. Finally, Brennan, downright chilling as Clanton, will make you forget every rerun of "The Real McCoys" you ever watched. As with other Ford films, there is no sustained score; Newman merely provides haunting little variations of the title song on a harmonica, and other western ballads on fiddles or guitars as needed. The script is lean and tight, and MacDonald's startling photography, under the Master's guidance, provides graphics so sweeping that the whole of the West seems bounded by the frame. Many other films about Wyatt Earp have been made: LAW AND ORDER with Walter Huston; two films named FRONTIER MARSHAL with George O'Brien and Randolph Scott in the role; TOMBSTONE, THE TOWN TOO TOUGH TO DIE with Richard Dix; WICHITA with Joel McCrea; GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL with Burt Lancaster; HOUR OF THE GUN with James Garner; and DOC with Harris Yulin. This, however, is the definitive rendering, if only for the sequence at the church dance. If that scene doesn't either give you chills or make you cry, see your doctor immediately.

My Darling Clementine [1946]: An Iconic Western Lore

Masculinity is so neat and smart in the old Hollywood movies, especially the ones set in the American frontier. While what we saw was a convincingly realistic version, it’s actually made by great film-makers who had mastered the cinematic craft to convince you. From the early silent film days to the recent Antoine Fuqua’s remake of “The Magnificent Seven” (2016), Western genre has portrayed masculinity in different shades. The perceived noble figures of early Western films were freed from their political notions and war-induced traumas. The protagonist would be so polite with the ‘virginal’ heroine, clamps down on the minority member of his community (and usually the minorities would be shown as drunkards with a weapon), and gun down the ‘bad’ men. These are all inconsistent virtues of our movie heroes, which commenced with all those old Hollywood movies and continue to be silently admired by modern movie-goers. You could have a field day if you are set to analyze the unceasing sexism, racial inequality, and glorification of violence in those old Westerns. In the later years, with Leone’s spaghetti Westerns and Sam Peckinpah’s unflinching visions, the uglier sides of frontier men’s masculinity were brought to light. The protagonists weren’t the typical noble men, but were painted in grey shades. The evolutionary cycle on the portrayal of the 19 th century Frontier men or Cowboys in cinema, I think made a full circle with Andrew Dominik’s profound, plaintive exploration of the ‘Old West’ heroes in “ The Assassination of Jesse James by Coward Robert Ford” (2007). Personally, I prefer the later year Western genre films, which are labeled as ‘revisionist’ or ‘deconstructed westerns’. However, I do love few of the gloriously hopeful and endlessly entertaining old Western films. The exemplary works from the old masters of this genre like John Ford, Howard Hawks, etc boasted cinematic depth, which heavily influenced the Hollywood film-makers of subsequent era (although topical breadth in these old films are another matter).

The conservatism themes are pretty evident in the films of John Ford and other great Western genre film-makers of the era. Ford made one of the greatest Western films titled “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” , in which he made the famous announcement: “When the legend conflicts with the facts, print the legend”. It’s an advice Hollywood follows to this day, concocting pure fictional tales with the nonsensical label ‘based on true events’ . While a lot could be argued about the ideology pushed through these old tales of legends, one can’t argue about or annul the majestic vision, Mr. Ford had crafted for his cinema. On the first look, Ford’s characters might seem to be too simple. Nevertheless, the man’s genius lies in his ability to visually express the convoluted desires and emotional complexities of the characters. From “Stage Coach” (1939) to “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), the master made obligatory concessions for studio-heads and then pursued his pure, unadulterated vision, which has stayed indefinitely in the minds of movie-lovers.

