Critics reviews

As Scott Eyman, Ford's biographer, points out in his voiceover commentary, if My Darling Clementine plays fast and loose with history it hardly matters – any more than o the borrowings from Dwan's version. What counts is that Ford imbues his story with grandeur, dignity and a seemingly instinctive visual poetry that few other westerns can match.

[The characters] lucky enough to survive the film do continue to be, to move forward, even if the perennial presence of the looming sky above Ford's low-hanging horizon line outdoes the mythic connotations of the human tragedies and dramas that play out beneath it. Such existential connotations always seem to lurk behind Ford's films, but never more delicately than in My Darling Clementine.

Released in 1946, My Darling Clementine, American iconoclast John Ford's first postwar film, stands at the nexus of tradition and progression in both its formal construction and ideological constitution... Ford's work attains a harmony rare in American studio filmmaking, its topical and cinematic breadth at once intimately sketched and historically attuned to the passage of time and its accumulated gravitas.

When it comes to a movie this gloriously mythic, there's no point in getting hung up on accuracy. "Print the legend," as someone says in a later John Ford picture, and that's precisely what Ford does here... My Darling Clementine is lazy in the best way, allowing both the characters and the town itself to breathe; when violence happens, it's all the more wrenching, coming across almost like a violation of nature.

The "anti" [as in "antiwestern"] assignation could refer not to the film's oppositional manner—that is, its inversion of the roistering traits of the classical horse opera—but to its use of negative space, both geographic and temporal. The low-slung genius of this film is that its every nuance appears loaded with information about a world (_the_ world) that exists outside the confines of the frame.

Essentially, the main character is the land—not exactly a new idea when it comes to Ford, but still a handy concept that's particularly noticeable in My Darling Clementine. The abstract grandeur of Monument Valley sets up the movie's tale of revenge within a mythic context (location shooting was unusual during an era of studio-bound stagecraft).

Ford's filmography... returns again and again to the potentials and pitfalls of group formation at a moment in American history—and within a genre of American cinema—defined by the collisions between people of varying classes, ethnicities, and visions of the nation's future. Rarely have these weighty queries been explored with such elegance, poignancy, and dexterous economy as in My Darling Clementine.

John Ford's slow-poke cowboy epic, "My Darling Clementine," is a dazzling example of how to ruin some wonderful Western history with pompous movie making... Typical of director Ford's unimaginative, conforming tourist sensibility is the setting he uses—dead, flat country with Picassoesque rock formations jutting dramatically here and there—that has happened in Westerns ever since Art Acord was a Baby.