Amazon.com Essentials:
The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the
O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any
measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry
Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west
with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends
in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had
turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers
(Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons
(led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a
mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the
tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping
civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties with
history, bending the story to fit his ideal of the West, a balance of
social law and pioneer spirit. Though the film reaches its climax in
the legendary gunfight between the Earps (with Doc Holliday) and the
Clantons, the most powerful moment is the moving Sunday morning church
social played out on the floor of the unfinished church. As Earp
dances with Clementine (Cathy Downs)--Fonda's stiff, self-conscious
movements showing a man unaccustomed to such social
interaction--Ford's camera frames them against the open sky: the town
and the wilderness merge into the new Eden of the West for a brief
moment. --Sean Axmaker
