![]() ![]() He plays the character of Wyatt Earp as a man who appears insusceptible to high emotion and remains casually unperturbed by the changing world around him. The latter is an epithet that could apply just as easily to Henry Fonda’s protoslacker/Droopy-like monotone performance in the lead role. It deals in such boilerplate genre fundamentals as blood revenge, existential torment, and the cultivation of an enlightened (read possibly nonviolent) American idyll, but does so in a manner that is at once explicit and passive. My Darling Clementine is often labeled an “antiwestern,” largely, one assumes, owing to its drowsy, death-waltz tempo, its absence of dust-kicking six-shooter showdowns (the climax notwithstanding), and its hero who, for a surprising portion of the film’s run time, sits jack-legged on a porch, waiting patiently for those around him to meet with their own inexorable demise. But that would be selling the film, and yourself, short. Were one to abide by the wishes of its no-muss-no-fuss creators, a gentle wallow in the film’s superficial pleasures (which are ample) would be all that was required. Miller bellyached that critics tended to read things into his script that simply weren’t there, a line that Ford was also known to toe. “What you see is what you get.” So said Winston Miller, coscreenwriter of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), in a terse rejoinder aimed at those searching for motivation, commentary, or other subtextual delights in the work.
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