“My Darling Clementine” (1946)
A decade and a half before ‘Liberty Valance’ and its most famous quote, Ford would himself “print the legend”: indeed the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral only became truly legendary after his film. Deviating wildly from historical fact (the female characters are either wholly fictional or amalgams; the Earps were never cowboys; Old Man Clanton died before the shootout; Doc Holliday survived, etc etc), the film remains to this day the most rewarding telling of this often retold tale, which Ford insisted he had heard first-hand from Wyatt Earp himself when Earp used to visit cowboy friends on the sets of their movies. Even John Wayne credited a lot of his inspiration for the lawman roles he’d go on to play to conversations with the real-life Earp. But tellingly, though Ford would film the character twice, neither time did he cast Wayne —”Cheyenne Autumn” has James Stewart in the role, while in “My Darling Clementine” it’s Henry Fonda. Fonda may have “only” appeared in 7 of Ford’s films (compared to Wayne’s whopping 24), but if Wayne is analogous to Ford’s id —his action-man side, his instinct, his plain-spoken manliness— then Fonda was perhaps his ego, and it’s certainly a thoughtful, soulful, considered performance he delivers here. In fact, it’s one of the movie’s great strengths that while it builds to a terrific climax and is a functioning tale of Western revenge, it is also a detail-oriented and surprisingly light-hearted character study, as well as an early precursor of the buddy movie in the evolving dynamic between Earp and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature, in his best-ever role). Not since “Stagecoach” had Ford made a Western that so thoroughly delivered on all fronts: as a portrait of a frontier community, a romance, a revenge film (with a brilliant against-type Walter Brennan performance) and an action movie. Yet despite performing on all these genre levels, ‘Clementine’ has a unique lyricism, even a quietude at times —Earp rocking on his chair on the porch, Doc reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy. There is a broad streak of sentimentality to Ford that detractors are quick to point out, but “My Darling Clementine” is the ultimate counterpoint argument: if there’s a line where warmth and sweetness pass into manipulation and mawkishness, here Ford does not just walk that line, like Earp in the film’s church-raising scene, but throws his hat off and dances on it.
“Fort Apache” (1948)
The first and, in story terms, probably best of Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy,” even if it lacks the eye-popping pictorialism of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon“‘s Technicolor, or the pre-“The Quiet Man” team of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in “Rio Grande,” “Fort Apache” is a taut, complex and resonant Western that holds water as a parable for clashing military tactics even today. Within Ford’s canon, it’s particularly of note for embodying the two sides of the debate in the two actors who were his most frequent stars: Wayne and Henry Fonda. Wayne’s popular Captain York represents the instinctive tactician who relies on on-the-ground knowledge and personal experience to inform his decisions. Fonda plays Lt. Colonel Thursday, who is assigned the promotion that the men believe to be York’s by right, and who represents a rigidly intellectual approach, whereby strict rules of military conduct and theoretical strategy must be applied no matter the changing circumstances. It’s essentially a battle between a kind of dogmatic hubris and a more malleable military pragmatism, but Ford’s skill and his fluid, organic filmmaking style, coupled with perfectly attuned performances from both his regular leading men, never let this film become overly doctrinal. On the contrary: by working in a familiar Fordian generational subplot about a younger officer (John Agar) who falls for Thursday’s daughter (a 20-year-old Shirley Temple in a sparkling turn), as well as his usual-suspects roundup of bawdy comic relief, Ford gives himself plenty of options for keeping the pace up and not allowing the weight of any one strand of the story to overwhelm the film’s general momentum. That’s not to say he doesn’t pick sides: his, and therefore our, sympathies are clearly with Wayne’s York and the very ending, wherein York endorses the official version of Thursday’s foolish and doomed final offensive as the brave sacrifice of a wise soldier, feels like a salutory admonition to all of us (before he’d make a whole film about this with “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) to not always take a legend at its face value. In this age of spin and obfuscation, that conclusion seems wiser than ever; coupled with a central dilemma that has had echoes in almost every U.S. conflict since, from Vietnam to the Iraq wars, it may be that “Fort Apache” is Ford’s most lastingly relevant film.
“She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949)
Of all the many partnerships that characterize Ford’s long career, “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon,” the middle film in his so-called “Cavalry trilogy” (“Fort Apache” and “Rio Grande” being the others), might boast the apex of a more esoteric connection: it’s perhaps the greatest use ever made by Ford of Monument Valley, Arizona, his backdrop of choice for shooting the Old West. And while the red rocks and vast skies of that landscape are now familiar to the point of banality within a Western context, here, couched in Winston C. Hoch‘s Oscar-winning vivid Technicolor photography (you’d never guess he and Ford clashed throughout filming, especially during the famous thunderstorm scene which led to Hoch later filing suit against the studio), it all looks fresh and new: it is that gorgeous. Narratively, however, this is as close to wheel-spinning as “good” Ford gets, turning in a much more episodic and less focused story than usual, as Captain Brittles (John Wayne playing 20 years older than his actual age), rankling from the defeat at Little Bighorn, faces retirement at the same time as a new Indian war threatens. Matters come to a head when he leads a mission against a nearby Cheyenne encampment at the same time as he must escort his superior officer’s wife and comely daughter to the stagecoach, but the film is oddly anti-climactic in its Indian war aspects and rather soapy in how it dwells on the rivalry for the colonel’s daughter’s favor. But perhaps because of this uncharacteristic looseness in terms of plot and pacing, the film does feature a tremendous, unusually introspective performance from Wayne —reportedly his own favorite role out of the 180-odd that he played over his long career. Brittles is concerned about encroaching obsolescence and the nature of his tarnished legacy and must contend with a generation gap, personified especially by Ben Johnson as one of his men. So given all that, ‘Ribbon’ is more a character piece and a gentle redemption story than the rip-roaring entertainment Ford delivered elsewhere, but it also shows the new textures and rhythms that Ford could find within the genre he mastered —so much more than a set of conventions and archetypes, in his hands the Western was robust and iconic, but also eternally elastic.