It starts with a shave & a beer.
Wyatt Earp (played not only coolly but also emotionally strikingly by Henry Fonda) goes into town with his brothers. The town: hoodlums and brawls, beer-drinkin' folks and music.
Earp becomes the new marshal. He's to take care of law&order. Plus: he has some revenge business. His kid brother was killed, and he thinks he knows by whom.
There will be a gunfight - there is a gunfight.
My darling clementine is classical western in the sense that it is about societal change. The old west is juxtaposed with the new west, the community, "society" - cultivation and even Enlightenment.
Doc Holliday, the troubled and tuberculosis-stricken doc-turned-gambler, is a figure of in-between here, who has a very interesting part in the film. There is a tension between him and Earp that builds tremendously and also has a surprising form of sad aspect to it. That has to do with a girl, also. Clementine comes to Tombstone to look for one Doctor Holliday. He has found himself a new woman, and wants to send this tidy girl home. She meets Earp, and some kind of relation strikes up quickly.
John Ford chooses to focus on the quieter material rather than the shootouts.
As a tale about change & civilization this film draws on many shady images. One of them: women civilize violent men. Clementine, in this film, is a figure of purity and decency (she becomes the village's next school teacher), and as Earp falls in love with her, his sense for justice seems to be enhanced. Well, basically Ford chronicles a heroic story in which white men and women come to the west with their own personal business in mind, but end up making the place a decent community.
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