MY
DARLING
CLEMENTINE
Directed by: John
Ford - Written by: Samuel G. Engel
Starring: Henry Fonda, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Tim Holt,
Victor Mature
Cathy Downs, Linda Darnell, Jane Darwell, John Ireland,
Alan Mowbray, J. Farell MacDonald
Black & White - Released: I946
This
is the one of the best westerns ever made. The first filmed
rendition of the OK Corral gunfight; while not an attempt
at historical accuracy; the film still has a feeling of the
era about it. After studio head Darryl Zanuck's
post-production butchering, most of director John Ford’s
work is left, if you can ignore a few embarrassments like
the opening titles and a grave-site scene.
It’s Director
John Ford's myth of frontier America as a land of evil
badmen and straight shooters who go to church on Sunday, a
vision that still mesmerizes America to this day. Ford
constructs the film as a balance beam. One of the most
outstanding scenes in American films shows Wyatt Earp
dancing at the unfinished church - the fulcrum of the film.
Only a foundation and floor exists in this moment between
the worlds, the unformed and the formed, frontier and
settled. What the lawman's guns don't destroy, bourgeois
society will. The church will be completed and the school
will open as the last bad guy bites the dust; pretty soon
the church’s bake sale will be the biggest news in town.
My
Darling Clementine has a scene
which, almost unique among westerns, captures the latent
fear inside an I880s saloon; the saloons in
Shane or
A River Runs Through It are later films
that come to mind. Anyone who’s spent time in a bar has
seen the glassy, emotionless stare of men who've been
drinking heavily. Put that bar in the no-go zone of your
city. Add a ready handgun and a pervasive drinking culture.
That might approximate being in a saloon in Tombstone in
the early I880s. That's the reason why westerns fascinate;
if there's no law, it's a game without rules, and devil
takes the hindmost.
The
Clanton family live by cattle rustling. In the scene in the
saloon they line up at the bar, each one staring intently
at Earp. The bar is dark; the ceiling low; it’s a
claustrophobic hellhole and death seems close here. Walter
Brennan (as the elder Clanton) had won best supporting
actor Awards in I936 and I938 and also in I940 as the
psychotic Judge Roy Bean in
The Westerner. There’s no
comedic shading of his role as Clanton in
Clementine, he plays a
cold-blooded killer, thus he has some family values to pass
on to his son, “When you pull a gun – kill a man”.
Henry
Fonda was drawing on a long line of movie marshals when he
adopted the icy look and precise phrase-making for his
portrait of Earp; but he did it better than his
predecessors; this is perhaps Henry Fonda's greatest role.
In his minimalist interpretation; every extraneous feature
has been chiseled away; his Wyatt has a moral and a
physical gravity; much like American felt during WWII. And
the humanizing bits of high spirits that he and others are
given to draw on work better than any other western of the
era.
The
dialogue is crisp and Ford’s stable of character actors are
at hand, as well as Tim Holt, Alan Mobray as the traveling
Shakespearean artiste, and of course Ford’s other big star,
the western landscape, played by the aptly named Monument
Valley; the literal and metaphorical cockpit of Ford's
message. In
Clementine Ford's tendency
to folksiness and sentimentality are at a minimum.
Cinematographer Joe MacDonald’s crystal-clear outdoor
scenes pop as if he’d been studying with photography legend
Ancel Adams.
This
is 1940’s western, so Linda Darnell belts a couple of songs
in a modern do. Hulking beefcake Victor Mature plays Doc
Holiday, looking out of place as usual, like the phony
saguaro cacti, but he does his best. Doc Holiday's
character is an examination of the real
John
Ford by
John Ford -
alcoholic, manic-depressive, even suicidal, mean, and
carrying the Ford trademark handkerchief. What Mature
couldn't do was were the trademark Ford sunglasses, worn
constantly to hide his sensitive eyes form the alligators
of Hollywood.
As in the real
old west, females are love interests only; the opening
titles are laughable, a product of the Zanuck changes
probably. Some backgrounds look skimpy. But the film
stands. A feeling and a spirit are rendered, thanks largely
to the style of John Ford and Henry Fonda
.
Notes:
(a) Ford claimed to have met Wyatt Earp in the I920’s. It’s
very possible, because the real Wyatt Earp lived until
I929. He saw the West as real life and again as myth. His
last years were lived out in Hollywood, California.
(b) A case could be made that Ford’s later films took this
film as template and ran it into the ground. That and John
Wayne’s acting range, or lack of it, would be an
interesting debate. Of course, the Duke took no roles in
which he was not the hero, in late life merely going
through his collection of mannerisms, thereby contributing
to the one-dimensionality of his legacy.
(c) John Ford's real name was Finney; he was the thirteenth
child in his family; he'd been making films since I9I7. By
the time of this film he'd already made such sound-era
classics as
The
Informer, Stagecoach and
The Grapes of Wrath.
(d) Wyatt Earp's real life was a mix of being on both sides
of the law. Besides being marshal, he had earlier been
involved in frontier gambling and prostitution operations -
a not unusual combination in the West. See
McCabe and Mrs. Miller for
a western that tells that more real kind of
story.
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