My Darling Clementine (1946)

[Rinaldo]

What a beautiful work! A young Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Ward Bond, Walter Brennan chewing up scenery, a young John Ireland and dear God, the camera work!

What do you all think about this film? John Ford films?

Speaking of Ford, there's a good Leone connection to Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," which has Lee Van Cleef and Woody Strode in the cast.


Naldo

[Belkin]

MASTERPIECE! Check out STAGECOACH, another MASTERPIECE!

[Il Buono]

Very nice film, nice camerawork, very moody, good music, great performances.  Don't remember much of it, but it's definately worth watching.  A true classic.

[Rinaldo]

MASTERPIECE! Check out STAGECOACH, another MASTERPIECE!

Oh yes, Stagecoach, a wonderful film. You really can't go wrong with any John Ford western. I would also recommend Ft. Apache; Rio Grande and, of course, The Searchers.

[DJIMBO]

im not ford's biggest fan but The Man who shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers are two of the best films ive ever seen.

[Belkin]

What a beautiful work! A young Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Ward Bond, Walter Brennan chewing up scenery, a young John Ireland and dear God, the camera work!

What do you all think about this film? John Ford films?

Speaking of Ford, there's a good Leone connection to Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," which has Lee Van Cleef and Woody Strode in the cast.


Naldo

Just watched FORD'S THE THREE GODFATHERS. A stunning piece of work. Great dialouge and some very scary moments tied in with some very tender moments. A forgotten classic!  

[cigar joe]

This was the second DVD I picked up in the double package at Sam's Club about a week ago. Dir by John Ford and staring Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Ward Bond, Walter Brenan, John Ireland, Tim Holt, Linda Darnel & Cathy Downs. Don't watch it for any historical accuracy, its completely screwed up. It has James Earp as the youngest Earp, exactly the opposite, Doc Holliday is a surgeon instead of a dentist (and Victor Mature is miscast in the part), and most of the events of the OK Corral shootout are completly fabricated. Its a total "meller".

But never mind all that because the real reason to watch this is more for its look, the cinematography is gorgeous both the town exteriors and the interiors are fantastic its Iconic in that respect alone, and it again features Monument Valley. Don't miss this film. 

[Tucumcari Bound]

I'm glad you started a thread about this great films, a John Ford Masterpiece. As you said before, throw all the historical accuracies out the window before you watch this. The story is fabricated in some areas. That's Hollywood for you.

Watch it for the technical side of it. The film is beautiful. The cinematography is some of the best I've ever seen. It's in glorious black and white, and I sometimes imagine how much more beautiful the visuals would have been if it was in color. Henry Fonda was great as usual. This is one of my favorite westerns. Cigar is right....it should not be missed.

[dave jenkins]

You both are right to mention the cinematography. The film was "lensed" by the great Joseph MacDonald, who also photographed such classic noirs as Shock (46), The Dark Corner (46), Call Northside 777 (48), The Street With No Name (48), Panic in the Streets (50), and Pickup on South Street (53). He did his share of Westerns, too, including Yellow Sky (48), which, like Clementine, has a great look.

MacDonald was equally at home with color, and was responsible for photographing Niagara (53), House of Bamboo (55), Bigger Than Life (56), and Warlock (59, reportedly Leone's favorite Western). He was nominated for Oscars three times: once for B&W photography (The Young Lions, 58), twice for color (Pepe, 60; The Sand Pebbles, 66). His last film was Mackenna's Gold (69). These are just the highlights. IMDB, where I got this information, credits him with cinematography on 74 films.

Needless to say, Clementine is more than just a series of beautiful photographs. Ford was in top form, conceiving and arranging such wonderful set pieces as the church dance, the Shakespeare recitation, and of course, the gunfight at the OK Corral. This last featured the absence of music, relying only on sound effects to create and sustain tension until the climax (doubtless an inspiration for the Cattle Corner scene in OUATITW). Ford tried to limit the amount of music throughout the picture, but Fox head Zanuck over-ruled him (the current R1 DVD features two cuts of the film, Ford's original and Zanuck's theatrical release; Ford's version is the more austere, and is better for it).

There are any number of things from this movie that SL appropriated. To mention just one, there's a running gag between Henry Fonda and the town's barber, which begins when Fonda first hits town. He only gets part-way through being shaved before trouble starts and he has to leave to see to it. The killer who doesn't get to finish his shave shows up in FAFDM, and in a scene that was deleted from OUATITW, Frank (Henry Fonda) leaves the barber after the auction to go confront Harmonica.

[cigar joe]

this film has an "abondanza" of atmostphere agreed courtesy of MacDonald & Ford not to  be missed.

[dave jenkins]

Cowboy Noir


The Big Bar-Down


Walter Brennan's Greatest Role

Are you watching, Sergio?

. . . a love of faces. . . .

Surprise, as only the Italians can register it.

I see your cool, and raise you.

Did I mention Linda Darnell is in the picture?

