My Darling Clementine

Henry Fonda is a likeable but utterly fictionalised Wyatt Earp, depicted as an already almost obsolescent nomad forced to play midwife to civilisation in lawless Tombstone. It’s a town where the poetry and Shakespeare that in 1832 young Mr. Lincoln could only read in isolation are, half a century later in 1882, and despite much continuing resistance, finally starting to find a place in which they can live and breathe as functional rituals of what is destined to become a genuine American polis.

And in fact, this film repeats the earlier one’s scenes of Fonda leaning back casually on a chair with his long legs up against a rail or table or window ledge, and the very same form of awkwardly simple dancing with his more experienced potential romantic interest, not to mention the same preoccupation with “drunk Indians”. Earp is counterposed by the educated but weak and unheroic figure of Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), the former drawn to the good girl and the latter in conflict about his desire for a slut (forming a “tragic” couple who must both be sacrificed so that the law of sexual virtue can establish solid foundations). The unusual focus on minor but significant details, the quality of the performances and the impressive use of darkness all do make the film stand out from the massive crowd of standard westerns, and it is understandable that those with a fondness for myth would find it to be a rich example thereof, but the limitations and hypocrisies of its mythmaking are still as obvious as is ever the case in this most generic of genres.