My Darling Clementine

In 1882 (a year after the actual gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881), Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil, and James Earp are driving cattle to California when they encounter Old Man Clanton and his sons. Clanton offers to buy their herd, but they curtly refuse to sell. When the Earps learn about the nearby boom town of Tombstone, the older brothers ride in, leaving the youngest, James, as watchman. The threesome soon learns that Tombstone is a lawless town without a marshal. Wyatt proves the only man in the town willing to face a drunken Indian shooting at the townspeople. When the brothers return to their camp, they find their cattle rustled and James murdered. Wyatt returns to Tombstone. Seeking to avenge James's murder, he takes the open position of town marshal and encounters the hot-tempered Doc Holliday and scurrilous Clanton gang several times. During this time, Clementine Carter, Doc's former love interest from his hometown of Boston, arrives after a long search for her beau. She is given a room at the same hotel where both Wyatt and Doc Holliday reside. Chihuahua, a hot-tempered Latina love interest of Doc's, sings in the local saloon. She runs afoul of Wyatt, trying to tip a professional gambler off to his poker hand, resulting in Wyatt's dunking her in a horse trough. Doc, who is suffering badly from tuberculosis and had fled from Clementine previously, is unhappy with her arrival; he tells her to return to Boston or he will leave Tombstone. Clementine stays, so Doc leaves for Tucson, Arizona. Wyatt, who has been taken by Clementine since her arrival, begins to awkwardly court her. Angry over Doc's hasty flight, Chihuahua starts an argument with Clementine. Wyatt walks in on their spat and breaks it up. He notices Chihuahua is wearing a silver cross that had been taken from his brother James the night he'd been killed. She claims Doc gave it to her. Wyatt chases down Doc, with whom he has had a testy relationship. Doc forces a shoot-out, ending with Wyatt's shooting a pistol out of Doc's hand. The two return to Tombstone, where after being questioned, Chihuahua reveals the silver cross was actually given to her by Billy Clanton. During the interrogation, Billy shoots Chihuahua through a window and takes off on horseback, but is wounded by Wyatt. Wyatt directs his brother Virgil to pursue him. The chase leads to the Clanton homestead, where Billy dies of his wounds. Old Man Clanton then shoots Virgil in the back in cold blood. In town, a reluctant Doc is persuaded to operate on Chihuahua. Hope swells for her successful recovery. The Clantons then arrive, toss Virgil's body on the street and announce they will be waiting for the rest of the Earps at the O.K. Corral. Chihuahua dies and Doc decides to join the Earps, walking alongside Wyatt and Morgan to the corral at sunup. A gunfight ensues in which all of the Clantons are killed, as is Doc. Wyatt and Morgan resign as law enforcers. Morgan heads West in a horse and buggy. Wyatt bids Clementine farewell at the school house, wistfully promising that if he ever returns he will look her up. Mounting his horse, he muses aloud, "Ma'am, I sure like that name...Clementine," and rides off to join his brother. == Cast ==

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. Zanuck had Bacon cut 30 minutes from the film. While Ford's original cut of the film has not survived, a "pre-release" cut dating from a few months after the preview screening was discovered in the UCLA film archives; this version preserves some additional footage as well as alternative scoring and editing. UCLA film preservationist Robert Gitt edited a version of the film that incorporates some of the earlier version. A significant change is the film's final scene: in the 1946 release, Earp kisses Clementine goodbye; in Ford's original, he shakes her hand. == Reception and legacy ==

The film is generally regarded as one of the best Westerns made by John Ford 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 ==