A relaxed, laid-back Henry Fonda tips back his chair on the shadowy porch, facing sun-bleached desert expanse (the plains of Arizona). It’s one of my favorite, ingrained movie images. And, Henry Fonda never looked this relaxed and cool as he was, when playing Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine” (1946). I generally like Henry Fonda and James Stewart’s performances as ‘Western’ heroes than the proverbial tough men like John Wayne. Fonda and Stewart possessed their own distinct rhythm, which enabled them to bring something fresh to familiar Western set-pieces – shootouts, courtship, wagon chases, etc. They have also possessed an air of ambiguity, unlike other ‘Western’ heroes. Combine that with a crackling script (by Winston Miller and Samuel G. Engel), and graceful visual flourishes, you get one of the best Western movie ever made. The myth of Wyatt Earp and his famous gunfight at O.K. Corral is one of the repeatedly documented events in American Western films. John Ford had consulted the real Wyatt Earp (1848-1929) for a silent film, although his own version of Earp is pure fiction. In movies, Tombstone — uncontrolled frontier town – is shown as the battleground between Earp brothers and rowdy Clanton cowboys (good vs bad). However, in reality, it was a political battle between two opposing factions. By the time, there was a climactic showdown at O.K. Corral, both sides abused law and had their fair share of pending arrest warrants. Both Earps and Clantons were the power players, who showed utter disregard for the law. But since in movies you need a clear-cut line dividing the good, ugly, and the bad, Earp brothers are portrayed as fair, noble souls; the Clantons as irredeemably bad apples; and John ‘Doc’ Holliday (Victor Mature) as the good-hearted frenemy.

“My Darling Clementine” was the fourth Wyatt Earp movie. Paramount’s “Wild Bill Hickok” (1923), followed by 1934 and 1939 versions of Wyatt Earp story as written by Earp’s biographer in the book “Wyatt Earp: The Frontier Marshall”, released in 1931. During his later years, Earp was very careful in constructing his own legend as the man who brought peace and law to the violent Wild West. It is the myth flawlessly adapted by Hollywood and led to consistent cinematic incarnations played by Randolph Scott, James Garner, Burt Lancaster, Joel McCrea, Jimmy Stewart, Kurt Russell, and Kevin Costner. The real life account of Wyatt Earp was less flattering. He was a deputy US Marshall as well as donned the job of brothel keeper, bouncer, stagecoach guard for Wells Fargo, and gambler. Historians consider Lake’s biography as ‘purely imaginative’ or a ‘hagiography’ as it has twisted every known fact about Earp. It was one of Lake’s books that served as a foundation for the story of Ford’s movie. In the first scene of “My Darling Clementine”, Ford seems to clearly discard Earp’s real story for providing a tale of engaging conflict.

The year is 1882. The Earp brothers – Morgan, Wyatt, Virgil, and James – are seen to be passing through Monument Valley as cattle rustlers, when encountering old man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and the scowling faces of his sons. Clanton, the biggest land and cattle owner offers to Earps’ cattle, which Wyatt Earp politely refuses. Wyatt hears about the town Tombstone from Clanton and heads into town in the night with his two brothers for a shave, while leaving the younger one to guard the cattle. During his brief stay in the town, Wyatt kicks a drunken, gun-toting Native American before asking ‘What kinda town is this, selling liquor to Indians?’ It might be a line designed to extract few laughs, but you can understand hidden meaning of this question: what’s this Native American doing in the neighborhood of white Americans? Why can’t this guy get drunk and wave the gun at his own neighborhood? But, let’s not delve into the longest chapter of how old American movies spitefully dealt with ‘trouble-making’ Indians or Mexicans. Earp’s courage in taking down the drunken guy brings him the offer to replace the town marshal. He rejects the offer, but has a change of heart, when he returns to find his younger brother murdered and his cattle stolen. Wyatt accepts the position with one condition: his two brothers should be the deputies (in reality, Virgil Earp was Tombstone City Marshal and the only one, who held the legal authority when the mythologized shootout at O.K. Corral happened).

Stills from two of the most memorable sequences in the movie

The early, small episode involving a Native American isn’t the only unflattering account of town’s minorities. There’s the brown-skinned, sensuous, bad girl Chihuahua (Linda Darnell). She is portrayed as ‘singer’ (which we can substitute with the word ‘prostitute’ ). She is in love with the charismatic white American Doc Holliday, for whom she is ready to sacrifice her life. Doc is the complex character after Wyatt, whose ribaldry as well as chivalry behavior bestows a fitting red herring for the tale. Doc seems to mirror the redeemable darkness that might afflict Wyatt’s conscience. When a polite, virginal girl with a positively infectious optimism arrives in Tombstone, looking for her former fiancee Doc Holliday, a new conflict arises. The expected tale of vengeance is pushed to the background and we get a more refined tale of burgeoning love. Wyatt falls head over heels in love with the girl named Clementine (Cathy Downs), who is insisted by Doc to immediately leave the town. The more surprising turn is that Wyatt is more interested in truly civilizing the place than seek for vigilante justice. He is not on the trail of Clantons to finish the unsettled business, but rather motivated to change the grey-shaded Doc. This fictional Wyatt Earp knows that winning over the tormented soul of Doc could really reinstate law in the Wild West town. The gradual build-up of a partnership between Earp and Holliday plays a vital role, when these men on one fateful morning, walked through the empty streets to confront their enemies once and for all.

