Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Spring 2002Mary P. Nichols teaches political science at Fordham University and is currently a visiting professor at Harvard. She writes on ancient and modern political theory, and politics and literature. Her most recent book is Reconstructing Woody: Love, Life, and Art in the Films of Woody Allen.
Prevalent in American history, philosophy, and literature is an optimism about the New World, the conquest of the wilderness, overcoming of the corruptions of the past, and establishing civilization on a firm foundation of individual liberty. The American western film lends itself to these themes, where the settlement of the frontier continually reenacts the American founding, where the absence of law allows villains--for a time--to flourish, only to be ultimately defeated by the good guys, and here heroes expand the reach of American principles and the order founded upon them. Some westerns, however, dissent from this optimism, and scholars have in fact argued that the American West offers a particularly good setting for an American representation of the tragedy of the human condition.
Peter A. French, in his study of ethics and death in American westerns, finds similarities between the Greek tragic hero and both the heroes and villains in westerns. As he traces "the typical story line of the Western," the hero inevitably prevails over the villain(s), but in doing so "drives an unremovable wedge between him[self] and the community in whose name he has risked life and limb." The sunset into which he rides is "not a shining good place where the hero can enjoy the fruits of his labor and the company of good people. It is a cold and lonely place" where at best such events will recur. 1
John Ford's film about Marshal Wyatt Earp, My Darling Clementine, has been interpreted in this way. Although Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) is attracted to "the values of civilization," writes Tag Gallagher in his comprehensive study of Ford's films, those values are in conflict with "the `high moral codes' of the wilderness" to which Wyatt remains loyal. Thus, "like many another Fordian hero," Wyatt "comes out of the wilderness, rights wrongs, and goes on his way." Civilization, according to Gallagher, cannot be built on those "moral codes," or "wilderness law" to which both the heroes and the villains of westerns are enslaved. 2 The end of lawlessness, tragically, requires the end of heroism, and heroes themselves bring about the latter when they accomplish the former. It is a short step from an appreciation of the heroic deeds of this tragic figure to grave reservations about the worth of the community for which he has fought if it has no place for him or his virtues. 3
This tragic lens, however, does not provide the best access to John Ford's view of the potentials of civilized community and western heroism. It is not simply as an outsider that Wyatt Earp protects the community. He chooses to do so as the town's marshal. He is duly appointed by the mayor and wears a badge. Critics of westerns give insufficient attention to the pivotal role of the hero as lawman, which clearly distinguishes him from both the law-abiding citizen he protects and the gun-slinging outlaw he conquers, and which suggests that he has as much, if not more, in common with the former than the latter. The hero who becomes a lawman demonstrates a more comprehensive heroism than that possible for a lone outsider. Because the law of a community is not self-enforcing, communities need lawmen, and sometimes even heroes. Their heroic acts, in turn, stem not merely from their personal integrity and sense of honor but also from their appreciation of the positive pleasures and concomitant duties of community. Ford's My Darling Clementine, I shall argue, presents not so much the conflict between wilderness law and civilization as the complex triumph of lawmen--both physical and moral--over outlaws, not only in warding off and punishing their brutalities but also in playing a part in a civilized community as outlaws can never do.
A FAMILY AFFAIR
My Darling Clementine opens in the plains of Arizona in the 1880s, with four cowboys herding cattle to California to sell. 4 They are the Earp brothers. The camera focuses on each in turn, holding a longer shot of the last, who turns out to be Wyatt Earp. Wyatt, we learn later, had been marshal of Dodge City, and his name is well known even in as remote a town as Tombstone, which they soon visit, but we do not know why he gave up his badge. There is a past that he carries with him, just as his family is an important part of his life. He may have given up law enforcement for herding and making money, but he is working with his brothers. They talk of their mother and father--the young James, for example, is almost as "good a cook as Ma," and Wyatt sadly writes to Pa of the death of James, aware that he will be "all busted up over it." 5 Americans are proud of their rugged individualism and the virtues of self-reliance and courage it fosters. But the Earps, surely exemplars of those virtues, are also a close-knit family, although one on which the "rough looking country," as Wyatt describes it, will take its toll by the movie's end. 6
On the trail the Earps encounter another family, the Clantons, four sons and their father. Unlike the Earps, who are bound by brotherly affection, the Clantons are held together by a dictatorial "Pa" at their head. 7 They offer to purchase the Earps's cattle and warn them that their herd will be "a sorry lookin' lot by the time they get to California." The Earps are undeterred, and have no hint of the more immediate danger threatening from the Clantons themselves. That evening, when the elder Earps go into Tombstone for a breath of civilization ("a shave, maybe a glass of beer"), leaving their younger brother with the cattle, the Clantons return to take the cattle they could not buy, and murder James to boot.
