[Western] My Darling Clementine

dir. John Ford, scr. Samuel Engel & Winston Miller.
****

20% documentary and 80% classic Western. As John Ford said, “I knew Wyatt Earp … and he told me about the fight at the OK Corral. So we did it exactly the way it had been.” Here’s a movie that’s tense, funny and classy

See Henry Fonda either imitating John Wayne or portraying an authentic frontier accent. Watch Victor Mature embody both an effete, tubercular surgeon and a lethal hard-drinking gun-fighter. Witness Indians, Mexicans and cattlemen getting a hard time (and read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to get an idea of how unfair that is). Enjoy 90 minutes in Tombstone, a town I’d be scared to visit.