My Darling Clementine
By Christopher Hyde
March 30, 2004
Fox Studio Classics reissues one of director John Ford’s greatest westerns in both its original and rough cut forms.
Considered by some as the best of all American directors, John Ford is remembered in the main for his epic adventures of the western territories. Though he directed films in a variety of genres, it’s the fables of the settling of the left half of the country that have resonated down through the years and today seem most evocative of his boundless talent as a pictorial helmsman. Both iconic and magnificent in scope, films like Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance explicate a legendary vision of the past that has few equals onscreen. While not without their casual historic oversights or politically incorrect moments, Ford’s cinematic portraits of the taming of the wilderness are without a doubt some of the finest pieces of celluloid to ever come out of the golden age of Hollywood.
With My Darling Clementine, the director chose to tackle one of the most well known of western legends, the battle of the OK Corral. Famously featuring the Clantons, the Earps and Doc Holliday, this story has been made over multiple times for the movies—including at least a couple of tepid versions during the decade of the nineties. (And it’s to be suspected that these won’t be the last time that this tale graces the silver screen, even with the Western seemingly moribund at present). Casting the inestimable Henry Fonda as sheriff Wyatt Earp and surrounding him with a selection of Ford regulars as well as Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, the filmmaker transforms the facts of that fateful occurrence into a measured myth that features many of the common John Ford themes.
Like many movies that purport to use history as their basis, the story of My Darling Clementine bears little resemblance to the actual facts of the Earp/Clanton confrontation in Tombstone. But sometimes the lies that a people tell themselves are just as revealing (if not more) as any supposedly objective truth; and besides, as the classic John Ford saw goes: “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. Here, in an economically set opening scene, we are initially introduced to both families within the usual majestic Ford location setting of Monument Valley. The director’s confident direction quickly establishes who the villains and the good guys are with a minimum of effort, immediately setting Fonda’s Earps up against the great Walter Brennan’s brutal Old Man Clanton and kin. It’s also not long before we meet Doc Holliday, depicted here as a tubercular former surgeon who has become an alcoholic gambler in a fruitless quest to escape his fate. The other major players in the cast are the female members of the ensemble, with the capable Cathy Downs filling the eponymous role of Clementine and the less talented Linda Darnell taking up the somewhat embarrassing and poorly written ethnic character Chihuahua.
The events that lead up to the eventual climactic shootout unfold against a frontier backdrop and touch upon a number of standard Ford themes and characters. Setting aside some of the more troubling aspects of the settling of the West, the filmmaker focuses mainly on the carving of a garden from the wilderness and the way that the forces of order and love replace a former lawlessness and chaos. Sketching his scenes with consummate care, the director displays a magnificent sense of pace and composition throughout the film, revealing an eye for detail that easily sets him apart from lesser makers of genre entertainment. Ford’s style here is never rushed or impatient; instead, leisurely scenes of character exposition meander away from the main storyline and give a sense of mythic breadth and depth to the whole film. This wandering is never aimless however, and in the hands of this master filmmaker this backgrounding only serves to fill out the people we meet and to make them seem as if made of flesh and blood rather than mere shadow and light.
Notable for the way in which it depicts its major plot points, My Darling Clementine also contains a number of more minor notes that add to its emotional richness. One is the fantastic cinematography by Joseph MacDonald, a journeyman whose skill blossomed under the impetus of Ford’s oversight. The Arizona/Utah location shooting is simply spectacular, with panoramic views of a unique landscape being utilized to give the film an overall sense of scale and grandeur. Also worthy of mention is the presence of many classic bit players who often turn up in the filmmaker’s westerns--actors such as Earle Foxe, Mae Marsh and the director’s brother Francis, who help to directly connect this film with the motion picture history of the genre itself. One another piece of work that should be pointed out is Alan Mowbray’s excellent turn as a drunken Shakespearean actor, a charmingly roguish performance whose short screen time does not reflect its ultimate importance to the film’s success.
As this movie is such a treasure in its own right, even a simple bare bones DVD would have been a nice addition to store shelves. Fox has done better that here, however, giving film fans not only a good looking transfer of My Darling Clementine as it was released to theaters but also including an early preview cut that runs some six minutes longer than the standard version. This rough cut is exceptional for the insight it gives into Ford’s working methods, as some of the scenes that were cut are more expansive and broaden the picture of the pioneer town of Tombstone. It’s also interesting for the way it shows how even a filmmaker of the stature of Ford was beholden to the studio system, with producer Darryl Zanuck wielding control of the scissors for the final edit. But Zanuck at least wasn’t a complete hack, and while personally I prefer the lengthier scenes in the rough cut as well as the director’s choice of music and final scene, there are at least a couple of instances where the producer’s cuts prove to be beneficial. In particular, the superfluous line of dialogue snipped from the first encounter of Fonda’s Earp and Mature’s Holliday makes the scene much smoother and reveals that Zanuck’s sensibility was not completely that of a Hollywood philistine.
Helpfully, the dual sided DVD includes another extra wherein UCLA archivist Robert Gitt delineates the differences between the standard and longer versions. There’s also a commentary track by hereditary descendant Wyatt Earp III and Ford biographer Scott Eyman (though it’s the latter who provides most of the information), which while it sometimes veers into intellectualized blathering is still a good source of data on the film and on John Ford himself. All in all then, this new release gives us one of the finest westerns by a man who is perhaps the greatest of all American directors in top-notch fashion, presenting both a clean presentation of the original as well as sparkling extras that aid in appreciation of the film. As My Darling Clementine is one of the best celluloid efforts ever made in the genre, it’s sure fitting to see it ride back into town in this way.
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