Framing the West: Doorways in My Darling Clementine
by Daniel Robbins
Presented to Prof. Lisa Coulthard 23 November 2009
FIST 220 - Hollywood in the Classical Era - UBC

In the film genre of ‘The Western’ there is a prominent theme of wilderness versus civilization. This usually seems to be shown in terms of the frontier versus the town or community. Through the use of cinematography, specifically frame-within-a-frame shot composition, John Ford creates a borderline between the ‘Wild West’ and ‘Civilization’ that is obeyed, reversed, and blurred throughout his film My Darling Clementine, challenging standard notions of wilderness and civilization.

In one respect My Darling Clementine can be seen on the same terms as countless other westerns. Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers ride into a town called Tombstone. The viewer believes this is going to be the standard town, a safe haven from the harsh west. The first thing Wyatt does is go to a barber to get a nice shave. He wishes to shed himself of the grunge he as accumulated herding cattle out in the Wild West. After finding his brother James has been killed and becoming marshal, Wyatt sends his brother Virgil out to hunt down the Clantons to find out if they were the ones that killed James and stole the cattle. When Virgil returns, Ford frames Wyatt and his other brother, Morgan, underneath the gateway to the Tombstone jail. This creates a frame within the unchanging frame of the movie. It is here that Wyatt waits for word from the wild. Wyatt and Morgan stand on the border between civilization and wilderness waiting for their brother who returns with news that the Clantons had been moving cattle. This can also be seen around the middle of the film. Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) interrupts a dinner party to remind Clementine that he told her to get out of town or he would. When he storms out Wyatt follows to try to get him to stay. This conversation is framed with a medium two-shot, and the two are placed on the outside of a doorway through which the dinner guests can be seen. Doc does not have many nice words to say, ending with, “my advice to you is start carrying your gun” (My Darling Clementine). It is clear in this shot that these types of confrontational arguments belong outside, not at the dinner table. Perhaps the most obvious instance of the doorframe as the borderline between wilderness and civilization comes at the end of the film, during the shootout at the O.K. Corral. After the Earp’s and Doc have killed all of the Clanton sons and Wyatt has spared Old Man Clanton’s life, sending him off into the frontier, just as Clanton passes the gates of the O.K. Corral he turns around on his horse to shoot back at the Earps. As soon as a character passes the threshold between civilization and wilderness, new rules take over. Using the doorframe as the borderline between wilderness and civilization, Ford follows conventions of the Western genre by portraying the town on the tame side of the doorframe and the frontier on the wild side.

While he sets the town up to be a safe haven from the Wild West, Ford also constructs the town of Tombstone to be much more dangerous than the frontier. At the very beginning of the film we get a slight hint of this; the first person the Earps encounter is Old Man Clanton. Clanton is introduced wearing all black while sinister music plays. He tells Wyatt that there is a “fine town” named Tombstone up ahead (My Darling Clementine). The fact that Ford first associates Tombstone with Clanton gives us an indication that maybe something is not quite right with this town. As soon as they enter the town the Earps are met with the noise of pianos and loud people chatting, screaming, and laughing in a dark town. As they dismount their horses and begin to assess their surroundings, Ford frames the Wyatt and his brothers through the doorway of the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor. We then see a shot that establishes the source of all the noise, through the doorway of the saloon and the Earps proceed into the barbershop with caution. Wyatt wants to get a shave, to clean himself up after a rough time in the wild, but this town seems just as wild as the frontier. These first shots through doorways set up the importance of the frame-within-the-frame in this film and also begin to form skeptical opinions in the viewer about this town. After gunfire starts, even entering the barbershop, Wyatt begins to ask, eventually for a third time, “what kind of town is this”. It is clear that, even to the characters, this is not the average town in the average Western film. Later in the film, the Clantons are fully set up as ‘wild’. Billy Clanton shoots Chihuahua through a window, and runs away. After Virgil Earp chases him all the way back to the Clanton house, and walks in to see Billy dead in bed, Virgil gives his condolences and walks out of the room. We see a shot, framed by the doorway, of Virgil walking out and then getting shot in the back by Old Man Clanton. Clearly, the Clantons are wild and they bring that wilderness inside. Here Virgil is shot from the inside, not from the outside. It is not in the Wild West that he is attacked, it is from within society. The Clantons are the personification of the wilderness presence within the town. But this wilderness can be seen throughout the town, always highlighted by Ford by framing the doorway for the audience to take note of who is on which side of the border between wild and civil. In man cases in My Darling Clementine, wild is on the inside, and the more civilized people are on the outside, thus reversing the common conventions of the film Western.

In both supporting and reversing the conventions of the Western, Ford has blurred the lines between wild and civil. He goes one step further in doing this, by using the frame-within-a-frame to show explicitly the confusion between the two. After Wyatt becomes Marshal, he spends his time on the porch of the hotel. The porch becomes, as Michael Budd put it best in his essay “A Home in the Wilderness: Visual Imagery in John Ford’s Westerns”, “the meeting place between shelter and wilderness” (Budd 164). The porch is both inside and outside. Furthermore Wyatt sites in the sun, and leans back into the shade of the roof. He is clearly sitting the border between wild and civilized, keeping watch as Marshal. This is further emphasized by Fords inclusion of the support columns of the porch in the shot, like the doorway from outside onto the porch. It is in this position that Wyatt first encounters Clementine, the films personification of Tombstone’s transition from wild to civil. She is clearly more proper in dress and speech than most of the town from the moment she arrives. From this same porch Wyatt and Clementine are seen in a tracking shot walking from the hotel to the new church. This tracking shot shows not just one of the porch’s support columns, but many. Ford uses this shot to show the transformation that the town is going through, as well as Wyatt and Clementine’s part in that transformation. They pass through many doorways on their way to the church, which is only half built. This is a symbol of the transformation in itself. It is an attempt at religion which considered one very important sign of civilization, but it is only half built, it does not even have a doorway to keep the wilderness out. They are on their way to full civilization, but not there yet. Through the use of porches, Clementine, and the church, as well as Wyatt’s interactions with the three, Ford makes his point clear about the distinction between wilderness and civilization; there is no clear line and the change from wild to civil involves a complex transformation process.

Ford both follows and reverses the common Western genre ideas of which side of the doorway the wilderness is on. He does this in order to blur the lines and bring to attention the fact that issues such as this are never black and white. He does this throughout the film using the town of Tombstone as his example. It is a town in a transitional period of development. It is half civilized, and half wild. Ford constantly frames his shots with the doorway in the foreground to bring this to the forefront. Through his use of the doorway as the blurred borderline between wilderness and civilization John Ford which challenges the way these issues are seen in film Westerns.