Engel and Miller’s script is full of wise dialogues and memorable rebukes [ “Mac, have you ever been in love” asks Wyatt, to which Mac replies, “No, I’ve been a bartender all my life” ]. John Ford is a master at putting emphasis on the character’s psychological nature through the use of physical spaces and lightening (cinematography by Joseph MacDonald). The shadowy interiors reflect the emotional conflicts between the characters, whereas the narrative’s transitional moments unfurls in the serene, sun-bleached, spacious landscape. Two astoundingly staged sequences confirm “My Darling Clementine’s” classic status: Earp accompanies Clementine, shyly taking her arm to the square dance at the premise of partially built Church. He is clearly nervous on whether to ask her to join him on the dance floor. Then, the musician makes up an intro, ‘Make room for our new Marshall and his Lady Fair’. They both dance in perfect harmony, shaping romance and making up the cinema’s most heartfelt moment; Earp and his gang walk apart to the destined place for the shootout. The carefully choreographed sequence is full of uncertainty as swirling dust particles and unpredictable gun blasts scatter through the place. There are no unnecessary multiple-cuts. It’s just one long, perfect visual flourish. While there was ample tension visible between Wyatt and Clementine in the sequence leading to dance, the naturally tense shootout itself moves through like a balletic dance. This calm, flawless visual harmony attained by John Ford later influenced many revisionist western film-makers (Sam Peckinpah calls ‘Clementine’ as his favorite Western). Many of the best scenes in this film happen when Wyatt is at his most vulnerable situation than when he inflicts his authority with a six-shooter. Although Ford upholds the myth of Wyatt Earp, he and Fonda humanize the character enough to not turn him into a caricatured gun-toting frontier lawman.

Unlike many Westerns that recounted the legend of Wyatt Earp, John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine” (97 minutes) offers immense pleasures to viewers through rich details and profound visual renditions. What a thoroughly entertaining, ‘dad-blasted’ Western myth! (the insistence is on the word ‘myth’ ).

Arun Kumar is an ardent cinebuff, who likes to analyze movie to its minute detail. He believes in the transformative power and shared-dream experience of cinema.

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My Darling Clementine

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Table Of Contents

My Darling Clementine , American western film , released in 1946, that is considered a classic of the genre . It was one of the first movies to elevate Wyatt Earp to mythical status and helped establish the legend of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1881).

Wyatt Earp (played by Henry Fonda ) and his brothers Virgil ( Tim Holt ), Morgan (Ward Bond), and James (Don Garner) are on a cattle drive from Arizona to California when they encounter Old Man Clanton ( Walter Brennan ) and his son Ike (Grant Withers). After refusing to sell the Clantons the cattle, Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil ride into the town of Tombstone , Arizona. When they return, they find James dead and the herd rustled. Wyatt becomes marshal of Tombstone, and he and his brothers set out to avenge James. They befriend Doc Holliday ( Victor Mature), a troubled doctor with a weakness for alcohol. However, the friendship between Wyatt and Holliday is threatened by the arrival of Doc’s former fiancée Clementine Carter ( Cathy Downs), whose presence causes a rivalry between the two men. When the Clantons kill Virgil, Doc joins Wyatt and Morgan in a violent showdown against the Clantons at the O.K. Corral. The Clantons are defeated, though Doc is also killed. Wyatt and Morgan opt to leave Tombstone, and Wyatt bids farewell to Clementine.

Empty movie theater and blank screen (theatre, motion pictures, cinema).

My Darling Clementine is a rousing and engrossing western done in the usual grand style of director John Ford . Fonda gave one of his most memorable portrayals as Wyatt, and Mature and Brennan also earned praise for their performances. The screenplay is largely fictionalized, with major distortions or inaccuracies concerning the main characters; notably, in real life Doc did not die during the shoot-out. However, the staging of the gunfight itself was based on the firsthand account related to Ford by Wyatt.

