MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

John Ford takes on the legend of the O.K. Corral shoot-out in this multilayered, exceptionally well-constructed western, one of the director’s very best films. Henry Fonda cuts an iconic figure as Wyatt Earp, the sturdy lawman who sets about the task of shaping up the disorderly Arizona town of Tombstone, and Victor Mature gives the performance of his career as the boozy, tubercular gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. Though initially at cross-purposes, the pair ultimately team up to confront the violent Clanton gang. Affecting and stunningly photographed, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE is a story of the endlessly fraught triumph of civilization over the Wild West from American cinema’s consummate mythmaker.

“If ever there was a gateway drug to the happy addiction of Hollywood oaters, this is it.” - Time Out

“The low-slung genius of this film is that its every nuance appears loaded with information about a world (*the* world) that exists outside the confines of the frame. So the film we see is merely a cozy point of convergence, with swirling metaphysical gravity and back-porch nostalgia attained through the way in which Ford frames the story as a curious detail on an epic canvas, or a single, gorgeous constellation amid a blanket of stars. The characters are rounded, rootsy products of lives lived and knowledge procured, and this story little more than a juncture of souls or a random point of communal progression. It’s not our duty to read things into the film that aren’t there. It is to know what the things that aren’t there are.” - David Jenkins