Hitchcoc If you have read anything about the Earps, you know immediately that this is an historical travesty. Of course, that doesn't matter. I'd like to know which cattle drive the Earp brothers went on when the youngest got killed. The whole thing with Wyatt was about him as a politician. He also had a sad history with women. Now, throw that all aside and assume this movie has nothing to do with the famous family. Well, they do have the same names. By making Wyatt a squeaky clean, heroic figure, we open the door to his treatment of the bad guys. Of course, he now also has the goal of avenging his brother's murder. Hollywood also throws in a romantic element and we're off. We know that the Clantons are lurking and something is going to have to be done about them. I get a big kick out of this movie. In addition to Henry Fonda, there are some superb characters that are unforgettable.

Richard Dominguez As Most Film Critics Agree, So Do I "My Darling Clementine" Is The Best Western Ever Made ... The Director John Ford As A Kid Worked At 20th Century And Wyatt Earp Would Stop By The Studio To Visit Friends ... Wyatt Would Tell John All About The Circumstances Around The Shoot Out At The OK Corral ... Making The Story Historically Accurate ... Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Walter Brennen, Linda Darnell Make Their Performances A Stella Gathering ... It Won National Board of Review, USA 1946 (And Is Still In That Top 10) ... National Film Preservation Board, USA 1991 ... And Won Best Foreign Film By The Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists 1948 ... Well Scripted With Excellent Direction John Ford Became A House Hold Name With This Film ... Truly A Western Classic Often Imitated But Will Never Be Duplicated

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . almost manages to bamboozle movie-goers that Evil is Good in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. And this is without so much as a cameo appearance by Ford's personal Frankenstein Monster, John Wayne. Unlike Wayne's nemesis director, Frank Capra of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, Ford's vision of the America he's promoting is more aptly titled IT'S A FASCIST'S PARADISE. Therefore, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE predicates ALL of its events upon the opening 1882 murder of poor Jimmy Earp, at the tender age of 18, by Evil Pops Clanton (Walter Brennan). Trouble is, as Western historian Andrew C. Isenberg documents in the definitive Criterion CLEMENTINE, James Earp was Wyatt's OLDER brother, and this Jimmy expired superannuated in 1926! The Earps were NOT cattlemen, either, as Ford would have it, and only dabbled occasionally in "law enforcement" TO PROTECT THE E^RP FAMILY PROSTITUTION AND CARD-CHEATING BUSINESSES. Like one of today's Chicago cops, it was Wyatt Earp himself who EXECUTED unarmed business rivals as a crooked "lawman." Anyone acquainted with the rest of John Ford's films (or even the Wayne flicks directed by someone else) is familiar with the pattern this mendacious pair of so-called "Hollywood Icons" used in doing their Devil's Work to tear down American Core Values and our Constitution. They were the Fox "News" of the 1900s: Unfair and Unbalanced. Though Wayne somehow missed 20th Century Fox's CLEMENTINE, one of Ford and Wayne's main henchmen--Ward Bond--plays a key Earp role here. Naturally.

