The West in Film

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John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) includes historical characters and historical events, while Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952) is more a generic Western with an interesting slant on the history of the time in which the film was made. At heart, both films are about a clash between good and evil that ends with a gunfight in the street, with the forces of law against the representatives of disorder. While this may be a timeless battle repeated endlessly in films--not only Westerns, but certainly in the Western genre time and time again--how this battle is treated in the two films shows a very different view of the social order, of the role of the hero, and of the meaning of the battle itself. Ford takes a much more traditional view of his hero, Wyatt Earp, and he treats that character in the heroic mold even though the historical character and his brothers were not as admirable as..."

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