MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 408, 18 April 1947, Page 14

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

(20th Century-Fox) . 4

HOSE picturegoers whe are more interested, and rightly so, in the methods of directors than in the vagaries of stars are ovre.tv' well

catered for by the new releases of the past week. In My Darling Clementine John Ford turns his attention again to the great American outdoors; while Cloak and Dagger, and Notorious (which I cannot review till next week) present Fritz Lang and = Alfred Hitchcock respectively at work in their favourite field of the thriller. John Ford’s Stage Coach probably still ranks as the finest Western since the talkies came, but My Darling Clementine comes pretty close to it in many ways. Like i:s almost-classical predecessor, it is an example of what a great director can do with a well-beloved subject, even when the material with which he is dealing is no different in kind from that used in the construction of ten hundred hackneyed horse operas-the lawless border town, the sheriff who avenges his brother and cleans up the’bad men, the siren of the saloon who turns up trumps, the pure sweet maid from back East so romantically out of place in this uncouth setting, the cattle rustling, the poker games, the hell-for-leather chases ecross the desert, the gun duels at sunrise. Under John Ford’s affec ionate care, all this hoary material becomes fresh, vital, exciting, and pictorially beautiful. % Fa 2ORD’S outstanding achievement here, I think, is that he establishes the border town of Tombstone as a real place; not just a collection of shanties run up'on a studio lot, but a locality which actually exis‘s and has a character of its own, so that you could find your way around it if you ever stopped there. That this is, in fact, something you couldn’t possibly ever do, since the town pictured here is the Tombstone of -1882 and in this form has long since disappeared, merely emphasises how genuine is Ford's feeling for period and place. The same is true of the magnificent surroundings-those sweeping landscapes of mountain, sandhills, cactus and weird rock formations rising from the desert, with clouds massed above-all so familiar to the picturegoer yet seen now, one feels, as if for the first time. Technicolour is not needed to accomplish this: Ford’s black-and-white photography has a lifelike quality and a richness of texture beyond anything the colour-process can yet achieve. A comparable air of verisimilitude surrounds the inhabitants of Tombstone; they are figures partly from history, mostly from history, but with a few exceptions they seem to belong to the place as much as the dining-room of the "Mansion House" belongs, or the bar--room and the barber’s shop. Only patient analysis could reveal the means whereby Ford establishes this sense of authenticity of setting and character in the midst of a highly melodramatic plot; but clearly it owes something to his meticulous observation and his loving attention to detail, which makes him pause in the telling of his story for the camera

to examine an item of dress, or to catch and preserve a gesture or the modelling of a face. The feet tapping out a squaredance on a sunny Sunday morning, a shadowy mass revealed by the breaking day as the head and shoulders of a waiting desperado, three small black figures advancing down a road, the flash of guns through swirling dust clouds-these are details that catch the imagination and stay in the memory. Ps xe *

ENRY FONDA, with a heavy black moustache this time and that slow, almost languid, manner of his, plays Wyatt Earp, the semi-legendary marshal of Tombstone-and plays hir@ to perfection. For an outdoor role there is nobody better than Fonda. Victor Mature, who was once tagged as "that beautiful hunk of a man" and gave no indication of being anything else, comes to light with a surprisingly mature and considered performance as the renegade doctor with T.B. seeking forgetfulness through the aid of whisky, a lush dancehall girl oddly called Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), and spasmodic bouts of violence. The darling Clementine of the title, the good sweet maid from back ._East, seems mainly an afterthought, introduced to give the film a name and a theme-song; but she is a charming enough afterthought. Around these principals, Director Ford has assembled a cohort of such estimable old-timers as Walter Brennan, Alan Mowbray, and J. Farrell MacDonald-players who not enly act but look their parts and assist in no small measure in making this film the honest and unassuming work of art as well as of entertainment that it is.