tieman64 Regarded as one of director John Ford's finest westerns, "My Darling Clementine" stars Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman who becomes sheriff of Tombstone, a small town in Arizona. Wyatt appoints several family members as his deputies, befriends the sickly Doc Holiday and shoots dead the Clanton family, a bunch of mean guys responsible for cattle thievery.You'd think a director who'd won three directorial Oscars in the space of six years would be free from studio interference, but no, producer Darryl F. Zanuck loved sinking his meddling claws into Ford's flicks. Zanuck's alterations to "Clementine" include the adding of unnecessary kisses, emphatic musical cues, the shortening of several wordless scenes and the removal of several natural/ambient sounds. In each case, Zanuck attempted to "make things more obvious", a contrast to Ford, who was attempting to craft a muted, restrained western.Still, Zanuck's meddling doesn't distract too much from "Clementine's" better qualities. Ford focuses on mood, ambiance, on creating a sense of place, and his film is purposefully diffuse, his characters seemingly drifting through life without rhyme or plan. Elsewhere Ford gives us a number of communal scenes, like those in which towns gather at theatres, saloons or for dances amidst skeletal churches. Other iconic scenes watch as Wyatt positions a chair at the head of his town and sits himself down like a lazy landlord, gazing as townsfolk walk wordlessly by. Ford's interested in Tombstone's flow of life, and the leisurely, unhurried tempo of the Old West."Clementine" was shot by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, who paints a number of wonderful scenes. The reveal of Tombstone, in which the distant town flickers in the night, is particularly excellent (George Lucas' Mos Eisley would be based on Ford's Tombstone). When he's not serving up low-key sequences, Ford takes us to the town's more festive areas, which are filled with tobacco smoke, dim lanterns, hootin', hollerin' and convey well the hustle and bustle of the frontier.Most Westerns are elegiac, the genre overly preoccupied with mourning the passage of the Old West. These are nostalgic pictures which pine for something that never quite existed, glorifying frontier justice, outlaw values and a violent masculinity which "regretfully" fades come the arrival of trains, power lines, steam engines, machine guns, pickup trucks and modernity in general. "Clementine's" melancholia, however, is rooted in something more specific. Ford's characters mourn lost lovers, family members, and everyone's weighed by both loss and life's frailty. Epitomizing this is Tombstone's comical barber, whose faulty "modern" chair perpetually threatens to slit his customers' throats. Later he slaps cologne on our heroes, Ford's men on the verge of passing into civilisation, domestication and even comical dandyism.As history, "My Darling Clementine" is nonsense. Wyatt wasn't the marshal of Tombstone (his brother was), Holiday and Old Man Clanton weren't killed at the infamous OK Corral, and Wyatt wasn't praised as a hero but put on trial after killing the Clantons. The Earps were themselves a group of violent drunks, law breakers, woman-beaters, murderers and brothel owners. Ford, of course, portrays them not as multiple felons (the real Earps eventually became corrupt lawmen who worked for bankers), but as something else: genteel custodians of civilisation who turn to violence only when necessary and always reluctantly. The Western genre has itself always salivated over sheriffs and deputies, foot-soldiers of a Law which has, historically, never been the public's bedfellow. Originating in slave patrols, beholden to the economic interests of land owners, and designed to maintain class stratification, the business of policing has always been policing for business."My Darling Clementine" stars Victor Mature as Doc Holiday. It's a hard role to play, and Mature isn't up to the task (perhaps modern audiences have been spoilt by Val Kilmer's electric Holiday in "Tombstone"). Fonda is better as Wyatt, playing his character as a mild-mannered, righteous romantic. The film co-stars Linda Darnell as Chihuahua, a voluptuous prostitute with a fondness for low-cut blouses."Clementine" would prove a huge influence on subsequent Westerns. The Sergio Leone rule-book was practically born here, Ford's film filled with drawn out sequences, sexy wistfulness, tactical uses of silence, portentous one-liners, strong silent-types and an aesthetic which alternates between serenity and sudden flashes of violence. This being John Ford, the film is also preoccupied with bogus notions relating to "what it means to be American". In this regard, Ford's Tombstone is steeped in barbarity until our heroes kick an Indian out (played by Charlie Stevens, grandson of Geronimo), visit an erected Church and bring co-operation, family and law to Tombstone's god-fearing townsfolk. For Ford, the Earps (and a woman named Clementine) occupy the film's moral high ground, a dominant white, religious culture which discards or reforms all outsiders. And so a Mexican prostitute, ostracised for her racial origin, dies, the disreputable Clanton family is murdered and the morally moribund Doc Holliday finds himself grave-bound. With the film's climax – a type of regenerative violence typical of Westerns – a great purge has been exacted in the name of "decent" values.8.5/10 – See Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and "Wagon Masters". Worth two viewings.