In Tombstone, meanwhile, civilization is less than perfect. At "the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor" where Wyatt goes for his shave, the chair, newly arrived from Chicago, almost propels him to the floor. More seriously, broken glass and flying bullets interrupt his shave. It is nothing more than an ordinary occurrence, Injun Charlie on a drunken spree. When the town's marshal refuses to deal with the problem ("they ain't payin' [him] enough" to commit suicide) and turns in his badge, Wyatt, lather and all, drives the Indian out of town. Wyatt refuses the mayor's offer of the job of marshal, as he had that of the Clantons to buy his cattle, that is, until he finds his cattle rustled and James dead. He then accepts the job, with the condition that his remaining brothers serve as deputies. It is still a family affair, as is the apparent reason he takes the job--to find James's murderers. Yet Wyatt tells James at his graveside, "Can't tell--maybe when we leave his country, young kids like you will be able to grow up and live safe." Even from the outset, Wyatt connects his particular experience with broader understandings of justice and community. 8
FRIENDSHIP AND DOMESTICITY
The writer of the screenplay has observed of this movie that there were "a lot of flaws in the construction [of the plot]": "Earp stays in town to get his brother's killer, and ... [w]e don't get back onto the brother's killer until way late in the script.... But that was the way it seemed to evolve and Ford didn't care. Our theory was as long as it's interesting." 9 The murder of James and its revenge at the OK Corral frame the movie, but what makes it interesting lies between. And while violent death is omnipresent in the frame, lying between are comic episodes, as when Wyatt punishes the first lawbreaker he encounters as marshal (the saloon's entertainer Chihuahua [Linda Darnell]) by throwing her into a water trough. So, too, do we encounter events of ordinary life, from breakfasts of buckwheat cakes to church socials. And most important, we, and Wyatt, meet Doc Holliday (Victor Mature).
Doc Holliday, owner of the town's gambling hall and saloon, enters the movie as a somewhat mysterious figure, marked by unexplained absences from town. "Who knows where Doc goes," the bartender tells Doc's girlfriend Chihuahua, who is as much in the dark as everyone else. Like Wyatt, Doc has a reputation that follows him, for he "left [his] mark around in Deadwood, Denver, and places. In fact a man could almost follow [his] trail, going from graveyard to graveyard." Doc Holliday rivals Wyatt as a gunfighter. He also rivals him as the chief authority in the town, since Tombstone is "Doc Holliday's town," as Chihuahua reports to the new marshal. Just as Wyatt earlier ran the drunken Indian out of town, Doc Holliday's first act in the movie is to run a cheating gambler out of his saloon and out of his town as well--an act to which Wyatt objects, for this is the marshal's job and "none of [Doc's] business." The two men, clearly rivals, also become friends. Although Doc draws on Wyatt when they first meet, and later Wyatt suspects Doc of being involved in James's murder, by the end of the movie they stand together against the Clantons at the OK Corral. Doc Holliday gives Wyatt the experience of friendship with a man obviously his equal in the ways of the West, but also touched by the refinements of the East. Doc Holliday comes from Boston.
Doc Holliday appreciates Shakespeare, as we see when Granville Thorndyke (Alan Mowbray), "eminent actor," "sterling tragedian," and somewhat pompous and often inebriated dandy, comes to town with his players. Nothing less than "Shakespeare in Tombstone," Doc muses, pointing to the incongruity of what they are about to witness but also revealing an incongruity in himself, a gunslinger who has not heard Shakespeare for "a long time" and desires to do so again. Even more incongruous is Thorndyke's saloon performance of Hamlet's soliloquy for the mean Clanton boys, who clearly are not satisfied by Thorndyke's repertoire of "them poems." But Doc demands to hear to its completion Hamlet's reflection on irresolution and death, and recites the lines when Thorndyke's memory falters, even though he is interrupted by his persistent cough. There is more in Doc's past than tombstones. Thorndyke serves as a comic version of Doc--an easterner who knows Shakespeare but goes West and mingles with "tavern louts." Like Thorndyke, Doc also attempts to maintain eastern civilities and niceties. He corrects Chihuahua's English, for example, and drinks champagne rather than whiskey, even though the reason is that whiskey speeds the effects of his tuberculosis. When he forces the cheating gambler to leave, he insists that he use the side door, the front one being "for ladies and gentlemen." 10
Unlike Thorndyke, however, Doc is not a comic figure. Only because he is a gunman and known to be one can he succeed in maintaining standards of civility such that the cheat must exit by the side door. When Doc brings eastern civilities to the wild West, he can, unlike Thorndyke, enforce them. Doc's self-destructive drinking ("That stuff will kill you," his bartender says to Doc of whiskey) may find comic reflection in Thorndyke, whose drinking causes him to miss his performance in the theater, places him in the hands of the Clantons, and causes him to forget his lines. But Doc helps him out with the lines, and Wyatt with the Clantons. Doc's difficulties are not as easy to resolve.
