"My Darling Clementine" - Film Review

My Darling Clementine could very easily have been a revenge narrative or about two leading community figures butting heads, but instead it chooses to spend a lot of time just hanging around an Old Western town called Tombstone. Those first two storylines are pushed to the background of the film, and we get to see the lives of people living in this lawless, isolated Old West town.

There's a grit to the film. The town is filled with booze, prostitutes, gambling and individuals of questionable trustworthiness. Even our protagonist Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) is selfish and vindictive. The paragon of the community Doc Holliday (Vic Mature) is a controlling and bitter man. The kindest indvidual is the titular Clementine (Cathy Downs), a spurned lover of Holliday, whose a prim and proper middle class figure from back East. And she's hardly the focus of the film, despite the title's suggestion.

But the title is fitting because it's a film where no one gets what they want (She never gets to be anymore than a mere "darling"). Earp and his brothers are cow wranglers who go into Tombstone as a respite from their travels, only to return to find the brother they left behind has been murdered and their cattle is gone. He takes up the job offering as the town marshal, which puts him at odds with Holliday and a bunch of shady cow wranglers called the Clantons. Holliday rejects Clementine, who keeps loving him despite his treatment of her, and he's equally terrible towards prostitute Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) who he's promised to marry (and never does, nor seems to really be committed to it). Earp clearly has feelings for Clementine but finds it best not to act on them, thus never ending up with her. And the price of the justice for Earp's brother proves to be incredibly costly, leading to the death of many people from the town.

This is not the most romantic of Westerns. It's moody, especially in its shots of nighttime. There's a longing, loneliness and isolation about the film. The most exciting things that happen to the town are the appearance of a Shakespeare performer and the completion of a church. There is little in the way of civilizations for many, many miles (though it starts to make its appearance over the course of the film). Tombstone is just a speck on the horizon of Monument Valley, but there's a lot of life in there. There's a lot of hope bubbling underneath all that melancholy, and it's embodied in the glimpses the film gives us of the town and the people who inhabit it.

The film is technically about the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which we witness towards film's end. But it's one of the least important parts of the film. This isn't a film about Wyatt Earp, and Fonda plays him rather unassumingly. It's about the idea of the Old West, and director John Ford explored that from countless angles throughout his career, but few as effectively as this.  
 
Grade: A