the walk

discussed:
my darling clementine, 1946; dir. john ford
high noon, 1952; dir. fred zinneman
stagecoach, 1939; dir. john ford

Writes Ronald L. Davis in his biography, John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master,

Film students have dissected virtually every frame of My Darling Clementine, pointing out the tension between the community and the individual. Critics have interpreted the scene on the hotel porch in which Wyatt Earp, the outsider, balances himself on one foot, then the other, while tipped back in a chair as showing Earp's tentative position with tombstone society. "If you told Jack Ford that, he'd have punched you in the nose," Iron Eyes Cody declared. (188)

Davis, on Ford's behalf, advocates the intuitiveness of the director's filmmaking; the man was not only uninterested but violently disinterested in such trifles as themes and subtext; he cared only about making an engaging, dramatically exciting film. He invariably denied claims of his artistry, asserting instead that he was merely a working man making a living.

Then again, Ford also claimed that My Darling Clementine was an almost entirely historical document, allowing that he had taken liberty only with the time of Doc Holliday's death. Apparently, the climactic shootout had been described and cartographed to Ford by Earp himself, "so in My Darling Clementine, we did it exactly the way it had been." (Tefertiller, 338)

In "Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends," an examination of the relationships between the historical Earp and his various literary and cinematic incarnations, Allen Barra troubles Ford's story. "Wyatt may or may not have talked to Ford about the gunfight--" writes Barra, "it seems doubtful that he would have told a movie director what he held back from his own biographers--but he never told him it happened like that. Nor, really, did Ford think that it did." The shootout had actually taken place near, not in, the corral. Neither Finn nor Old Man Clanton, who had been killed a few days earlier, were among the Clanton's ranks, and two others, The McLaurys, were. Furthermore, no Earp brothers were killed until after the O.K. corral; the former was actually retribution for the latter, a causal relationship reversed in the film. "Ford knew pretty much what had happened at the gunfight, and if he didn't, Stuart Lake's bestseller was there to tell him." (347)

In fact, Lake's "biography," Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, which was itself, outside of the battle in question, almost entirely fabricated, was never consulted by either Ford or his screenwriter, Winston Miller. (Lake was included in Clementine's credits because of the terms of a contract the author had negotiated with Fox for an earlier movie.) Nor was it quite as unlikely as Barra suggests that Ford had conversed with Earp. Earp did serve, toward the end of his life, as an advisor to several films, and was described as being difficult largely because he would not retell deeds he had not done. Frustrated with the world's total lack of interest in the facts of his life, Earp took briefly to telling stories he had read about himself, and it was possibly at this point that Ford encountered the living legend. Ford was not then a director but a prop boy who, he claims, got Earp coffee and a chair and was in return regaled.

Nonetheless, it is true that Ford could not possibly have believed in the historicity of his film. Wherever he got his facts, he got too many of them right to have been unaware of those he had skewed. There is one element in particular of My Darling Clementine that exposes Ford's utter willingness to distort, amend, and rewrite history ("Do you want good history or a good movie," was one of his mantras) as a means to explore the very themes of which we film students accuse him. This element is Clementine, who has no historical antecedent whatsoever, nor does she appear in any previous Earp "history." "Ford had to know that he was creating a grand romantic fantasy," concludes Barra, "but in all the interviews he gave in later years he vehemently insisted on the historical veracity of his Earp movie." (348)

It is initially baffling that the film drew its title from an a-historical supporting character with so little screentime that Jeanne Crain, the star actress for whom the role was initially intended, had to be replaced with an unknown. True to form, Ford maintained that he had suggested the title to Miller because he liked the song.

The obvious conclusion is that Hollywood movies simply need a romantic subplot, and Clementine was inserted to fill that need. The title, then, was probably intended to lure prospective audiences. It amounts to no more than typical hollywood studio generica, overlain upon an otherwise unconventional masterpiece with more pressing concerns.

The obvious conclusion is wrong. Clementine offers nothing like a classical hollywood romance. Earp is distracted by the former lover of his (albeit tenuous) friend and fighting companion Doc Holiday. His exact moral liability here is difficult to appraise, but it is clear from Henry Fonda's lowered head that, regardless of our own final judgements, he considers his character's thoughts covetous. While there can be no mistake that Earp is enamored of the urbane Clementine, there is very little evidence that his feelings are reciprocated. At the film's close, Earp rides off into the fade-out without ever having received so much as a kiss on the cheek or amorous glance from the object of his affections. In 1946, such a troubled and unsatisfying romance was far from customary. (Shane, which was considered highly unconventional for developing a strikingly similar triangle, was released seven years later.) Had the box office necessitated the fabrication of a Clementine, it would have been a far jucier fruit.

What's more, the historical Earp did in fact seduce the wife of another man in Tombstone, an act which contributed in no small way to the tensions that led the Earps and Clantons to the O.K. Corral. Neither member of the couple is given any mention in Ford's film.

