My Darling Clementine ***** (1946, Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature) – Classic Movie Review 2081

Director John Ford’s splendid 1946 back and white Western tells a fanciful version of the tale of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Career-best portrayals by Henry Fonda as a thin-lipped, tough, resolute lawman Wyatt Earp, Victor Mature (giving a mature performance as outlaw Doc Holliday) and Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton head a memorable turnout of the Ford regular stock company of actors.

The film is based on a real event that took place on October 26 1881 and fancifully reinvents Earp and Holliday’s shoot-out with the Clanton gang in Tombstone. Ford famously said ‘print the legend’ and this is it in the making.

Among the other notables are Cathy Downs as Wyatt ‘s darling girl Clementine Carter, Linda Darnell as Doc’s clinging lover Chihuahua, Tim Holt and Ward Bond as Virgil and Morgan Earp plus Grant Withers and John Ireland as Ike and Billy Clanton, as well as (in what looks like a malicious piece of casting) Francis Ford, the director’s brother, as the Tombstone town drunk.

Strikingly luminous, claustrophobic cinematography by Joseph P MacDonald leads the way for this masterly, atmospheric, flavourful Western.

Stuart N Lake’s book Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal was previously filmed as Frontier Marshal in 1934 and 1939. Samuel G Engel, Winston Miller and Sam Hellman carve out a classic screenplay from it.

Also in the cast are Alan Mowbray, Roy Roberts, Jane Darwell, J Farrell MacDonald, Russell Simpson, Don Garner (as James Earp), Ben Hall, Louis Mercier and Harry Woods.

The film isn’t too concerned with historical accuracy. The real gunfight was a 30-second-long, face-to-face affair with only a few firearms. The story is retold in Gunfight at the OK Corrall (1957) with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. Its director, John Sturges, revisited the same material when he later made a more historically accurate sequel of sorts, Hour of the Gun (1967), starring James Garner and Jason Robards as Earp and Holliday. The film begins with a more accurate version of the OK Corral gun battle.

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