My Darling Clementine (1946)

(On TV, November 2019) I’m aware that My Darling Clementine is often praised as a western classic (it even gets a rare “1”—Masterpiece—rating from the influential Mediafilm service), and I’m partially nonplussed by the acclaim. I’m not going to make an argument that it’s a bad movie: with Henry Fonda playing Wyatt Earp in an early take on the O.K. Corral shootout, it’s a John Ford production executed with all of the skill that a big-budget western could muster in the 1940s. Even by Hollywood standards, it’s a very fanciful retelling of history that invents or combines (or kills) historical figures, rearranges the chronology of events and certainly imbues them with virtues or failings that makes the entire thing more accessible as a story. Actually, it goes even further than that: Watching My Darling Clementine, there’s a palpable desire to create a piece of American mythology. A desire fully fulfilled, in that the O.K. Corral shootout has been told and retold in movies even decades later. That, too, plays against My Darling Clementine: To modern viewers weaned on Tombstone, this early take feels unfocused, ham-fisted, and clichéd, bested by its own inheritors. Even at a relatively spry 103 minutes, it feels long, especially as it offers tangential material such as Shakespeare in the Wild West, and strange narrative choices such as building up a surgery sequence and then telling us in the next scene that the sick character (perhaps the most striking of them) has died. These little issues accumulate to the point that My Darling Clementine ends up feeling like a decent but underwhelming western, far from being all all-time classic even in Ford’s filmography, especially when there’s Stagecoach or The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence to pick from.   But now I’m reviewing the reviews rather than the film itself.