Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Blistering performances.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

John Ford is a master of pictures and set design. I dare to say that these elements are essential for a good western. MY DARLING CLEMENTINE is the story of the legendary sheriff Wyatt Earph and significant duel, peppered with a lot of fiction and taste. The definition of good and evil is too obvious and romance was put on the back burner. However, in addition to the above the western fiction is more than good.Dynamic action, rich pictures, great scenery and atmosphere are compelling in this film.The film, which just causes a good mood. All is well designed. Every shot, eye contact, understanding and misunderstanding in relationships and the ferocity of the people in a beautiful and cruel world. Stereotypes in the film are not trivial, but are simple.Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp is more a model of a man that is a healthy mind in relation to the strict and fair sheriff. The acting performance, full of confidence and calm, helped him in the best way to shows the moral cause of the main character.Victor Mature as Dr. John Henry "Doc" Holliday is a doctor poisonous with evil seed, which in turn becomes a good man. Very good performance and one of the most tragic figures in the classic western.Walter Brennan as Newman Haynes Clanton has all the characteristics of evil and poisonous desert rattlesnakes. Targeted negative character and indispensable in this film.Female characters act like useless ornaments. They should get more space.This movie is full of contrasts, trends and styles. A few steps from perfection.

The problems are not director John Ford's doing, but rather the fault of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who has used the picture to promote Linda Darnell. So shamelessly over-exposed, in fact, is she that her character often gets in the way of the plot.Although he is not as visually appealing as Miss Darnell, Walter Brennan should have had more screen time, since he essentially plays the lead villain of the piece. Stretches of the film go by without Brennan's character present or even mentioned, so in a way there is no looming threat over the town's law and order to increase dramatic tension and make the story truly exciting.One issue, though, does seem to stem from Ford's direction. That is the way the film loses sight of its hero. About halfway into the picture, Victor Mature's Doc Holliday takes over and Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp becomes a supporting character. This is a film about Earp, where Fonda should remain front and center. As a result, we have a decentralized protagonist and the story shifts into one that focuses more on Doc Holliday—that is, when the camera is not lingering on Darnell.

Regarded as one of director John Ford's finest westerns, "My Darling Clementine" stars Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman who becomes sheriff of Tombstone, a small town in Arizona. Wyatt appoints several family members as his deputies, befriends the sickly Doc Holiday and shoots dead the Clanton family, a bunch of mean guys responsible for cattle thievery.You'd think a director who'd won three directorial Oscars in the space of six years would be free from studio interference, but no, producer Darryl F. Zanuck loved sinking his meddling claws into Ford's flicks. Zanuck's alterations to "Clementine" include the adding of unnecessary kisses, emphatic musical cues, the shortening of several wordless scenes and the removal of several natural/ambient sounds. In each case, Zanuck attempted to "make things more obvious", a contrast to Ford, who was attempting to craft a muted, restrained western.Still, Zanuck's meddling doesn't distract too much from "Clementine's" better qualities. Ford focuses on mood, ambiance, on creating a sense of place, and his film is purposefully diffuse, his characters seemingly drifting through life without rhyme or plan. Elsewhere Ford gives us a number of communal scenes, like those in which towns gather at theatres, saloons or for dances amidst skeletal churches. Other iconic scenes watch as Wyatt positions a chair at the head of his town and sits himself down like a lazy landlord, gazing as townsfolk walk wordlessly by. Ford's interested in Tombstone's flow of life, and the leisurely, unhurried tempo of the Old West."Clementine" was shot by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, who paints a number of wonderful scenes. The reveal of Tombstone, in which the distant town flickers in the night, is particularly excellent (George Lucas' Mos Eisley would be based on Ford's Tombstone). When he's not serving up low-key sequences, Ford takes us to the town's more festive areas, which are filled with tobacco smoke, dim lanterns, hootin', hollerin' and convey well the hustle and bustle of the frontier.Most Westerns are elegiac, the genre overly preoccupied with mourning the passage of the Old West. These are nostalgic pictures which pine for something that never quite existed, glorifying frontier justice, outlaw values and a violent masculinity which "regretfully" fades come the arrival of trains, power lines, steam engines, machine guns, pickup trucks and modernity in general. "Clementine's" melancholia, however, is rooted in something more specific. Ford's characters mourn lost lovers, family members, and everyone's weighed by both loss and life's frailty. Epitomizing this is Tombstone's comical barber, whose faulty "modern" chair perpetually threatens to slit his customers' throats. Later he slaps cologne on our heroes, Ford's men on the verge of passing into civilisation, domestication and even comical dandyism.As history, "My Darling Clementine" is nonsense. Wyatt wasn't the marshal of Tombstone (his brother was), Holiday and Old Man Clanton weren't killed at the infamous OK Corral, and Wyatt wasn't praised as a hero but put on trial after killing the Clantons. The Earps were themselves a group of violent drunks, law breakers, woman-beaters, murderers and brothel owners. Ford, of course, portrays them not as multiple felons (the real Earps eventually became corrupt lawmen who worked for bankers), but as something else: genteel custodians of civilisation who turn to violence only when necessary and always reluctantly. The Western genre has itself always salivated over sheriffs and deputies, foot-soldiers of a Law which has, historically, never been the public's bedfellow. Originating in slave patrols, beholden to the economic interests of land owners, and designed to maintain class stratification, the business of policing has always been policing for business."My Darling Clementine" stars Victor Mature as Doc Holiday. It's a hard role to play, and Mature isn't up to the task (perhaps modern audiences have been spoilt by Val Kilmer's electric Holiday in "Tombstone"). Fonda is better as Wyatt, playing his character as a mild-mannered, righteous romantic. The film co-stars Linda Darnell as Chihuahua, a voluptuous prostitute with a fondness for low-cut blouses."Clementine" would prove a huge influence on subsequent Westerns. The Sergio Leone rule-book was practically born here, Ford's film filled with drawn out sequences, sexy wistfulness, tactical uses of silence, portentous one-liners, strong silent-types and an aesthetic which alternates between serenity and sudden flashes of violence. This being John Ford, the film is also preoccupied with bogus notions relating to "what it means to be American". In this regard, Ford's Tombstone is steeped in barbarity until our heroes kick an Indian out (played by Charlie Stevens, grandson of Geronimo), visit an erected Church and bring co-operation, family and law to Tombstone's god-fearing townsfolk. For Ford, the Earps (and a woman named Clementine) occupy the film's moral high ground, a dominant white, religious culture which discards or reforms all outsiders. And so a Mexican prostitute, ostracised for her racial origin, dies, the disreputable Clanton family is murdered and the morally moribund Doc Holliday finds himself grave-bound. With the film's climax – a type of regenerative violence typical of Westerns – a great purge has been exacted in the name of "decent" values.8.5/10 – See Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and "Wagon Masters". Worth two viewings.

No need to recap the plot or echo consensus points. To me, this is one of best of Ford's westerns, beautifully staged and subtly acted. And frankly, I prefer the b&w to Technicolor since the b&w doesn't distract from the well-plotted action. Still, Ford's celebrated pictorial eye is in evidence, but in a way that complements the drama instead of competing with it. In fact, that last elegiac scene between Wyatt (Fonda and Clementine (Downs) has to be one of the most gracefully meaningful of any western I've seen. I love the lone trail leading up to the lordly stone monolith in the far distance. It's an endearing human warmth set against a boundless horizon all in the same frame. That alone is worth the price of admission. Ford may have been an artful myth-maker and a sometimes uncritical one, yet Clementine remains the most dramatically uncompromised, of his many fine horse operas.