My Darling Clementine (1946)

Film: My Darling Clementine (1946)
Stars: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: Despite the iconic nature of this film and Ford's clear fanbase at the Academy, this wasn't nominated a single Oscar.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I had hoped to have our Linda Darnell picture this week be Forever Amber, the ill-fated 1947 movie that featured Darnell in full Scarlett O'Hara-mode.  The movie could have been a breaking point in Darnell's career, but it wasn't and she followed up with some of her best-regarded work (plus, that movie is so infamous that it's one I'm going to have to see eventually, if only for the OVP).  Unfortunately, my DVR filmed that in the middle of a blizzard, and as a result I only got 28 minutes of the movie, and because we live in a world where "streaming is replacing everything, but somehow the movies you want are never on streaming" I didn't have another way to catch it.  So we're going to go to a considerably better-regarded Darnell picture, possibly the most well-known and well-loved movie in her filmography, though one I was skipping because I suspected, like most John Ford westerns, that the men would get the heavy lifting in terms of performances, and I was right.  Still, even if this feels a bit unfair to put in a month celebrating Linda Darnell, it's a damn good picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Wyatt Earp (Fonda), a legendary lawman from Dodge City who comes to Tombstone, Arizona, and is made the marshall after throwing out a drunk man who is trying to shoot the town up.  He takes this job because his sensitive brother was just murdered, the necklace he bought for his sweetheart stolen in the process.  He soon meets Doc Holliday (Mature), an outlaw who is haunted by personal demons (he's clearly ill) and used to be a surgeon.  Two women surround Doc's life, his hot-tempered singing lover Chihuahua (Darnell) and the recently-arrived Clementine (Downs), who used to be his love but is now being pursued by Wyatt Earp.  The film follows their burgeoning friendship until one of Earp's other brothers is killed by Old Man Clanton (Brennan), who also killed Earp's first dead brother.  This results in the legendary "Shootout at the OK Corral," where all of the Clanton's die, as well as Doc Holliday (Chihuahua has already died from a stray bullet from the Clantons, in a movie with a high body count).  The movie ends not with a pursued relationship between Clementine & Earp, but with him riding into the sunset while she stays behind to run a school, letting him pass into legend.

The movie is really good.  It doesn't resemble history even a little bit (Earp wasn't actually the central figure in the shootout despite popular culture making him the star-his brother Virgil was the most important figure in the shootout).  This wouldn't even be worth mentioning in a movie of this era (factual accuracy wouldn't be en vogue for a few more decades), but for the random trivia that John Ford once met the real-life Wyatt Earp, and actually discussed the shootout with him years before this film was made, and used some of the facts of the shootout in the picture.  It's a thrilling scene regardless of its relation to the truth, as Ford does some really marvelous long shots where other directors would have done closeups, and considering how central closeups were to the rest of the movie, I was stunned that this wasn't the case.  The movie is a fun western from start-to-finish; it's not treading new territory, or finding some of the darkness that Ford's westerns like The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would eventually contain, but Fonda & Mature are both great in the lead roles, and the movie comes along briskly (just under 100 minutes).

As for our star of the month, sadly, she's relegated to basically a supporting part despite her leading lady billing.  The film's stereotypes about Latina women are pretty egregious (she's referred to as a "wildcat" multiple times), and there's nothing here for her to do but be jealous of Clementine, lust after Mature, and then die beautifully, her entire life made more worthy by looking gorgeous while she's on the operating table.  She's so ancillary to the plot that she doesn't even get a proper death scene, and one could argue that Downs gets the bigger role.  At the time, Darnell was a major star in the middle of a comeback while Downs was a nobody who was about to enjoy a very brief period as a leading woman (that ended when, according to Hollywood gossip, she wouldn't sleep with Darryl Zanuck); she'd eventually get rediscovered by film audiences decades later when the Poverty Row films she made in the 1950's (schlocky Sci Fi pictures), were discovered by camp film fans.  So much of Darnell's film career was spent with her playing the beautiful love interest, which is why I was bummed we couldn't put her center stage with Forever Amber this week.  Thankfully, next week (our final film with Darnell), we'll get a treat as she'll be giving her best performance by far we've profiled, and it will be the gentlemen taking the backseat.