Both Barra and subsequent biographer Casey Tefertiller agree that there was ample drama, intrigue, and romance in the historical Tombstone, and are baffled as to why Ford would have concocted what they consider an appreciably less interesting tale. But the director's elusive motivations become clear, I think, after Holiday instructs Clementine to leave the town. He sits at his own bar, drinking himself into a terrible funk and exacerbating his tubercular condition. Under the guise of altruism, Earp decides he is going to get the good doctor to go to bed. He criticizes Holiday's foolishness for turning Clementine away, and, to drive the point home, knocks the fool unconscious.

Give us your best shot, Jack, you're not fooling anybody. Earp, who is in all respects the paradigm of rugged individualist masculinity we have come to expect from a "westerner," would apparently be willing to give it all up for the love of a cultured, civilized eastern lady. She even gets him to go to church.

The sheriff sits introspectively on the porch of Doc Holiday's, having just received a haircut and a shave. Despite the Barber's insistence on the magnificence of his work, Earp is unsettled by how gentrified (to be read as emasculated, according to most scholars of the western) he looks. To make matters worse, the barber sprays him with something fragrantly botanical, and Wyatt admits to his brothers that the smell of home they believe they are imagining is in fact emanating from him.

The occupants of a passing carriage invite him to church, but he declines, stammering out a rather unimpressive excuse. It is not until Clementine emerges from the inn and asks the sheriff to escort her that he changes his mind. The two embark on a long, quiet walk through town.

It is a scene which both Ford and the genre prolifically recreated, and for which both are famous; the outsider walks through town with his heroine on his arm. Film historian Michael Coyne identifies Stagecoach's "lonely walk down Main Street" as the prototype for the ensuing stereotype. (19) The Ringo Kid, in an attempt to "break out of prison and into society in the same week," strolls through Lordsburg alongside his prostitute fiancee. She is on her way to the town's mini-ghetto, and he; either to be killed by his rivals or sent back to jail, and yet the pair proceeds as an ordinary couple on an ordinary night. Dallas recognizes the farcical nature of their evening constitutional, but Ringo does not.

Clementine's walk, while unable to claim prototypical status, makes its dramatic function somewhat more explicit. Earp is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of belonging to a community (he has, after all, just left his position as sheriff in Dodge City to raise cattle) and is especially inept at anything that might be called "civilized." He has no trouble antagonizing Chihuahua, the Mexican prostitute, but stammers attempting to make polite conversation with Clementine. He is perfectly confident at the gambling table on saturday night, but recedes into the nonexistent corner of the church on sunday morning. He looks like a prince with scruff along his jaw and a disheveled mop atop his head, and a thinly guised pauper with a shower and a shave.

Like Ringo, Earp is playing dress up. He is trying on civilization like a new pair of boots. He walks through town as if he were the kind of person who did things like walk through town. Unlike Ringo, Earp sees the irony.

Of course, the word "long" means something very different when applied to a shot in a movie than it does in most other circumstances. Wyatt and Clementine's walk lasts no more than twenty seconds, which, in terms of screen time, is practically interminable. This dichotomy is magnificently not illustrated by High Noon.

Director Fred Zinnemann has said that High Noon is not so much a western, but a drama of a more generic nature with the trappings of a western. The point has been reiterated by numerous American critics. And yet, Phillip Drummond, author of the British Film Institute's High Noon companion, calls the film "a 'western,' with all the mythic meanings of tales set in the history of the North American west...." Proponents of either persuasion seem to consider their position self-evident.

Certainly, a number of tropes we have come to expect are missing. There is no desert, no mountains, no sweeping panoramic shots that dwarf the characters against their surroundings. In fact, the shot of which Zinneman was most enamoured, "the boom shot," as he proudly referred to it, pulls back from our hero to reveal... a town. There are no ranches, no cattle, and no one ever mounts a horse. There is no frontier. There is no John Wayne. In short, there is no West. There is, however, a long, lonely walk down main street.

And it's long. High Noon is shot very nearly in real time. Such a respectful relationship with time is unusual in a western; temporal impossibilities are probably the genre's most generic flight of fancy. A westerner does, after all, have to be able to draw faster than the man holding the gun to his head can pull the trigger. (This phenomenon is hyperbolically demonstrated by the removal of several frames from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in order to give Robert Redford a superhuman draw.) Furthermore, dramatic moments (like deaths) are often extended well beyond a reasonable duration. Shane, for example, can draw and shoot in an immeasurably short period of time, but takes a good ten seconds to throw a punch. High Noon is guilty of very few such distortions.

In fact, the whole film is disappointingly plausible; another fact which sets it apart from the bulk of its genre. Unlike Shane or Ringo, who basically defeat their opponents by using their magical cowboy powers, Will Kane wins by strategizing and hiding, and with the invaluable help of his wife, who rather unchivalrously shoots a man in the back. What kind of western makes its heroes resort to such realistic means?

The town through which Kane walks, though, is an undoubtedly western town. It is laid out fairly similarly to Tombstone. Both have every manner of tradesman, including a fantastically multi-talented barber, set between a hotel bar on one end of town and a church on the other. The ambivalence displayed by Kane and Earp toward their respective walks is in both cases because the men are on their way to church.

