from Steve Erickson's Zeroville, Europa Editions, NY, 2007:
"My Darling Clementine. John Ford's greatest movie. Now I know what you're going to say. Stagecoach. Right? The Searchers. Well, Stagecoach was a distinct landmark in the genre, no getting around it. But that shit hasn't aged well, though no one wants to cop to it, while The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen, evil white racist honky pigfucker though he may be. I mean he may be a racist pigfucker, but he's bad in The Searchers, no getting around it...
"I mean Duke gives a performance of terrifying intensity and sublime psychological complexity, whether by intent or just natural fucked-up white American mojo. The Searchers loses it, though, whenever Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles come on -- Ford, he couldn't direct the ladies for shit, unlike my man Howard Hawks where all the ladies are fine and kick-ass on top of it, even if they're all versions of the same fox, or as William Demarest puts it down in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, "Positively the same dame!' I mean Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not actually has some of the same exact lines as Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings.
"But now My Darling Clementine here, it's practically noir Western, all moody and shit. Ford's first after the War and all the concentration camps and maybe he wasn't in his usual sentimental rollicking drunk Irish jive-ass mood. Check out my man Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and, dig it, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday and, dig it again, Walter Brennan as Pa Clanton! I don't mean no Grandpa McCoy from TV, I mean in My Darling Clementine Walter Brennan is one stone fucked-up killer, you hear what I'm saying? 'When you pull a gun, kill a man!' Damn!
"My Darling Clementine, it's got the inherent mythic resonance of the Western form but in terms post-War white folks understood, figuring they were all worldlier and more sophisticated than before the War. Ford's creation of the archetypal West, laying out codes of conduct that folks either honored or betrayed -- and I'm just trying to give the motherfucker due credit, not even holding against him, not too much anyway, the fact that he played a Klansman in that jive Birth of a Nation bullshit -- anyway Ford's view of the West was so complete by this point that Hawks, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, they could only add to it, you hear what I'm saying?
"But of course the Western changed along with America's view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody's free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America's just too fucking CONFUSED, can't figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder."
I love this book. It's worth the price of admission just for the chapter in which the aging, hard-drinking editor (who might possibly be based on Dorothy Spencer? help me out here) instructs our hero in the finer points of construction of A Place In The Sun. You also get to hang out at a beach house which will seem very familiar if you've read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (and if you haven't, you should go and do that right now) with the likes of John Milius, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, Margo Kidder and Robert De Niro amongst others, all very thinly disguised.
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