The next visitor to town is a lady from the East looking for "Dr. John Holliday," who has sought him "from cowcamp to cowcamp, from one mining town to another." Again the incongruities abound, as between the "good surgeon" Clementine Carter seeks and the gunslinger Tombstone knows. Clementine at first seems as out of place in Tombstone, as did Thorndyke performing before the Clantons. Doc tells Clementine that Tombstone is "no place for your kind of person." He also tells her that "the man you knew is no more. There's not a vestige of him left. Nothing." Yet we have just seen Doc quote Shakespeare. With Clementine we visit his room and see his doctor's bag and medical books, his framed diplomas, and his picture of Clementine herself in a nurse's uniform.
The scene in which Clementine goes into Doc's room, followed by Wyatt, who observes with her these relics of Doc's past, was added by Ford in the course of filming. It replaced a scene in Clementine's own room, where she stares at a picture of herself and Doc that she had carried west. 11 Ford converts Clementine's memory of the past into a revelation about Doc in the present--that he keeps displayed before him what he once was. Another scene added by Ford to the shooting script involves Doc alone in his room, looking at one of the diplomas Clementine saw earlier, with his face reflected in its covered glass. 12 Echoing the name with which Clementine had inquired for him earlier, Dr. John Holliday, he shatters the diploma's glass with his own empty whiskey glass in apparent self-disgust. Try as he might, Doc cannot simply destroy the man he was and be content with the man he has become. He keeps the name "Doc." He is addressed by the world by a familiar version of the professional name by which he was addressed in Boston. And it was his retention of that name, presumably, that helped Clementine to track him down.
We may doubt Doc's statement to Clementine that his illness had "nothing to do with [his] leaving Boston" and believe her suggestion that Doc's own approaching death has led him "to run away from [him]self" and even to try "to get [him]self killed." Presumably Hamlet's lines about taking his own life, which Doc recites, are not merely a random retention from his past but also have some bearing on his present situation. It is when he gets to the line, "Conscience doth make cowards of us all" that Doc has to stop because of his coughing. It is by no means clear, however, that Doc's character has undergone a simple degeneration that parallels the course of his illness. Ford suggests that Doc's flight from himself, paradoxically, has led him to develop certain strengths. Would Wyatt Earp, for example, become the friend of the Bostonian doctor whom Clementine once knew? The man he befriends is, after all, a rival authority in a tough town that at least Chihuahua acknowledges to be "his." Had he been in Tombstone at the time, he might have handled Injun Charlie when the marshal refused to risk his life and turned in his badge. Doc is an easterner who gains the respect of the West, and although Clementine accuses him of cowardice, he has faced fights in western cowtowns that lesser men flee. His is an earned reputation. Would a physician's life in Boston--or even the Clementine whom he left behind--have satisfied even a healthy John Holliday? Perhaps there is a shred of truth in Doc's lie that his illness was not the reason he left Boston. Doc's strengths do not stem simply from the vestiges of the past that he retains. They have developed in the West. And however many men Doc may have killed, we have no reason to believe that he ever fought unfairly or dishonorably.
Ford's changes in the script, especially his addition of the two scenes in Doc's room, manifest his interest in Holliday, and therewith in Wyatt inasmuch as Ford presents Wyatt sharing that interest. Ford's introduction of the scene in which Wyatt follows Clementine into Doc's room allows Wyatt to see how important Doc's former life remains for him. And we have already seen Wyatt listening attentively to Doc recite the lines from Hamlet (Ford gives us several close-up shots of Wyatt watching Doc during the scene). Wyatt, we may suppose, knows no lines from Hamlet, but he is the only man in the movie who becomes Doc's friend. Those who see Wyatt and Doc's friendship simply in terms of their mutual recognition of each other's independence and self-reliance ignore such scenes and miss the complexity of their relationship, just as scholars who interpret westerns as paeans to such virtues misunderstand the extent to which Ford points to their limitations as well as their nobility.
When Wyatt learns that Clementine is leaving town, Wyatt tells her that she is giving up too easily. She replies that he does not know much about a woman's pride--words that Doc himself might have uttered to her about a man's pride. Doc does not care to be the object of anyone's pity, or to be in need of nursing. 13 Reproached by Clementine, and coming to understand Doc, Wyatt is getting lessons in both a woman's and a man's pride, as his affection for both Clementine and Doc deepens.