The main difference, of course, is that Kane has a church to walk to. In Tombstone, there is just a wooden frame where the would-be congregation will eventually meet. Since they do not yet have a minister, they are not actually holding a service; instead they are holding a dance to raise the funds necessary to complete the church. When Earp arrives he is well-received. Smiling men and women step and spin across the screen.

But things have changed. There is no dancing at the service Kane interrupts, nor is there even a smile. No one is happy to see him, and the minister even questions his right to be there. The children twitch in their seats, and when they are dismissed, they cheer with ignorant bliss.

The active community has become passive. The excitement felt at the prospect of civilization has been lost with its actualization. We are given to understand that when Kane first ran Miller out of town, it was a very different place. The very men that now turn him away then rallied behind him to fight Miller, just as those in Tombstone offer their help to Earp. Those that have not are willing to fight to make their town "a decent place to raise women and children," but those that have simply want to protect what they have.

Meanwhile, at the dark end of Main Street, further changes have taken place. The promiscuous, ethnically-other anti-heroine now owns her place of business, the hotel wherein once upon a time her stock character was just another whore. "The viewer expects to learn that the nonwhite Helen Ramirez is a prostitute," writes feminist critic Gwendolyn Foster, "bent on the destruction of the good girl who takes her man." (94) We expect it because this is the treatment normally given her character; Foster has, after all, just perfectly described Chihuahua.

Nonetheless, despite the scrappy, voluptuous Mexican's uncommonly empowered position in the town, and the docile, white-clad white woman's final show of competence, let us not overestimate High Noon's egalitarian project. Both women still mean the same thing they always have.

Doc Holiday, by rejecting Clementine in favor of Chihuahua, rejects also the civilized North-eastern world from whence the former came. He insists that she leave town because he knows that she brings civilization with her; at the film's close we find that she has become the new schoolmarm. Holiday understands what Kane takes an hour and a half to discover; there will be no place for him in a civilized world. He tells Amy she does not belong because she does not. Chihuahua belongs.

Conversely, Kane makes the transition from town-taming gunslinger to store-keeping gentleman by concluding his affair with Helen Ramirez and marrying Amy. Amy is the same peaceable, refined character who did not belong in Tombstone, but in Kane's post-tamed town, the tables have been turned. It is Ramirez who must go.

Ford had initially envisioned a funeral scene for Chihuahua. It would begin with the casket being led only by a madame and the other prostitutes. As the casket passed through town, the shopkeepers would look out their windows and be struck by a bout of conscience, until one by one, every man in town joined the procession. The scene was cut because it did not fit into the flow of the film, but nonetheless sheds a good deal of light on how Ford envisioned Tombstone. Ramirez leaves town because she knows no one will lift a finger in her defense when Miller returns. Even the man to whom she is selling her business, who claims a debt of gratitude, makes no show of being endebted. The world has changed.

If a western is so geographically bound as its designation would suggest, then High Noon does not seem to qualify. Unlike most other films in the genre, it is not a tale that has grown out of the historical curiosity that was the American frontier, a curiosity the likes of which our crowded planet will never see again. The innumerable historical parallels critics have drawn, alongside our nation's current darkling political scene, suggest that High Noon tells a tale which is sadly in no danger of extinction. Zinnemann himself, resentful of the close readings the film has received, nonetheless identified his "primary concern" as the dramatization of "contemporary history for the large American audience and to make them understand in emotional terms what the world outside looks like today." (Prince, 83) High Noon is not a film about the west.

And yet, if that's all there is to a western, then Barra and Tefertiller have a good point. Why did Ford change the Wyatt Earp story? The real shootout resulted largely from the peculiar sociopolitical climate of the fledgeling Oklahoma; it was in all a far more "western" tale than the vengeance/romance by which it was replaced.

Drummond is not the first non-American to suggest a less geographically oriented schema. Andre Bazin argues that westerns are just a transplanting of ancient mythological themes and archetypes into a new setting, and the spaghetti western phenomenon should probably be considered an argument in his defense. Of course, Bazin is wrong, but he nevertheless establishes that there must be something more to westerns than blind americana if so many others feel they can lay claim to it. Even Coyne, who rejects Bazin's appraisal, refers at length to the "odyssey western," naming half of the genre's output after the first literary figure ever to struggle with a simultaneous longing for home and need to be free.

High Noon is not a western by accident. Whether or not Zinnemann knew it, his tale belongs to the genre because it concerns everything that westerns are about. Neither, then, was fords historical revision arbitrary; he was turning the Earp legend into a western. Westerns are not merely about the west. They are not about mountains, but the relationship of a mountain to a man; not forests but the relationship of a forest to the town that was built from it. Likewise, High Noon is not a film about a town but about the relationship between a town and the towns that preceded it. Zinnemann need not show his society's antecedent for the same reason he does not need to show mountains or saddles; his employment of the western motif makes them implicit.

Although My Darling Clementine and High Noon portray civilization in two very different stages, they make essentially the same final appraisal of the institution. It is something akin to, "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The uncivilized world is not suitable for women and children, and the civilized world is not suitable for men. Westerns take place in that liminal place that is no longer one and not yet the other, the brief historical moment in which everyone belongs.