A bit of a dust-up at the OK Corral

End of the trail

Ford's original ending

Zanuck's "improvement" (not photographed by MacDonald)

[Tucumcari Bound]

Great pics jenkins!

[Silenzio]

Yes, very cool, Dave!

[cigar joe]

Thanks Dave!

[dave jenkins]

I'm posting this great exchange from Steve Erickson's most recent novel, Zeroville (2007). Set in 1968, it follows the adventures of Vikar, a film nut who has come to Hollywood to work in movies. Although he does break into the business (albeit at the most menial level), he's frustrated to find that most people in the industry aren't as fanatical about films as he is. One night he catches a young man of color breaking into his apartment and clocks him one. Vikar ties the guy to a chair, calls the police, but they never come. Man and prisoner start watching movies on TV. Eventually, Vikar dozes off. Here is all of Chapter 50 (the first "Chapter 50" that is, there are two in the book):

Vikar wakes with a start on the couch. “. . . check it out,” he hears a voice, “some wicked shit on the tube tonight.”
     Vikar’s prisoner is still tied to the chair, watching the TV.
     “My Darling Clementine,” the burglar is saying. Vikar realizes he’s fallen asleep, and that in his sleep he’s been hearing the other man’s voice as though there’s been no pause in the conversation, as though the burglar has been talking the entire time. Vikar tries to clear his head and wipes his eyes. “John Ford’s greatest movie,” says the bound man, “now I know what you’re going to say. . . .”
     It’s four in the morning, hours since Vikar called the police.
     “. . .Stagecoach. Right? The Searchers. Well,” the burglar continues, “Stagecoach was a distinct landmark in the genre, no getting around it. But that shit hasn’t aged well--“
     “Uh.”
     “—though no one wants to cop to it, while The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen, evil white racist pigfucker though he may be. I mean he may be a racist pigfucker, but he’s bad in The Searchers, no getting around it.”
     “Bad?”
     “I can see I need to choose my words more carefully,” says the burglar. “I mean Duke gives a performance of terrifying intensity and sublime psychological complexity, whether by intent or just natural fucked-up white American mojo. The Searchers loses it, though, whenever Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles come on—Ford, he couldn’t direct the ladies for shit, unlike my man Howard Hawks where all the ladies are fine and kick-ass on top of it, even if they’re all versions of the same fox, or as William Demarest puts it down in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, ‘Positively the same dame!’” The burglar stomps his foot and laughs, pleased with himself. “I mean Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not actually has some of the same exact lines as Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings. But now My Darling Clementine here, it’s practically noir Western, all moody and shit, Ford’s first after the War and all the concentration camps and maybe he wasn’t in his usual sentimental rollicking drunk-Irish jive-ass mood. Check out my man Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and, dig it, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday and, dig it again, Walter Brennan as Pa Clanton! I don’t mean no Grandpa McCoy from TV, I mean in My Darling Clementine Walter Brennan is one stone fucked-up killer, you hear what I’m saying? ‘When you pull a gun, kill a man!’ Damn! My Darling Clementine, it’s got the inherent mythic resonance of the Western form but in terms post-War white folks understood, figuring they were all worldlier and more sophisticated than before the War. Ford’s creation of the archetypal West, laying out codes of conduct that folks either honored or betrayed—and I’m just trying to give the motherfucker due credit, not even holding against him, not too much anyway, the fact that he played a Klansman in that jive Birth of a Nation bullshit—anyway Ford’s view of the West was so complete at this point that Hawks, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, they could only add to it, you hear what I’m saying? But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too fucking confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder . . . what are you doing?”
     Vikar unties him from the chair. “Don’t break into my place again,” he says.
     The burglar looks almost hurt, but he stands from the chair slowly, a bit painfully, and arches his back and rubs his wrists. “O.K., man,” he answers quietly, “solid.”
     “I’m sorry about your head,” Vikar says.
     The burglar’s eyes return to the movie. “It’s cool. Occupational hazard. Hey, uh,” there’s a slight pleading in his voice, “can I just see the rest of this?”
     “Well.” Exhausted, Vikar is due on the Paramount lot in five hours.
     “There’s this scene coming up where Henry Fonda is having a drink in the saloon and,” the burglar starts laughing, “he says to the saloon keeper, ‘Mac, you ever been in love?’ and Mac answers, ‘No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.’ Oh man!” the burglar slaps his thigh.
     “I’m tired,” says Vikar.
     “I’ve been a bartender all my life!”
     “I—“
     “Hey, go ahead and get some sleep. It’s been a long night.”
     Vikar looks at the room around him.
     “Hey,” the burglar says, “on my honor as a foot soldier in the armed struggle against the white oppressor, I’m not touching anything. Go ahead and get some sleep. I just want to see the end of My Darling Clementine. What do you say?”
     Vikar returns to the couch. In his sleep, he hears sirens again. When he wakes two hours later to daylight coming through the window, the other man is gone and so is the television.