by Louis Williams

Created on: July 19, 2009   Last Updated: March 10, 2011

JOHN FORD’S DARK LADY: MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946)

It’s fitting that the last person you see in this movie is the school marm-nurse from the East, Clementine (Cathy Downs). The Clantons are all dead and half the Earps and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), her former fiance, as well. The field has been pretty much cleared, in fact for, after The Gunfight, the old uncivilized monsters are nearly all in their graves and the church and the town itself are being built and filling with good, industrious, tedious citizens, so many that soon Tombstone, Arizona, will be indistinguishable from, say, Dubuque, Iowa.  There, on the edge of town, Clementine stands looking after her new love, Wyatt Earp, as he rides hell for leather away.

This is all perhaps in the cards when the Earps, cattle herders passing through, first go to town, because Wyatt’s (Henry Fonda) first stop is the barbershop. Once he and his brothers become the law they dress up in three piece suits and Wyatt, after getting one look at Clementine, visits the barbershop again. It isn’t recorded that the Clantons even know what a barbershop is.

The Clantons, in fact, are real primitives, hairy of face and thick of head, all except Old Man Clanton, played to a psychotic T by Walter Brennan, who’s as hairy as the rest, but at least has a brain. His sons, though, are simply stupid times four.

The Earp brothers are quite a few steps up on the evolutionary scale. They’ve actually heard of civilization, something the Clantons have missed. Of course, even they aren’t quite right. Only Clementine is that, along with the dimly seen solid citizens who move in and out of the background. In the foreground Clantons and Earps maneuver, dodge, feint, and finally shoot it out. Then Wyatt and his remaining brother leave, heading back east with the body of the brother the Clantons last shot. Wyatt promises Clementine, more or less, to come back, and maybe he will, but when last seen he’s helling after the wagon carrying his brother’s corpse in a scene that may faintly foreshadow the ending of Once Upon a Time in the West, when Charles Bronson takes Cheyenne’s body into the desert, leaving Claudia Cardinale to bring water to the railroad workers and civilize the west.

Better Cardinale, bursting with life, than Cathy Downs, however, who looks, even in black and white, as if she needs a blood transfusion. Be that as it may, she is clearly the maker and keeper

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