We see Wyatt, in Doc's view, violate the code that one man does not intrude into another's personal business by advising him that it would be difficult to find "a finer girl than that Miss Carter." We see Wyatt knock out Doc when Doc is drunk and firing a gun recklessly, as he had earlier with Injun Charlie, but Wyatt also gets Doc to bed, risking, as Chihuahua says, that Doc will "twist [his] tin badge around [his] heart" when Doc finds out Wyatt butted in. And it is Wyatt who tells Doc to operate when Chihuahua has been shot by Billy Clanton and will die unless the bullet is removed. In the shooting script, it was Clementine who convinced Doc to operate, but Ford's change gives to Wyatt the role of urging Doc to live up to himself. 14 Ford is less interested in renewing the relationship between Doc and Clementine than in developing one between Doc and Wyatt.
We hear the word "friendship" only once in the film. As the town drunk carries Thorndyke's suitcase to the stagecoach, which will carry him from Tombstone, the actor thanks him with one of his typically overblown quotations: "Great souls by instinct to each other turn, / Demand allegiance, and in friendship burn." It is in Ford's typically "lean dialogue," in contrast, as well as in the deeds in the movie, that we see Wyatt and Doc's friendship develop. 15 In explaining his love of poker early in the film, Wyatt muses "Every hand a different problem. I got to do a little figuring here. What would I do if I were in your boots, Mr. Gambler?" Ford thus lets us see Wyatt's ability to place himself in other "boots" serve his poker playing, including his awareness that behind his back Chihuahua is revealing his hand to the gambler. We may presume this same ability is at work when he listens to Doc recite Hamlet's words and when he walks through Doc's room with Clementine.
Meanwhile, Wyatt has noticed Clementine's charms and, after all, he has done all he could to bring her and his friend back together. We see him again, as in his first visit to Tombstone, enter the Bon Ton Tonsorial parlor, this time for not only a shave but the haircut he originally refused. And this time his visit to the barber is not interrupted by gunfire and shattered mirrors. Rather, Wyatt somewhat dubiously inspects his new image in the mirror that the barber holds for him. The lightness of this scene, with the marshal's examination of his own reflection, contrasts with the sense of despair we saw in Doc's disgust at his reflection superimposed on his diploma. Doc sees the discrepancy between the present and the past, while Wyatt sees in his image what might be. Wyatt's shyness is apparent, as is his acceptance of his own sprucing up as somewhat ridiculous. "You don't think that's kind of ... "he questions the barber as he looks at himself. Twice he must admit, first to his brothers, and then to Clementine, that the honeysuckle they smell emanates from his visit to the barber.
Concerns other than the revenge that caused him to linger in Tombstone are in the front of his mind, and when Clementine asks to go with him to the "social gathering" intended to raise money to build a church, Wyatt would "admire to take [her to the services]." The "First Church of Tombstone" has no name yet, nor a preacher, but it has a deacon who is also a fiddler and who has found "nary ... a word against dancing" in the Good Book. The less than eager marshal does his duty when Clementine looks eager to join in the dancing. Wyatt seems in fact to enjoy it, to his brother Morgan's amazement. 16 When afterward Wyatt and Clementine join the deacon and his wife for Sunday dinner at the hotel, he is admired as "a dad-blasted carver" as well as "a dad-blasted dancer."
This image of Wyatt's domesticity--with hints at what he is capable of becoming and enjoying--is interrupted by a confrontation between Wyatt and Doc who, when he sees Wyatt at dinner with Clementine, is reminded of what he lacks. We are informed that Clementine has decided to stay only when we see her in her room unpacking. Wyatt follows Clementine to her room, for what purpose we can only surmise, and finds the jealous Chihuahua trying to force Clementine to leave town. In the shooting script, Wyatt is playing poker when he hears the fight between the women upstairs and goes to investigate. 17 Ford's change makes clearer Wyatt's active pursuit of Clementine, a purpose left suspended by the family obligations that are about to intrude.
The confrontation with Chihuahua initiates the series of violent events that conclude the movie--Wyatt's discovery of James's cross around Chihuahua's neck, his pursuit of Doc and their confrontation, Chihuahua's revelation that Billy Clanton gave it to her, thus implicating him in James's murder, Billy's shooting Chihuahua, Wyatt's sending Virgil after Billy, Doc operating on Chihuahua, Billy Clanton's death, old man Clanton shooting Virgil in the back, and Clanton's challenge to Earp to meet at the OK Corral. Wyatt's romantic interests in Clementine, and his reservations about them, however, are not forgotten in the midst of the fast-paced events that conclude the movie. Watching Clementine leave the saloon, in which she assisted the surgery, Wyatt asks the bartender, "Mac, you ever been in love?" The bartender's comic reply, "No, I been a bartender all me life," expresses what is no doubt the issue on Wyatt's mind. Is he able to be what he is and also be in love? During his initial visit to the barber, Wyatt claims that he is "just passing through." To be sure, James's murder leads Wyatt to accept the job of marshal, supposing that once he finds James's murderer he will move on. But his meeting Clementine Carter and Doc Holliday gives him experiences that may lead him to imagine different possibilities for himself.