Studio: Twentieth Century-Fox
Director: John Ford
Producer: Samuel G. Engel
Writers: Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller
Music: Cyril Mockridge
Running time: 97 minutes
Henry Fonda (Wyatt Earp)
Linda Darnell (Chihuahua)
Victor Mature (Doc Holliday)
Cathy Downs (Clementine Carter)
Walter Brennan (Old Man Clanton)

Film Reference
Films My-No

My Darling Clementine - Film (Movie) Plot and Review

Director: John Ford

Production: Twentieth Century-Fox; black and white, 35mm; running time: 97 minutes. Released November 1946. Filmed on location in Monument Valley, Utah and in New Mexico.

Producer: Samuel G. Engel; screenplay: Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller based on a story by Sam Hellman, from the novel Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal by Stuart N. Lake; photography: Joseph P. MacDonald; editor: Dorothy Spencer; art directors: James Basevi and Lyle R. Wheeler; music: Cyril Mockridge and David Buttolph; orchestrator: Edward B. Powell; special effects: Fred Sersen; costume designer: Rene Hubert.

Cast: Henry Fonda ( Wyatt Earp ); Linda Darnell ( Chihuahua ); Victor Mature ( Doc John Holliday ); Walter Brennan ( Old Man Clanton ); Tim Holt ( Virgil Earp ); Ward Bond ( Morgan Earp ); Cathy Downs ( Clementine Carter ); Alan Mowbry ( Granville Thorndyke ); John Ireland ( Billy Clanton ); Grant Withers ( Ike Clanton ); Roy Roberts ( Mayor ); Jane Darwell ( Kate Nelson ); Russell Simpson ( John Simpson ); Francis Ford ( Dad, old soldier ); J. Farrell McDonald ( Mac the barman ); Don Garner ( James Earp ); Ben Hall ( Barber ); Arthur Walsh ( Hotel clerk ); Jack Pennick ( Coach driver ); Louis Mercier ( Francois ); Micky Simpson ( Sam Clanton ); Fred Libby ( Phin Clanton ); Harry Woods ( Luke ); Charles Stevens ( Indian Joe ); Danny Borzage ( Accordian player ); Mae Marsh.

Publications

Mitry, Jean, John Ford , Paris, 1954.

Everson, William K., and George N. Fenin, The Westerns: From Silents to Cinerama , New York, 1962.

Haudiquet, Philippe, John Ford , Paris, 1964.

Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford , Berkeley, 1968; revised edition, 1978.

Springer, John, The Fondas: The Films and Careers of Henry, Jane and Peter Fonda , New York, 1970.

Kitses, Jim, Horizons West , Bloomington, Indiana, 1970.

Baxter, John, The Cinema of John Ford , New York, 1971.

Place, Janey, The Western Films of John Ford , Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973.

McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington, John Ford , New York and London, 1975.

Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery , London, 1976.

Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford , London and New York 1979.

Ford, Dan, Pappy: The Life of John Ford , Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.

Anderson, Lindsay, About John Ford , London, 1981; New York 1983.

Caughie, John, editor, Theories of Authorship: A Reader , London, 1981.

Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System , New York 1981.

Fonda, Henry, and Howard Teichmann, Fonda: My Life , New York, 1981.

Goldstein, Norm, Henry Fonda: His Life and Work , London, 1982.

Thomas, Tony, The Films of Henry Fonda , Secaucus, New Jersey, 1983.

Reed, Joseph W., Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, Charles Ives , Middletown, Connecticut, 1984.

Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and His Films , Berkeley, 1986.

Stowell, Peter, John Ford , Boston, 1986.

Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian & Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola and Scorsese , Springfield, 1990; 1993.

Darby, William, John Ford's Westerns: A Thematic Analysis, with a Filmography , Jefferson, 1996.

Davis, Ronald L., John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master , Norman, 1997.

Girus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan , New York, 1998.

Levy, Bill, John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography , Westport, 1998.

Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford , New York, 1999.

Variety (New York), 9 October 1946.

New York Times , 4 December 1946.

New Yorker , 14 December 1946.

Auriol, Jean-Georges, "Lettre à John Ford sur My Darling Clementine ," in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), Spring 1947.

Rieuperout, Jean-Louis, in Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television (Berkeley), Winter 1952.

