My Darling Clementine (1946) on Netflix
Passed19461h 37mBiographyDramaRomanceWestern
Wyatt Earp and his brothers are driving cattle to California when they stop in Tombstone. Their herd is stolen and their brother James is killed, so Wyatt takes the marshal's job.
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- IMDb7.7/1028,862 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
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Plot summary
Old Man Clanton and his sons offer to buy the cattle that Wyatt Earp and his brothers are driving to California, and the Earps turn them down. Hearing of Tombstone, the boom town nearby, Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil ride in and leave the youngest, James, on watch. Tombstone has no marshal; Wyatt is the one man who stands up to a drunken Indian firing at the townspeople. Back at the camp, the herd has been rustled and James is killed. Wyatt returns to Tombstone, becomes town marshal and promises to remain until the men who killed his brother are caught. He meets Doc Holliday, a hot-tempered saloon keeper, and the Clanton gang. Clementine Carter arrives from Boston, searching for Doc.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about My Darling Clementine (1946)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director John Ford said that when he was a prop boy in the silent era, Wyatt Earp would visit pals he knew from his Tombstone days on the set, and that Earp told him about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral; the film, Ford said, did it exactly the way it had been.
- After a preview screening, 20th Century Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck judged John Ford's original cut too long with weak spots, and had Lloyd Bacon shoot new footage and heavily edit the film, cutting 30 minutes.
- Wyatt Earp's widow Josephine worked to keep her name out of Stuart Lake's biography of her husband, and after Earp died she threatened to sue the movie producers to keep it that way; Lake claimed she tried to influence what he wrote and consulted lawyers.
- Clementine Carter is not a historical person; the screenplay makes her an amalgam of Big Nose Kate and Josephine Earp. The Earps, unlike the film's cattle-driving brothers, were never cowboys, drovers or cattle owners.
- Old Man Clanton actually died before the O.K. Corral gunfight and probably never met any of the Earps, and the real Doc Holliday was a dentist, not a surgeon, and survived the shootout.
- Director Sam Peckinpah called My Darling Clementine his favorite Western and paid homage to it in several of his own Westerns, including Major Dundee (1965) and The Wild Bunch (1969).
- John Ford did not want to make My Darling Clementine at all, but his contract obliged him to make one more movie for 20th Century Fox.
SPOILER
Ford's original cut has not survived, but a prerelease cut from a few months after the preview screening was found in the UCLA film archives, and preservationist Robert Gitt edited a version incorporating some of it. In the 1946 release Earp kisses Clementine goodbye, while in Ford's original he shakes her hand.