This former marshal of Dodge City has surely lived close to death. But a gunfighter can choose to risk his life, whereas the danger to a man from an illness is not chosen. Perhaps Wyatt has to befriend a man dying of tuberculosis before he can appreciate the fragility of life and the sweetness of its joys. Then, too, he has recently lost two of his brothers to the Clantons. Doc seems to come to this same realization about life only after he, too, experiences the possibility of the death of someone he loves. The only time we see Doc happy in the movie is after the operation, which he supposes has been a success. He is proud to have saved Chihuahua's life, but he is also much relieved that she is "all right." He shares a drink with Wyatt, and at least this once his whiskey has no adverse effect on him. For Doc, however, there will be no lasting happiness.
THE MARSHAL'S DUTY
As Wyatt and Morgan get ready to approach the corral where the Clantons are waiting for them, the mayor and the deacon offer to help out, although they "ain't fighting men." This western does not take as dim a view of community as Fred Zinnemann's later High Noon (1952), where the marshal finds no help from either civil or church authority when he faces a similar shootout. Wyatt at first refuses the mayor's and deacon's help, for "this is strictly a family affair," although it is no longer clear whether he means it or whether he wants to protect them. The latter seems more likely, as he does proceed to involve the two men in a plan to deceive the Clantons: When they see the mayor and the deacon walking beside Wyatt to the corral, they suppose they are Morgan and Doc, and thus remain unaware that Morgan and Doc are positioning themselves elsewhere for the fight. The mayor and deacon drop back before the gunfire starts. Wyatt thus goes to the corral with the willing support of these representatives of the community and gives them a role to play, but one that minimizes the danger to themselves. It is not strictly a family affair. Not only have the Clantons killed their brother James, but they have killed their brother Virgil, who was also a deputy in pursuit of his duty. Furthermore, Wyatt does not question Doc's joining them in this not strictly "family" affair.
Doc goes into battle burdened by another failure. Chihuahua, he tells them, has died. J. A. Place argues that when Chihuahua dies, Doc's "last possibility of redemption dies with her, and he fears death less than he despises his own life." 18 But Place understands Doc's despair simply in terms of failed pride and does not mention Doc's loss of Chihuahua. Not only Wyatt's confidence in him, but also his affection for Chihuahua helped him overcome his fears of failure and perform the operation. When, after the operation, Clementine praises Doc, it is his patient who is on his mind; "a brave girl," he tells Clementine. Even if Doc's fighting at the OK Corral risks a life he does not care to preserve, this battle, unlike his famed gunfights of the past, serves a larger purpose. Now he is helping his friends, especially Wyatt, as they proceed against those who also murdered Chihuahua. And as far as we know this is Doc's only gunfight on the side of the law. It is one in which he dies, overcome in the end not by the Clantons, but by his own disease when his coughing exposes him to their gunfire.
Before the shooting begins, Wyatt tells the Clantons that he has a warrant for their arrest, names their crimes--murder and rustling--and offers them "a chance to submit to proper authority." True to their lawlessness, they choose to fight. For the Earps, public authority channels their desire for private vengeance. The warrant--and Wyatt's asking Clanton to submit to authority--was added by Ford in filming. Additionally, in the film the fighting begins when one of the Clanton boys draws on Wyatt, not as in the shooting script when Doc and Morgan surprise the Clantons from behind. 19 Ford's changes make clear that Wyatt is not merely enacting codes of family vengeance against the Clantons but is himself upholding proper authority. 20 It is a recognition of the need for law, and not just convenience, that moved Wyatt from the beginning to become marshal of Tombstone to seek his brother's murderer--a move that Gallagher finds so morally questionable. 21 We should also remember that when Wyatt first learned of the danger Injun Charlie posed, he did not immediately take it upon himself to straighten the matter out. In fact, Wyatt echoes the mayor's appeal to the marshal "to get that drunk Indian out of there," and gets involved only when the marshal turns in his badge and walks away.
