“What kind of town is this?” Wyatt Earp asks on his first
night in Tombstone. “A man can’t get a shave without gettin’ his head blowed
off.” He gets up out of the newfangled barber’s chair at the Bon Ton Tonsorial
Parlor and climbs through the second-story window of a saloon, his face still
half lathered, to konk a gun-toting drunk on the head and drag him out by the
heels.
Earp
(Henry Fonda) already knows what kind of town it is. In the opening scenes of
John Ford’s greatest Western, “My Darling Clementine” (1946), he and his
brothers are driving cattle east to Kansas. Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan leave
their kid brother James in charge of the herd and go into town for a shave and
a beer. As they ride down the main street of Tombstone, under a vast and
lowering evening sky, gunshots and raucous laughter are heard in the saloons,
and we don’t have to ask why the town has the biggest graveyard west of the
Rockies.
Ford’s
story reenacts the central morality play of the Western. Wyatt Earp becomes the
town’s new marshal, there’s a showdown between law and anarchy, the law wins
and the last shot features the new schoolmarm–who represents the arrival of
civilization. Most Westerns put the emphasis on the showdown. “My Darling
Clementine” builds up to the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, but it is
more about everyday things–haircuts, romance, friendship, poker and illness.
At
the center is Henry Fonda’s performance as Wyatt Earp. He’s usually shown as a
man of action, but Fonda makes him the new-style Westerner, who stands up when
a woman comes into the room and knows how to carve a chicken and dance a reel.
Like a teenager, he sits in a chair on the veranda of his office, tilts back to
balance on the back legs and pushes off against a post with one boot and then
the other. He’s thinking of Clementine, and Fonda shows his happiness with body
language.
Earp
has accepted the marshal’s badge because when he and his brothers returned to
their herd, they found the cattle rustled and James dead. There is every reason
to believe the crime was committed by Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his “boys”
(grown, bearded and mean). An early scene ends with Clanton baring his teeth
like an animal showing its fangs. Earp buries James in a touching scene. (“You
didn’t get much of a chance, did you, James?”) Then, instead of riding into
town and shooting the Clantons, he tells the mayor he’ll become the new
marshal. He wants revenge, but legally.
The
most important relationship is between Earp and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature),
the gambler who runs Tombstone but is dying of tuberculosis. They are natural
enemies, but a quiet, unspoken regard grows up between the two men, maybe
because Earp senses the sadness at Holliday’s core. Holliday’s rented room has
his medical diploma on the wall and his doctor’s bag beneath it, but he doesn’t
practice anymore. Something went wrong back East, and now he gambles for a
living, and drinks himself into oblivion. His lover is a prostitute, Chihuahua
(Linda Darnell), and he talks about leaving for Mexico with her. But as he
coughs up blood, he knows what his prognosis is.
The
marshal’s first showdown with Holliday is a classic Ford scene. The saloon
grows quiet when Doc walks in, and the bar clears when he walks up to it. He
tells Earp, “Draw!” Earp says he can’t–doesn’t have a gun. Doc calls for a
gun, and a man down the bar slides him one. Earp looks at the gun, and says, “Brother
Morg’s gun. The other one, the good-lookin’ fellow–that’s my brother, Virg.”
Doc registers this information and returns his own gun to its holster. He
realizes Earp’s brothers have the drop on him. “Howdy,” says Doc. “Have a
drink.”
Twice
Doc tells someone to get out of town, and twice Earp reminds him that’s the
marshal’s job. Although the Clantons are the first order of business, Doc and
Earp seem headed for a showdown. Yet they have a scene together that is one of
the strangest and most beautiful in all of John Ford’s work. A British actor
(Alan Mowbray) has come to town to put on a play, and when he doesn’t show up
at the theater, Earp and Holliday find him in the saloon, on top of a table,
being tormented by the Clantons. The actor begins Hamlet’s famous soliloquy,
but is too drunk and frightened to continue. Doc Holliday, from memory,
completes the speech, and could be speaking of himself: “ … but that the
dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no
traveler returns, puzzles the will … .”
The
gentlest moments in the movie involve Earp’s feelings for Clementine (Cathy
Downs), who arrives on the stage from the East, looking for “Dr. John Holliday.”
She is the girl Doc left behind. Earp, sitting outside the hotel, rises quickly
to his feet as she gets out of the stage, and his movements show that he’s in
awe of this graceful vision. Clementine has been seeking Doc all over the West,
we learn, and wants to bring him home. Doc tells her to get out of town. And
Chihuahua monitors the situation jealously.
Clementine
is packed to go the next morning when the marshal, awkward and shy, asks her to
join him at the church service and dance. They walk in stately procession down
the covered boardwalk, while Ford’s favorite hymn plays: “Shall We Gather at
the River?” When the fiddler strikes up, Wyatt and Clementine dance–he clumsy
but enthusiastic, and with great joy. This dance is the turning point of the
movie, and marks the end of the Old West. There are still shots to be fired,
but civilization has arrived.
The
legendary gunfight at the OK Corral has been the subject of many films,
including “Frontier Marshal” (1939), “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957), “Tombstone”
(1993, with Val Kilmer’s brilliant performance as Doc) and “Wyatt Earp” (1994).
Usually the gunfight is the centerpiece of the film. Here it plays more like
the dispatch of unfinished business; Ford doesn’t linger over the violence.
There
is the quiet tenseness in the marshal’s office as Earp prepares to face the
Clantons, who’ve shouted their challenge that they’d be waiting for him at the
corral. Earp’s brothers are with him, because this is “family business.” Earp
turns down other volunteers, but when Doc turns up, he lets him take part,
because Doc has family business, too (one of the Clanton boys has killed
Chihuahua). Under the merciless clear sky of a desert dawn, in silence except
for far-off horse whinnies and dog barks, the men walk down the street and take
care of business.
John
Ford (1895-1973) was, many believe, the greatest of all American directors.
Certainly he did more than any other to document the passages of American
history. For him, a Western was not quite such a “period film” as it would be
for later directors. He shot on location in the desert and prairie, his cast
and crew living as if they were on a cattle drive, eating out of the
chuckwagon, sleeping in tents. He filmed “My Darling Clementine” in his beloved
Monument Valley, on the Arizona-Utah border.
He
made dozens of silent Westerns, met the real Wyatt Earp on the set of a movie
and heard the story of the OK Corral directly from him (even so, history tells
a story much different from this film). Ford worked repeatedly with the same
actors (his “stock company”) and it is interesting that he chose Fonda rather
than John Wayne, his other favorite, for Wyatt Earp. Maybe he saw Wayne as the
embodiment of the Old West, and the gentler Fonda as one of the new men who
would tame the wilderness.
“My
Darling Clementine” must be one of the sweetest and most good-hearted of all
Westerns. The giveaway is the title, which is not about Wyatt or Doc or the
gunfight, but about Clementine, certainly the most important thing to happen to
Marshal Earp during the story. There is a moment, soon after she arrives, when
Earp gets a haircut and a quick spray of perfume at the Bon Ton Tonsorial
Parlor. Clem stands close to him and says she loves “the scent of the desert
flowers.” “That’s me,” says Earp. “Barber.”