Springer, Henry, "Henry Fonda," in Films in Review (New York), November 1960.

Cowie, Peter, "Fonda," in Films and Filming (London), April 1962.

McVay, Douglas, "The Five Worlds of John Ford," in Films and Filming (London), June 1962.

Fonda, Henry, "Fonda on Fonda," in Films and Filming (London), February 1963.

Brode, Henry, in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1968.

Wood, Robin, in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1971.

"Ford Issue" of Filmkritik (Munich), January 1972.

Buffa, M., and C. Scarrone, "Per una rilettura del cinema classico americano," in Filmcritica (Rome), October-December 1973.

Gomery, Douglas, "Mise-en-Scène in John Ford's My Darling Clementine ," in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 2, no. 4, 1978.

Marinero, P., in Casablanca (Madrid), January 1983.

Darby, W., "Musical Links in Young Mr. Lincoln, My Darling Clementine , and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ," in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 1, 1991.

Nielsen, R., "Ray's Way: John Ireland in My Darling Clementine ," in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 191, May 1991.

Erisman, F., "The Night Christopher Lloyd Danced with Mary Steenburgen," in Jounal of Popular Film and Television , vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 1992.

Luhr, W., "Reception, Representation, and the OK Corral," in Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film , vol. 18, 1993.

Kermode, Mark, "Video: My Darling Clementine Directed by John Ford," in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 5, May 1994.

Combs, Richard, "The First Cut is Still the Bleakest: The Wild Bunch Directed by Sam Peckinpah/ My Darling Clementine Directed by John Ford," in Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 4832, 10 November 1995.

Romney, Jonathan, "America's Creation Myth: My Darling Clementine Directed by John Ford," in New Statesman & Society (London), vol. 8, no. 381, 1 December 1995.

Simmon, Scott, "Concerning the Weary Legs of Wyatt Earp : The Classic Western According to Shakespeare," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 24, no. 2, 1996.

Yawn, M., and B. Beatty, "John Ford's Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism," in Film and History (Cleveland), vol. 26, no. 1/4, 1996.

Schwengler, O., "Exercices de style a 'OK Corral,"' in Cinémaction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), vol. 86, no. 1, 1998.

My Darling Clementine is considered the archetype of the classic western. In retelling the familiar story of the Earp brothers standing up to the evil Clanton family, director John Ford proved Hollywood genre films would become great cultural artefacts. However, Ford, one of the industry's most honored directors, is usually better remembered for other masterworks. While My Darling Clementine is considered one of his better films, it is only one of many in a truly remarkable career.

Ford, however, did not want to direct this classic work originally. After World War II Ford, like many of Hollywood's highly rated directors, formed an independent company, in this case Argosy Pictures. But he still owed Twentieth Century-Fox one more film. (Fox's production chief Darryl F. Zanuck tried to tempt Ford to renegotiate his Fox contract for a guaranteed $600,000 per year plus limited freedom but Ford refused.) Zanuck assigned Ford to My Darling Clementine starring Fox stars Henry Fonda and Victor Mature. Shooting began in Monument Valley in May, 1946, and was completed within 45 days. Zanuck found Ford's version too long, and the story unclear, so he cut 30 minutes, and re-structured some of the remaining material. Released in November, 1946 the film received favorable reviews, and earned respectable, but not record-breaking revenues.

The structure of My Darling Clementine is straightforward, and symmetrical, opening with the ominous meeting of the Earps with the Clantons, and closing with the gun-fight at the OK Corral (and Wyatt's half-hearted promise to return). All this seems to take place in three or four days. Although the events are grounded in history (Ford claimed to have gotten this version directly from friend Wyatt Earp), the details were transformed to make a popular film. The Doc Holliday figure was transfigured the most. Like central characters in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , Holliday tragically stands between primitivism and civilization. Unlike the Earps, this character fails to find a way to reconcile his place in the changing world, and turns to alcohol and a desire for death.

Disintegration of the family was a dominant theme in Ford's work prior to World War II. In My Darling Clementine the contrast between the Earps and Clantons is clearly drawn, with death at the ultimate shootout predestined. The Earps are diametrically opposed to the Clantons, yet strong similarities exist. In both cases, the father holds powerful authority. "Old Man" Clanton beats his sons with a whip, bullying them like animals. The Earps, however, are more civilized, and continually appeal to their unseen father ("How will we tell Pa?"). In the end Wyatt and Morgan, the surviving brothers choose to return to tell Pa of recent events rather than remain to help civilize Tombstone.

