#732: FORD, John: My Darling Clementine (1946)

FORD, John (United States)

My Darling Clementine [1946]

Spine #732
Blu-ray

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.

97 minutes (final version)

103 minutes (prereleases version)
Black & White

Monaural

1:33:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2014

Director/Writers

Screenplay by Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller.

From a story by Sam Hellman.

Based on a book by Stuart N. Lake.

John Ford was 52 when he directed My Darling Clementine.

Other Ford films in the Collection:

#320: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
#516: Stagecoach (1939)

The Film

As an Arizonan, let’s start with a few anachronisms:

Tombstone (near Tucson) is about 500 miles away from Monument Valley. It’s not just “over the rise there.” That’s fine — in 1946 nobody knew any different.

Also, saguaro cacti do NOT grow there. There are indigenous to the Sonoran Desert — they don’t even grow in Tombstone.

**

Ah, just a quibble. John Ford’s My Darling Clementine is a masterpiece — and not just of the Western genre. It is a fine film — and available on two different versions on this disc; Ford’s prerelease cut, and the final cut, edited by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Many years later, Ford made some noise about Zanuck’s cut — but contemporarily, he referred to him as a “genius.” There is actually very little difference between the two versions (see below).

Ford was a filmmaker who went in for “simplistic” filmmaking. The camera is never noticeable; there is but one tracking shot in the entire film (see below).

Taking note of a few of the film’s pleasures:

0:00:29: Over the “My Darling Clementine” song, the opening credits are woodburned into ragged plaques of wood. The camera pans down to each new board, mounted on a pole. It really sets the mood.

0:02:03: The buttes of Monument Valley are gorgeous — even in black & white — and a mass of cattle being driven up the dusty trail is perhaps a cliché, but with Ford — even today, there is something magnificent in the image. Like many of his shots in this film, the cows and monuments in the background are completely dwarfed by a the upper two-thirds of the frame by the sky.

0:02:12: With Cyril Mockridge’s soaring score, Ford introduces the Earp brothers in intercutting medium close-ups on their horses; first the ill-fated James (Don Garner), then Morgan (Ward Bond), Virgil (Tim Holt) and finally Wyatt (Henry Fonda).

0:02:44: Note how Mockridge’s score turns dark as Old Man Clanton (a great Walter Brennan) and his son, Ike (a glowering Grant Withers) turn up.

0:08:07: Wyatt wants a shave. The barber can’t quite operate the chair (“I only had it a week. Came all the way from Chicago”) ... Wyatt nearly falls off. The joke pays off well in the Prerelease version, which includes a scene cut from the final print. At the Bird Cage Theatre

still standing in Tombstone, it seems that Doc Holliday (Victor Mature, fantastic) had a similar experience; his face is bandaged from the cuts he received in the accident.

0:14:38: Wyatt rides out to visit James’s grave. Another small anachronism: “Born 1864 Died 1882.” The fight at the O.K. Corral took place in 1881.

0:17:20. The poker game. Here we get a glimpse of how Fonda — who absolutely inherits this film — is so great. With little dialogue (Ford is concerned with faces, particularly eyes), Wyatt knows he is being cheated, but never overreacts. When he grabs Chihuahua (Linda Darnell, forced on Ford by the studio) and throws her in the watering trough, it is all in one intense short action.

0:23:05. Doc and Wyatt are about to meet. Earp collects his chips in his hat and puts the hat on his head. In a magnificent wide shot, observe Fonda’s gait, as he walks down to meet Doc. It is iconic. Their conversation is mostly filmed in medium two-shots, with only two close-ups in four cuts.

0:31:43. The wonderful Alan Mowbray is Granville Thorndyke, a traveling actor who is reciting Shakespeare’s famous Hamlet soliloquy for the drunken Clanton brothers. When he breaks down in the middle, Doc — obviously an educated man — picks up where he left off.

0:37:06. As Clementine (Cathy Downs) steps off the stage, Mockridge plays the Clementine song in slow, longing tones, scored for strings. Watch Fonda, as he is obviously smitten with this beauty, but shows it all in body language and movement. Ford films this meeting with great cinematic charisma; Fonda on the porch, a long vertical pole in frame center, and Clementine, all petite, with the (transplanted or fake?) saguaros, a wagon and a long monument butte in the far background. You can readily see why Kurosawa was so influenced in his own work, with shots like this.

0:41:19: As Thorndyke leaves Tombstone on the stage, Ford brings us another glorious wide shot of the stage, the desert, the monuments — all occupying about a fifth of the lower frame with nothing but a sky filled with clouds in the top four-fifths.

0:53:55. One of the film’s best jokes. Wyatt — who has just had a haircut and spritzed with perfume by the barber — is standing on the porch between his brothers. Virgil:

“You know, I swear I can almost smell the honeysuckle blossoms.”

Wyatt: “That’s me ... barber.”

