My Darling Clementine
1946
Director: John Ford
Starring: Henry Fonda, Walter Brennan, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell
One of my all-time favorite westerns, My Darling Clementine manages to have all the classic hallmarks of its genres, but the overall mood and feeling seems fresher, lighter. It is the oft-told tale of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday fighting the Clantons at the O.K. Corral – American Western mythology at its finest – but the story has never been told quite like this.
When Wyatt Earp (Fonda) and his brothers stop in Tombstone for the night, the lawless Clanton clan kills the youngest brother to steal the herd of cattle the Earps were pushing to California. Instead of moving on, Wyatt decides to stay on in Tombstone as marshal in order to avenge the death of his brother, falling in love with a pretty lady and butting heads with the gloriously curmudgeonly Doc Holliday (Mature) along the way.
When you boil the plot down like this, My Darling Clementine sounds like a bitter tale of gritty revenge. Oddly enough, it’s the furthest from it, and that’s thanks to Fonda’s performance as Wyatt Earp and John Ford’s brisk direction. Consider: in his first night in Tombstone, Earp goes to the barber for a shave (falling backwards off the fancy new barber’s seat in the process), during which bullets fly in through the window. Instead of fear, Earp exclaims with a sense of exacerbation, “What kind of a town is this?” The situation is humorous, not frightening. Doc Holliday, the reigning gambling lord of the town, quickly comes up against bent-on-reform Earp. In their first “stand-off” in Holliday’s saloon, the two stare down one another and exchange thinly-veiled threats, but the situation is lightened when Holliday orders champagne for Earp. The grimace on Earp’s face as he tries to down the champagne is a lovely touch of laughter in what could have been a deadly serious encounter. Later on, more than a few laughs are had from the barber spraying Earp with a few blasts of unwanted perfume. This juxtaposition of aggression with humor, thanks to Ford, litters the film, making it an oddly light-hearted western.
