Astonishingly, this masterpiece starring Henry Fonda as the upright town-taming marshal Wyatt Earp, and culminating in the 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, was only Ford’s second western of the sound era (the first was Stagecoach in 1939) and the first he shot entirely among the now familiar sandstone buttes and mesas of Monument Valley, subsequently so closely associated with his world and its ethos that any other film-maker working there does so in a spirit of homage. It marks the director’s homecoming to Hollywood after distinguished war service.
Henry Fonda also returned from active service as a naval officer to play the part in the film, his fourth collaboration with Ford. Ford claimed to have known Earp (who died in 1929 shortly after spilling some dubious autobiographical beans to biographer Stuart Lake for the myth-making book Frontier Marshal), but it is in virtually every verifiable respect inaccurate. However, it is a poetic movie about good and evil that rings true to the myths and aspirations of the west that the genre symbolised, celebrated and came to criticise.
Victor Mature gives his finest performance as Doc Holliday, Earp’s consumptive sidekick, though he’s a doctor here rather than a dentist, and over the years he has been played by Kirk Douglas, Jason Robards, Dennis Quaid and others. All films about the Earp family and Tombstone reflect the times in which they were produced, and this stately movie about civic values and the creation of a community out of the wilderness (significantly using as its title the name of the film’s civilising heroine) is an address to a nation emerging from the second world war by a team of film-makers on both sides of the camera who had served in that war. It provides a lesson in humanity, not history.
In an interesting comment on the times in which the film was shot, Kim Newman suggests in a booklet accompanying the film that the night sequences in Clementine are as nourishingly expressionistic as the nightmare vision of Pottersville in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and the daytime scenes of Monument Valley as lyrical as those of Bedford Falls in the same movie. They were being shot at exactly the same time.
In 1946 the story of the Earp family and the gunfight at the OK Corral was not well known, certainly not yet a legend as well established as that of Jesse James, Billy the Kid or General Custer. Essentially it was created by two popular authors who came to know Earp in his final days in Los Angeles, where he had settled after a wandering life of gambling, saloon-owning, crime, financial chicanery, pimping and law enforcement that took him around frontier boom-towns from Texas to Alaska and back. They were Walter Burns, whose Tombstone: An Iliad of the South West appeared in 1927, and Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, published four years later, and they set the scene for an unattributed Hollywood film of the Earps in Arizona called Law and Order (Edward Cahn, 1932), scripted by John Huston and starring his father, Walter Huston, as a character called Frame Johnson, and in 1939 Frontier Marshal, starring Randolph Scott as Wyatt Earp.
It was this film that the head of 20th Century Fox, Darryl F Zanuck, suggested might be remade by Ford and screenwriter Winston Miller, and although both denied having seen it, it actually anticipates Ford’s film quite closely. There is for instance a minor role for Ward Bond, who plays Morgan Earp in Clementine, and most strikingly a sequence virtually repeated in Ford’s film in which Earp is offered the post as marshal by the town’s elders after confronting a drunken Native American, a racist moment that nowadays embarrasses most audiences.
The inclusion of Frontier Marshal is one of the major elements in this Arrow Academy box set, which also features an hour-length documentary on John Ford and Monument Valley, a pictorial essay on Ford by Tag Gallagher, two radio treatments of the film, a 35-page booklet, and a study of the differences between the version of Clementine originally shown at a sneak pre-preview and the release version. The most striking alterations in the versions of the film are the addition of more folk music, and the change (suggested by Zanuck) that Earp and Clementine part at the end with a chaste kiss rather than the friendly handshake that had drawn laughter at the first screening.
Alan Dwan, the veteran director whose career had begun before the first world war, did a decent job of Frontier Marshal and provided virtually all the key scenes that Ford transmuted. He even began his film with a montage that gave his film a historical setting by explaining the significance of the silver strike that accounted for Tombstone’s brief prosperity and its notoriety. But what it lacks is that magic touch that turned rough prose into breathtaking poetry and the Monument Valley setting that embodied Ford’s vision of the west.
My Darling Clementine, as I’ve suggested, became a text for film-makers to argue with and challenge over the next 70-odd years as times and morals changed and more information about the historical background became available. In Fort Apache, Ford’s next western after My Darling Clementine and later in the 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he formulated his ironic view on history, mythology, truth and what we blithely and confidently call reality. “This is the west. When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” The remark is attributed to a drunken newspaper editor.
