A Film Canon

My Darling Clementine envisages the Western as the American answer to Shakespearean tragedy, and so culminates Ford's movement away from the democratic laughter-space of his earlier films. Not only is Wyatt Earp's (Henry Fonda) first decisive action as sheriff of Tombstone to defend the local interpreter of the bard, but Ford conjoins town and Monument Valley so as to render the latter synonymous with those voids that Shakespearean tragic heroes move through, or gaze into, and which don't reify Fate so much as the possibility that it may not exist. More specifically, Ford ensures that every part of the town is a potential vantage point onto the Valley, translating its extrinsic character - as a place that people seek out merely to get away from other places - into literal terms; a couple of buildings that just happen to share the same stretch of desert. This reduces every character to a tiny silhouette, especially Earp, whose face is frequently shadowed or in darkness, and who is much more of a cerebral than a physical presence, as evinced in the most iconic instance of Fonda's trademark thinking-pose - feet resting up against a pillar, gazing into space. That said, this stillness is ultimately a preparation for Earp's dexterity in the final gunfight, albeit one which imbues that fight - and, in particular, Earp's linear trajectory, defined against the circuitous strategies of his companions - with the same cerebral dimension, as if it were a mere extrapolation of the elusive conversations that he and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) have shared, which chart a subtle transition from merely sharing the same taste in enemies and women, to exhibiting a more intrinsic investment than Tombstone will ultimately allow. Combined with Ford's spectacularly wide, long shots, this suffuses the actual physics of the fight with a pathetic insignificance, minuteness, and even stasis, producing one of the most poetic action sequences in all film.