My Darling Clementine is a 1946 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp during the period leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The ensemble cast also features Victor Mature (as Doc Holliday), Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, Cathy Downs and Ward Bond.

The title of the movie is borrowed from the theme song "Oh My Darling, Clementine", sung in parts over the opening and closing credits. The screenplay is based on the biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake, as were two earlier movies, both titled Frontier Marshal (released in 1934 and 1939, respectively).

My Darling Clementine is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest Western films ever made. In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. It was among the third annual group of 25 films named to the registry.

Production

Development

In 1931, Stuart Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal two years after Earp's death, and it became an instant bestseller.

Director John Ford said that when he was a prop boy in the early days of silent pictures, Earp would visit pals he knew from his Tombstone days on the sets. "I used to give him a chair and a cup of coffee, and he told me about the fight at the O.K. Corral. So in My Darling Clementine, we did it exactly the way it had been." After seeing a preview screening of the film, 20th Century Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck thought Ford's original cut was too long and had some weak spots, so he had Lloyd Bacon shoot new footage and heavily edit the film.

Fifty years after its release, Roger Ebert reviewed the film and included it in his list of The Great Movies.

In 2012, director Michael Mann named My Darling Clementine one of his 10 favorite films, stating it was "possibly the finest drama in the western genre" and "achieves near-perfection" in its cinematography and editing. It was also President Harry Truman's favorite film.

The film scores a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from 35 reviews with the consensus: "Canny and coolly confident, My Darling Clementine is a definitive dramatization of the Wyatt Earp legend that shoots from the hip and hits its target in breezy style."

</references>

  • My Darling Clementine: The Great Beyond an essay by David Jenkins at the Criterion Collection
  • Lake, Stuart. N. Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall. Houghton Mifflin, 1931.