Wyatt, however, does not completely follow the dictates of the law. After the old man's sons have all been killed in the gunfire and Clanton laments his loss, Wyatt does for a moment take the law into his own hands, refusing to arrest him. But he "ain't going to kill [him]," for he hopes Clanton lives a hundred years so that he might "feel just a little what my Pa is going to feel." He has put himself in his pa's boots, and so in Clanton's--there are some lives worse than death. And so Wyatt tells Clanton to "get out of town" and to "start wandering." It will be Clanton who has, finally, just passed through Tombstone. Ford makes clear, however, that Wyatt might have suffered for his vengeance--Clanton draws on Wyatt as he pretends to ride off--had not Morgan saved his brother's life by shooting the old man first. 22
GOING HOME
The last scene of the movie shows Wyatt and Morgan leaving town, going home to see Pa "and tell him what happened." Wyatt's future remains uncertain, for he "might get some cattle, maybe stop by here again." Clementine is staying to help get a school started, and it is there that Wyatt might "stop by." Most critics assume that the movie implies that Wyatt will never return. Gallagher, as we have seen, understands Wyatt Earp as "a wilderness figure just passing through; he cloaks his wilderness moral code with the laws of civilization, and leaves a bloodbath behind him." 23 And Place mentions Wyatt's carrying out "his mythical destiny to wander solitary through life and never settle." 24
That this is the film's view of Wyatt, however, is dubious. We have no reason to suppose that Wyatt is a man who raises false hopes and every reason to suppose that he is a man of his word. More important, we have seen Ford (and his scriptwriter) delay the course of Wyatt's pursuit of his brother's murderer to chart events involving Wyatt--especially the development of his friendship with Doc and his meeting Clementine and sharing a church celebration with her. And we have seen changes that Ford made in the script itself, all of which support a view of Wyatt's developing erotic and social inclinations. Place acknowledges that his conclusion that "Wyatt's path will not return this way" requires dismissing what Ford has shown us in his film when he writes: Earp's "stature as a mythical, legendary figure is largely dependent on his remaining outside the course of events ... carried along by a higher logic than is inherent in narrative-plot developments." 25
Such critics do not consider the possibility that Ford may have been revising just such a view of the "mythical hero" in light of a more complex understanding of heroism. The "narrative-plot developments" prepare us to see Wyatt's exit at the end of the movie not as an affirmation of the solitary life of the Western hero but as an assumption of responsibility to his family, one that can only be a foundation for a future with Clementine. He is not setting out to do what many Western heroes do, or what he himself told old man Clanton to do--"start wandering" again. Like Place, Gallagher refers to the "Fordian hero's traditional ... obligation to wander," 26 but Wyatt at any rate understands wandering as a punishment, one which he would inflict on Clanton.
Ford acknowledges that the attraction of westerns comes from an "escape complex": "We all want to leave the troubles of our civilized world behind us. We envy those who can live the most natural way of life, with nature, bravely, and simply." 27 But while Ford obviously appealed to this desire, he also attempted to educate it. Gallagher is well aware that Ford should not be understood in terms of stereotypes, 28 but he too quickly accepts a radical distinction between the hero and the community. Thus he sees in Virgil and Morgan's visit to their brother's grave during the church meeting a sign of their "exclud[ing] themselves from the community to pursue their private visit to James's grave." 29 He does not mention that, after the invitation of the deacon to join the church gathering, Morgan observes that "there's probably a lot of nice people around here" and that Virgil hurries Morgan to visit the grave because "I'd kinda like to get back for that dancing." The Earp brothers do return in time to enjoy the sight of Wyatt and Clementine on the dance floor.
Ford suggests that in spite of the tensions within themselves that men like Earp face, it is possible to do what the bartender thought he could not do--to do one's work and also be in love. Although Place views Wyatt as a hero in the solitary mode, alienated from community and destined to wander, he also notices that Wyatt represents a "precarious balance": coming from "the Western tradition with inner dignity and refinement,... he can [also] join in the church celebration or dance with the Eastern lady." 30 But Place traces Wyatt's ability to "internalize both value systems and express them simultaneously" not to Wyatt's success in reconciling his own integrity with his belonging to community but to the very "self-contain[ment]" that makes him a solitary figure. 31 His interpretation becomes less plausible when one considers that it is not simply Wyatt Earp, but also Doc Holliday, and even Clementine Carter, a lady from Boston, who find a home in Tombstone, who manifest elements of what Place refers to as East and West. It is not that East and West are two "value systems" that a self-contained man can for a moment internalize, but that in East and West Ford has externalized the tensions within human beings that form more or less precarious balances at all moments of life.
The title song, which we hear both at the beginning and the end of the movie, does suggest, in the words of Gallagher, "yearning for what is lost irretrievably." 32 But Gallagher assumes that this is what Clementine Carter represents for Wyatt Earp as well as for Doc Holliday. The movie indicates that the past relationship between the young Bostonian doctor and his nurse cannot be recaptured in the present. But the Clementine of the film is not simply a Bostonian nurse. Rather, she objects vigorously when Doc proclaims that Tombstone is "no place for your kind of person." She asks him, "What kind of person am I, John?" echoing Wyatt's earlier question of Tombstone, "What kind of town is this?" Tombstone is more than its name indicates, for while it may have more than its share of graveyards, it is also the scene of a church social and dance, and will have the school that Clementine will help establish.