The joke is repeated at 1:00:11, this time with Clementine.

0:55:12. As Chihuahua yells at him, Fonda sits in his chair and pushes both feet up against the pole, coolly keeping his balance. Another iconic image.

0:58:27. Fonda walks in to the hotel softly whistling the Clementine theme. As Joseph McBride points out in his excellent commentary (see below), the interaction is completely cinematic, done with hats, glances and movement. At 0:58:57, Ford closes in on Fonda, revealing a checkerboard pattern of light on his suit. It is only in the next cut to Clem, that we see it is a reflection of the window curtains. Another gorgeous piece of quiet filmmaking.

1:00:55. The tracking shot of Earp and Clem walking down the porch; Ford pulls the camera back to track their movement towards the camera. That’s as fancy as Ford’s camera gets here!

1:04:20. The famous dance sequence has Fonda lifting up his legs exactly as he does in another Ford classic, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) (Spine #320).

1:09:20. Earp — wrongly suspecting Doc of his brother’s murder — chases after him, cutting him off at the Huachuca Pass.

An extraordinary few moments filled with terrific stunt riding.

1:20:21. Old Man Clanton’s cold-blooded murder of Virgil is shocking.

“Get mounted.”

1:25:28. Clanton is shown completely in black silhouette with a dark sky in the background. Ford (and his brilliant cinematographer, Joseph MacDonald) simply open up the lens to achieve daybreak. 

1:27:26. Perhaps the most brilliant low-horizon shot, the good guys seem to be about half an inch tall in the background with the town’s facade on the left and desert on the right and nothing but a gigantic cloud-streaked sky above.

1:28:53. The gunfight unfolds in unusually rapid cuts, until the Old Man is the only Clanton still alive. He surrenders to Earp, begging him not to kill him.

“I’m not gonna kill you. I hope you live a hundred years. So you’ll just a little know what my pa’s gonna feel.”

1:36:06. An obvious reshoot. At previews, people laughed when Fonda just shakes Clem’s hand to say goodbye. Audiences are not stupid. The affection between them obvious, and Zanuck insisted on adding the chaste kiss on the cheek before the handshake. A rare producer/editor who knew what was what.

1:36:34. Watch Fonda’s face as he mounts his horse, and cracks a sly smile before uttering one of the best last lines of any film:

“Ma’am — I sure like that name: Clementine.”

Film Rating (0-60):

56

The Extras

The Booklet

Essay by critic David Jenkins.

Brilliant! For example:

“ ... 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 points of communal progression. It’s not our duty ... to read things into the film that aren’t there. It is to know what the things that aren’t there are.”

Version 1

New 4K digital restoration of the theatrical release version of the film, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack.

Zanuck’s edits.

Version 2

High-definition presentation of the 103-minute prerelease version of the film.

As noted below (Comparison), there is little difference between the two versions. For example, in this version, after the Clantons are no more and Wyatt is on his way out of town, there is a scene where he is saying goodbye to all the townspeople. Perhaps Ford wanted to further humanize Earp, but Zanuck wisely cut it — leaving us with the kiss and the handshake.

The chaste kiss itself was another Zanuck idea.

Commentary

Featuring Ford biographer McBride.

Non-stop info, praising Ford’s genius and detailing filmic details. A total pleasure to listen to McBride, who occasionally stops talking to let a bit of dialogue register.

Interview

With western historian Andrew C. Isenberg about the real Wyatt Earp.

Again, great info about the actual history and how the story probably became clouded beyond any definitive understanding because of the real Earp’s tendency to exaggerate in his final years in Hollywood. Ford himself is said to have talked to Earp extensively, who told the filmmaker about the military maneuvers in the fight, and even drew a map (which you can see Fonda drawing before the shoot-out) ...

Comparison

of the two versions by film preservationist Robert Gitt.

All the differences spotted. Many are only soundtrack-related. There is a scene in the prerelease which amplifies the Chihuahua-Billy Clanton relationship.

Gitt even confesses to a preservationist sin — he clarified a moment by using footage from a previous scene of the stage arriving — panning left to block out Fonda. He seems slightly embarrassed to have done so.

Video essay

by Ford scholar Tag Gallagher.

Another great extra.

Bandit’s Wager

A 1916 silent western short costarring Ford and directed by his brother, Francis Ford, featuring new music composed and performed by Donald Sosin.

This is a delightful silent short with a burst-of-surprise ending. Must-see.

Television documentary

NBC television reports from 1963 and 1975 about the history of Tombstone and Monument Valley.

Removed from the post-war time of the film’s creation, the two broadcasters bring the location details up-to-date.

Lux Radio Theatre

Adaptation from 1947 starring Fonda and Downs.

Boiling the whole thing down to an hour, the radio audience “got the picture.” Fonda is just as good on audio as he is on video!

Trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

37

56 + 37 =

93

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