FRIDAY: Concerning My Darling Clementine...

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2025

...we learned from the late Roger Ebert: Our president seems to have his darling Vladimir Putin. We advise you to pity the child—to find a way to pity the child for the way the adult apparently got here.

Thanks to director John Ford, we all have My Darling Clementine. The leading authority's overview starts exactly like this:

My Darling Clementine 

My Darling Clementine is a 1946 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp during the period leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The ensemble cast also features Victor Mature (as Doc Holliday)...

The title of the movie is borrowed from the theme song "Oh My Darling, Clementine," sung in parts over the opening and closing credits. The screenplay is based on the biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake, as were two earlier movies, both named Frontier Marshal (released in 1934 and 1939, respectively).

My Darling Clementine is regarded by many film critics as one of the best Westerns ever made. In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. It was among the third annual group of 25 films named to the registry.

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Fifty years after its release, Roger Ebert reviewed the film and included it in his list of The Great Movies. He wrote it was "one of the sweetest and most good-hearted of all Westerns, unusual in making the romance between Earp and Clementine the heart of the film rather than the gunfight."

We came to appreciate the film thanks to Ebert's decency. His lengthy 1997 review can be read by clicking here. We gained a great deal from this passage:

My Darling Clementine

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The gentlest moments in the movie involve Earp’s feelings for Clementine (Cathy Downs), who arrives on the stage from the East, looking for “Dr. John Holliday.” She is the girl Doc left behind. Earp, sitting outside the hotel, rises quickly to his feet as she gets out of the stage, and his movements show that he’s in awe of this graceful vision. Clementine has been seeking Doc all over the West, we learn, and wants to bring him home. Doc tells her to get out of town...

Clementine is packed to go the next morning when the marshal, awkward and shy, asks her to join him at the church service and dance. They walk in stately procession down the covered boardwalk, while Ford’s favorite hymn plays: “Shall We Gather at the River?” When the fiddler strikes up, Wyatt and Clementine dance—he clumsy but enthusiastic, and with great joy. This dance is the turning point of the movie, and marks the end of the Old West. There are still shots to be fired, but civilization has arrived.

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“My Darling Clementine” must be one of the sweetest and most good-hearted of all Westerns. The giveaway is the title, which is not about Wyatt or Doc or the gunfight, but about Clementine, certainly the most important thing to happen to Marshal Earp during the story. There is a moment, soon after she arrives, when Earp gets a haircut and a quick spray of perfume at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor. Clem stands close to him and says she loves “the scent of the desert flowers.” 

“That’s me,” says Earp. “Barber.”

Ford loved American music; he also loved cornball humor. His female characters were very important. In Stagecoach, the duke (John Wayne) stands up for an equally compelling lady, even in 1939. In The Searchers, we're always struck by the portrayal of the Vera Miles character, an extremely spirited young woman who's living, with her immigrant parents, next door to the end of nowhere, way out in the desert west.

(Then too, Ford made the deeply human Grapes of Wrath. He chose this lyric from the American songbook: "Do not hasten to bid me adieu.")

In My Darling Clementine, the painfully shy Fonda character finally has the courage to act on his admiration for the young woman who has arrived from the east but is about to go away on the morning stage. You can see the scene in question here. It culminates in their dance under an open sky.

Their dance is beautifully rendered. With that dance, Ebert says, civilization has come to the west.

In large part, civilization depends on the ability of the people thought of as men to respect, and to admire, the people thought of as women. More broadly, it depends on the ability of us the humans to come to terms with the challenges of sexuality, attraction and romance, which have always been very hard.

The Fonda character has his darling Clementine. Tragically, President Trump almost seems to be pursuing a darling of a different stripe. (We suggest that you pity the child.)

On programs on the Fox News Channel, many top stars are having a very hard time respecting the challenges of modern sexuality. Tomorrow, we'll show you an especially grisly example of what we're talking about. 

Despite the stories we tell ourselves, Blue America has never had much of a sexual politics either, not even during the recent period when we were briefly pretending. That said, the current backsliding on the Fox programs we have in mind is astounding and hard to believe, as is the liberal world's silence about this behavior.

Our nation is in a world of hurt. We'll need good luck to survive.