Clementine has an affinity for Tombstone, at least at certain times of the day, for "I love your town in the morning," she tells Wyatt. "The air is so clean and pure." 33 Ford's Clementine may be from Boston, but she is not repulsed by Chihuahua, nor by Doc's relationship with her. 34 And she teams up with the lovable madam who runs "the Ladies' Boarding House" to assist in Chihuahua's operation. After Doc's death, and even though Wyatt is leaving, she decides to stay in Tombstone to "help get a school started." The miner's daughter of the title song may be lost and gone forever, but Clementine Carter will be easy to locate--at the new schoolhouse, for it is there she asks Wyatt to stop if he comes back to Tombstone. The tune of the song that frames the movie is heard when Clementine arrives in Tombstone, and then the mood is one of expectation and interest among those who watch her descend from the stagecoach. And it is a happy Wyatt who whistles the tune, after he has been spruced up by the barber, as he enters the hotel in which Clementine is staying. Ford revises the legend of the solitary hero and the meaning of the film's opening song, transforming a sad tale of irretrievable loss into one of great constancy: "I'll be loving you forever, O my darling Clementine." 35
NOTES
1. Peter A. French, Cowboy Metaphysics: Ethics and Death in Westerns (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 75-76.
2. Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986), 226-27. Gallagher's monumental work is a thoughtful and invaluable aid to any study of Ford's films. Whatever my disagreements with Gallagher, I am indebted to his thoroughness, his careful scholarship, and his appreciation of Ford's films. I share wholeheartedly Gallagher's assessment of Ford as one of America's major artists and his view of Ford's "immense intelligence." I agree as well with Gallagher's reservations about apologists for Ford who "laud his instincts and emotions, as though he were an artist unconsciously, unintentionally," and his criticisms of those who label Ford as a militarist or racist while neglecting Ford's "subtleties between extremes, [his] double-leveled discourses, [and his] oeuvre's obsessive plea for tolerance," p. vii.
3. See as well interpretations of John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. French finds "little optimism about the new age" in this film, but "mostly a deep sense of loss, perpetuated by a vague sort of nostalgia for the former age of heroes," Cowboy Metaphysics, 135-50, especially page 146. See also Mark Roche and Vittorio Hosle, "Vico's Age of Heroes and the Age of Man in John Ford's Film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," Clio 23, 2 (1993): 131-147; J. A. Place, The Western Films of John Ford (Secaucus, N.J.: The Citadel Press, 1974), 214-227, especially page 225; and Gallagher, John Ford, 384-413, especially page 407.
4. Robert Lyons's edition of the film script of My Darling Clementine, along with interviews and reviews of the film, is a helpful source book for the movie, Robert Lyons, ed. My Darling Clementine: John Ford, Director (New Brunswick: Rutgers University press, 1984).
5. I have quoted from the film itself, although I have confirmed my quotations by checking Lyons's edition of the film script.
6. Ford modified the shooting script, which introduced in the first scene some minor friction among the Earp brothers. My Darling Clementine, 113. Instead, we see nothing but good will among them.
7. "Pa" Clanton does not hesitate to beat his sons, even using his whip on them when Wyatt betters them in a fight. "When you pull a gun, kill a man," he offers them as fatherly advice.
8. Ford illustrates that for Wyatt the marshal's job comes to involve more than an opportunity for personal vengeance for James's murder in a minor scene in which Wyatt demands that a dishonest gambler getting out a stagecoach must be on it again when it departs in thirty minutes. As marshal, such matters are "his business."
9. "Interview with Winston Miller," in My Darling Clementine, 148. Miller describes the process of his working with John Ford as his script writer, agreeing that it was "really a collaboration between [him] and Ford," 147-48. "John Ford and I sat around for five or six weeks kicking this thing around, trying to cook up a story," and "we talked out every single scene, at least every basic scene," 141. Of course, Ford and Miller did have a story, in fact several stories--the historical record of Wyatt Earp, a biography (Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake), and the numerous films that had been made of the Earp legend, including Gunfight at the OK Corral. But Ford is famous for, in the words of Lyons, "his nonchalance about historical accuracy." Since Ford believed that Westerns have "a basically moral quality," he thought that "the artist's or director's task is to shape and alter history so as to reveal its logic and meaning," My Darling Clementine, 4-5. For an account of the historical record as well as the various movies about Wyatt Earp, see Jon Tuska, "Wyatt Earp," in The American West in Film (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 183-196. Even after his script writer completed the shooting script, Ford made a considerable number of important changes in the course of directing the film. Differences between the film and the shooting script are noted on pages 113-31 of My Darling Clementine.
10. Ford further points to the similarity between Doc and Thorndyke as outsiders to the West, when Thorndyke finishes off the champagne that Doc poured for the unappreciative Wyatt (who prefers whiskey).
