Love story
Long ago and far away – in the autumn of 1971, I believe, and in Canterbury – I fell in love. The obscure object of my desire was Cinema, and two inamorata vied for my affections. One was the collective achievement of Jean-Luc Godard, whose films I gorged on in the regional film theatre at the University of Kent. The other was the legacy of John Ford, which was unspooling as I recall in a Sunday night season on BBC2. Jean-Luc’s oeuvre and I have unquestionably had our ups and downs, but I like to believe that I have remained unfailingly faithful to the movies, and most especially the westerns, of Big John. My almost automatic answer to the dinner party question about which single film I would take to a desert island has been The Searchers from 1956, but at this moment I’m not so sure. For I have just seen a glorious, glittering restoration of Ford’s 1946 My Darling Clementine.
The restoration was carried out on a 35mm nitrate print held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was accomplished by Cineric Inc, with the audio restored by Audio Mechanics. A slightly sparse house watched it this afternoon in NFT1 during the London Film Festival. I don’t know how it was for anyone else, but I sat there with my heart in my mouth and, quite often, a tear in my eye. It was that beautiful.
The film tells of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda, above), ‘Doc’ Holliday (Victor Mature) and the gunfight at Tombstone’s OK Corral against the Clantons, headed by Walter Brennan’s ‘Pa’. Linda Darnell is the harlot with a heart of gold, in love with the consumptive Doc, and troubled by the arrival of his girl from back East, the fragrant Clementine (Cathy Downs). Ford and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald shot much of the movie in Monument Valley, which has never looked so breath-taking under silvery-grey, cloud-dappled skies.
Like all truly great poetry, My Darling Clementine is fragile and elusive, sometimes seemingly flat, almost obvious, and it is close-to-impossible to hymn it properly in words. It is both epic and intimate, and the relationships between the central characters and their loves (including that between Wyatt and Doc) are restrained yet deep. The themes are those that make the western so potent, as they do American culture in general: wilderness and civilisation, man and woman, the individual and community, family and friendship, nature and culture. But it is the thousand grace notes that contribute so much: Earp’s shyness as he asks Clem to dance, the saloon rendition by Granville Thorndike (Alan Mowbray) of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’, the panic of the horses in the downbeat closing gunfight.
I first saw My Darling Clementine on a tiny screen in a school common-room, and then I was far from sure that this was the masterpiece that others assured me it was. But I have returned to it time and again, as I have grown older and perhaps a little wiser. I have come rather slowly to appreciate truly its beauties. Yet that too is part of the pleasure I take in it, especially when the film’s wonder can revealed anew as overwhelmingly as today. John Ford only moved his camera when he needed to, but there is one heady tracking shot which accompanies Earp and Clem on their way to the blessing of Tombstone’s half-built church. It’s so absolutely right, so perfect, that had I not long been in love with Cinema, with Ford, and perhaps just a little with Fonda’s Earp, I should most definitely have fallen head over heels for all three.
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