My Darling Clementine seems to present a well known story, set in the familiar context of the western. Upon closer examination of the film, however, one can still see the confusion Zanuck must have sensed, such as the sequence in which the Earps come to town. Wyatt settles down for a shave when gunshots arouse him. He goes through the hotel (next to the barber shop) and emerges, in a medium long shot, alone on the sidewalk. A barber pole serves as a reference to locate him in the darkness. Wyatt goes across the street to the source of the trouble. We see him with the Oriental Saloon in the background, its doors clearly seen in deep space. Wyatt enters the Oriental saloon to capture Indian Joe, the perpetrator of the trouble. Wyatt then gathers the barber from the crowd of spectators and seeks a continuation of his shave. Later in the film we learn, through several long establishing shots, that there is no Oriental saloon on the other side of the street. This absence of the continual "referential focus" disrupts the film's visual rhythm, setting this sequence apart from the rest of the film. There are numerous other examples of visual discontinuity in this film, all violating rules of classical Hollywood style. Indeed in this seemingly simple work Ford develops a complex visual pattern of stability and disruption in the world of Tombstone. Ford seems to be foreshadowing his autocritiques of the western genre made throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

In its use of generic elements My Darling Clementine suggests the western myth might not be as stable as it was prior to World War II. Although in the end the film seems to promise the formation of a utopian community, the western hero does not seem to be able to reconcile his individual and social roles. He rides off in the closing sequence with only a vague suggestion he will return to Clementine and the community. To further play on the hero's ambiguous character Ford continually reminds us that he does not fit in. My Darling Clementine 's most cited sequence is not its elaborate gunfight, but rather a dance in which Wyatt Earp displays his lack of grace on the dance floor. This Eastern ritual is here to stay, whether the western hero fits in or not. Ford seems to have been influenced in My Darling Clementine by his recent military experience during World War II. Despite the fact Ford made seven films about the United States Cavalry, My Darling Clementine seems to be his most militarist western, both in theme and action. The Earps represent a new type of law—cold and calculating. They operate within the law, yet are always clearly able to kill in a most efficient manner. Family ties and a sense of justice seem all that is necessary to justify action. Civilization defends itself only by obliterating the other side, and then leaving when the job is done, much as the popular image of the role of the American military during World War II.

In the end, in structure, theme and style Ford seems to be undercutting the anarchic spirit of the western, so celebrated in 1939 with his Stagecoach . The style seems classical but upon closer inspection is not. The themes seem classical, but contradictions and loose ends abound. Even closure, the Hollywood system's point of "wrapping the package," is confused and ambiguous. My Darling Clementine represents the work of a filmmaker ready to break out of the studio system and go onto more complex projects, as Ford would. In an uneven path he would make his way to his masterworks, westerns of complexity and ambiguity: The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). My Darling Clementine , a masterwork in its own right, foreshadows Ford's greatest films.

