My Darling Clementine. 1946. USA. Directed by John Ford. Written by Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller, from a book by Stuart Lake. With Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Tim Holt, Walter Brennan. DCP. 97 min.
John Ford was said to be unhappy with the casting of Victor Mature and Linda Darnell, two Fox actors outside Ford’s cinematic family, in the 1946 Western that was his postwar return to the genre—and the first of many multilayered masterpieces that followed in the 1940s and ’50s. And yet Ford makes brilliant use of them, placing Mature and Darnell (as Doc Holliday and his Latina saloon-girl lover, Chihuahua) as liminal characters who belong neither to the feudal past of Walter Brennan and his murderous sons nor to the shining democratic future of Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp, but rather to a realm of eccentric individualism somewhere in between—a world Ford valued as well, though it is unlikely that Ford would have been able to conjure Chihuahua’s dark sensuality without Darnell’s active participation.