11. My Darling Clementine, 116.
12. Ibid., 117.
13. When Doc's conversation with Clementine is cut short by his coughing, he leaves.
14. My Darling Clementine, 129. In the shooting script, Clementine pleads, "You've got to do it, John. You've no alternative. Not only is her life at stake, yours is too." In the film, Wyatt says merely, "You're a doctor, ain't you?" and "Doc, you're gonna operate." Ford's change is not merely from Clementine to Wyatt, but he omits both Clementine's suggestion that Doc has no choice and her explicit statement of what is at stake. Wyatt's words, less patronizing, place the burden of decision on Doc, and are thus more appropriate to the man who would do what Wyatt urges. His words, "you're gonna do it," are less a command than an expression of his confidence in Doc.
15. For Ford's "lean dialogue," see "Interview with Winston Miller," 141, and Gallagher, John Ford, 225. The only explicit reference to their friendship in the entire movie occurs in conventional words of introductions, when Doc presents Wyatt to Chihuahua and later to Clementine as a "friend" of his. In the first instance, Doc and Wyatt have just met, and Chihuahua is correct to question the designation, "Him, a friend!" But she is only partially correct to question it. Doc's words fall short of reality, but they express potential.
16. The shooting script contained a longer scene of the church dance that Ford shortened, My Darling Clementine, 118-19, and 126. In that scene, the town's madam Mrs. Nelson comes sheepishly to the church social, and Wyatt gallantly asks her to dance. By omitting this event, Ford placed greater emphasis on Wyatt's dance with Clementine. At the same time he left out an event that might have qualified Wyatt's shyness.
17. My Darling Clementine, 129.
18. The Western Films of John Ford, 69.
19. My Darling Clementine, 131.
20. Gallagher misses this aspect of the film. For example, he takes Wyatt's statement to the mayor and the deacon when they offer to help--that it is "strictly a family affair"--as an attempt to keep the conflict personal. He does not see the possibility that Wyatt may be trying to protect these men, who are clearly not experienced gunmen. Nor does Gallagher mention the fact that Wyatt does involve the mayor and the deacon, if not directly in the fighting, in a way appropriate to their positions. Thus Gallagher writes "when it comes to Wyatt's chief purpose, to get the Clantons, he seeks to exclude the community," John Ford, 227. Nor does Gallagher mention the warrant at all.
21. Gallagher asserts that "what is worrisome is [Wyatt's] alliance of implacable vengeance with legal and moral justification," John Ford, 226.
22. In the shooting script, Clanton is not killed, but rides off alone after Wyatt sends him away. My Darling Clementine, 131. Ford's change presents Wyatt grasping for revenge, misjudging Clanton, and almost dying for his mistake. In contrast to the film, the script as written gives no indication that Wyatt has made a mistake. Another possibility, however, is that Wyatt, able to put himself in the boots of even Clanton, suspects what the vengeful man will do, and would have been prepared if Morgan wasn't.
23. Gallagher, John Ford, 226. For views of the film more consistent with mine, see Robert Lyons, "Introduction" to My Darling Clementine, 3-17, and Peter Wollen, "Structural Patterns in John Ford's Films," in My Darling Clementine, 171.
24. Place, The Western Films of John Ford, 71.
25. Ibid., 65.
26. Gallagher, John Ford, 226.
27. Quoted in "The Old Wrangler Rides Again," Cosmopolitan (March, 1964): 14-21.
28. As Gallagher perceptively observes, for Ford, "the stereotype only begins to define a character," John Ford, 232, note.
29. Gallagher, John Ford, 227.
30. Place, The Western Films of John Ford, 65. Thus even Place cannot help be impressed by the "robust dance" of Wyatt and Clementine, which in the words of Jim Kitses "mark[s] the marriage ceremony that unites the best qualities of East and West. It was one of Ford's greatest moments," "Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western," My Darling Clementine, 183.
31. Place, The Western Films of John Ford, 183.
32. Gallagher, John Ford, 230.
33. Ford omitted a scene in which Clementine remarks that the Western landscape is "melancholy and lonely," My Darling Clementine, 128. Moreover, those things to which she attributes her love of Tombstone in the morning are the "scent of desert flowers." The marshal must admit that the scent is from his recent visit to the barber. It is really the marshal, in more ways than one, that accounts for her loving the town.
34. One might contrast Clementine Carter with Lucy Mallory in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). This other Eastern lady who comes west to join her man does not react half so well to the town's disreputable Dallas, as Clementine does to Chihuahua. Lucy hesitates even to ride in the same stagecoach with Dallas.
35. While the words of the song that we hear with the opening credits include "you are lost and gone forever," the only words at the end are the ones I quote here.
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