—Douglas Gomery

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My Darling Clementine movie review (1946)
John Ford's greatest Western, "My Darling Clementine" (1946), he and his. brothers are driving cattle east to Kansas. Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan leave. their kid brother James in charge of the herd and go into town for a shave and. a beer. As they ride down the main street of Tombstone, under a vast and.
My Darling Clementine
My Darling Clementine. NEW. In the middle of a long cattle drive, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers stop off for a night in the town of Tombstone. The next morning they find their cattle ...
My Darling Clementine (1946)
My Darling Clementine: Directed by John Ford. With Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs. After their cattle are stolen and their brother murdered, the Earp brothers have a score to settle with the Clanton family.
My Darling Clementine
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.
My Darling Clementine Movie Review
Parents need to know that My Darling Clementine is a 1946 classic that features the lawlessness, vengeance, and gunplay typical of movies about the Old West. Considered to be one of director John Ford's masterpieces, the story mythologizes Marshall Wyatt Earp and the infamous shootout at the OK Corral….
My Darling Clementine
My Darling Clementine is a 1946 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp during the period leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.The ensemble cast also features Victor Mature (as Doc Holliday), Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, Cathy Downs and Ward Bond.. The title of the movie is borrowed from the theme song "Oh My Darling, Clementine ...
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Understated and meditative in tone, "My Darling Clementine" is a different kind of Hollywood western, one that conveys a humanistic theme with emotional depth. Characters are multi-dimensional, unvarnished, and as striking and memorable as the stately buttes and spires of Monument Valley. 61 out of 75 found this helpful.
David Reviews John Ford's My Darling Clementine ...
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 ...
My Darling Clementine (1946) Movie Review from Eye for Film
Unlike another landmark Western, High Noon, the climactic showdown is not what the film is about and if you compare My Darling Clementine with John Sturges's monumental Gunfight At The OK Corral 11 years later, it may appear dramatically weakened by a casually choreographed shootout, culminating in Wyatt's extraordinary generosity towards Boss ...
My Darling Clementine (1946)
My Darling Clementine. 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 ...
Review: My Darling Clementine
Those nefarious Clanton boys eventually roar back into My Darling Clementine, prompting the classic shoot-out sequence seemingly embedded within the DNA of the American western.In keeping with the ambivalence that defines the entirety of the film, Ford films the confrontation between Earp (joined by Holliday and others) and the Clantons as a swirl of riled horses, kicked-up dust, jutting fence ...
My Darling Clementine (1946)
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 ...
My Darling Clementine Review :: Criterion Forum
Picture 9/10. The theatrical version of John Ford's My Darling Clementine receives a new transfer (taken from a new 4K restoration), and is being released by The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray. The dual-layer disc presents the film in its original aspect ratio of about 1.33:1 in 1080p/24hz. The new restoration and transfer is certainly ...
Review: My Darling Clementine
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.
My Darling Clementine 1946, directed by John Ford
For him the key thing about My Darling Clementine is its authenticity: 'I knew Wyatt Earp...and he told me about the fight at the OK Corral. So we did it exactly the way it had been.'. For viewers ...
‎My Darling Clementine (1946) directed by John Ford • Reviews, film
A.V. Club review. Makes sense that my most vivid memory from a previous viewing 20+ years ago was Henry Fonda leaning back in his chair—this is a gloriously lazy movie, in a very different way from Hawks' (equally wonderful) digressive '50s Westerns. Also turned me around on day-for-night, which I hadn't realized could look so evocative.
My Darling Clementine:
"W hat you see is what you get." So said Winston Miller, coscreenwriter of John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), in a terse rejoinder aimed at those searching for motivation, commentary, or other subtextual delights in the work. Miller bellyached that critics tended to read things into his script that simply weren't there, a line that Ford was also known to toe.
My Darling Clementine
Check out the exclusive TV Guide movie review and see our movie rating for My Darling Clementine. X. ... My Darling Clementine Reviews. 1946; 1 hr 37 mins Drama, Action & Adventure
My Darling Clementine [1946]: An Iconic Western Lore
It was one of Lake's books that served as a foundation for the story of Ford's movie. In the first scene of "My Darling Clementine", Ford seems to clearly discard Earp's real story for providing a tale of engaging conflict. The year is 1882. The Earp brothers - Morgan, Wyatt, Virgil, and James - are seen to be passing through ...
My Darling Clementine
My Darling Clementine(From left) Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Alan Mowbray, and Tim Holt in My Darling Clementine (1946), directed by John Ford. My Darling Clementine, American western film, released in 1946, that is considered a classic of the genre. It was one of the first movies to elevate Wyatt Earp to mythical status and helped establish ...
My Darling Clementine
Ford seems to have been influenced in My Darling Clementine by his recent military experience during World War II. Despite the fact Ford made seven films about the United States Cavalry, My Darling Clementine seems to be his most militarist western, both in theme and action. The Earps represent a new type of law—cold and calculating.
My Darling Clementine
Based on one of the most durable stories in frontier history - Ford's only retelling of a particular historical event in Western clothes - Clementine is on the one hand, a myth as much as any of the immature Westerns before or after. If anything, the film errs on the side of too much myth, and this where things start to get interesting.
My Darling Clementine (Blu-ray Review)
My Darling Clementine sits high upon a pedestal as one of the most well-made western films ever. There shouldn't be any doubt of that. After all, John Ford directed the film (with a slight bit of help in the editing room by Darryl F. Zanuck), and John Ford was one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. And while it wasn't the first film to tackle the subject matter at hand (nor was it ...

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