186. My Darling Clementine (1946)

Directed By John Ford

Synopsis

James Earp gets shot, Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil Earp go to Tombstone where Wyatt becomes Sheriff, they make friends with Doc Holiday. Eventually the Clantons are killed at OK Corral. Oh there's a romance with a woman called Clementine somewhere in there... and a prozie called Chihuahua.

Review

John Ford is a proper director, and frankly this film came as a refreshing change from all the noirs and neo-realisms that we have been having. A proper Western where half the screen is sky and clouds and the rest of the screen is men with fucking guns!

This was a good film, while I actually figure that the two female characters could have been dispensed with as they just make for a bit of a distraction on what is really a film about the Wyatt Earp story.

All said and done Ford is a brilliant director with a sense of angle and shot that few other people have. Again we have the Monument Valley with all those rock formations that Ford has made recognisable world-wide and the huge open skies and Henry Fonda playing another Henry Fonda character pretty well. Heck, it isn't the best film ever, but it was fun.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:


* The ages of the Earp brothers are wrong. In the movie, James is a teenager, Virgil is in his twenties, Wyatt is thirty, and Morgan is the oldest. In actuality, at the time of the OK Corral gunfight, James was 40, Virgil was 38, Wyatt was 33, and Morgan was 30. There was a younger brother Warren in real life who does not appear in the movie.

* Wyatt is depicted as being the town marshal of Tombstone, and Virgil and Morgan as his deputies. In fact, Virgil was the town marshal (according to some sources, his actual title was "chief of police"), and Morgan and Wyatt were his deputies.

* James and Virgil are depicted as getting killed: James during the cattle rustling scene, and Virgil shot in the back before the gunfight takes place. James actually lived until 1926 and Virgil survived the gunfight (only to be wounded during an attempted assassination as retaliation). The only Earp to be killed in Tombstone was Morgan, and that was months after the gunfight.

* Doc Holliday is depicted as having gotten his degree in medicine. In fact, Holliday was a dentist, not a physician or surgeon.

* Doc Holliday is shown critically wounded and dying by the end of the gunfight. He survived in real life with a minor bruise and lived for years afterward, dying in Colorado in 1887 from tuberculosis.

* "Old Man" Clanton is shown as a major participant in the feud between the Clantons and the Earps and takes part in the gunfight. (This is also true of the later film Gunfight at the OK Corral.) In fact he was killed in August 1881, well before the gunfight took place.

* Billy Clanton is shown getting killed well before the gunfight, where he actually died. Ike Clanton and other Clanton brothers are seen getting killed at the gunfight, but this did not happen.

* The movie depicts Wyatt and Doc meeting for the first time in Tombstone. They had in reality met years earlier at Fort Griffin, Texas and were good friends by the time both arrived at Tombstone.

* In the movie, the Earps are portrayed as cattlemen who casually stop in Tombstone for a drink and a shave only to get caught up in a rivalry with the Clantons. In truth, they had planned to move to Tombstone to start businesses and get in on the gambling and mining claims that were thriving there.

* The gunfight is portrayed as an epic, street-wide running battle lasting minutes. In fact the fight lasted no longer than 30 seconds.

* Rather than being a bachelor falling in love with a visiting teacher, Wyatt had arrived to Tombstone with a wife (as did his brothers) and during his stay there had fallen in love with actress Josephine Marcus.


Trailer: