A parting handshake and saying goodbye with a kiss are two very different endings — and for the minds behind My Darling Clementine, that ending would make or break the audience’s response to the now-iconic western.
The 1946 film, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs, saw studio interventions override the legendary filmmaker’s original decision to have characters Wyatt Earp (Fonda) and Clementine Carter (Downs) go their separate ways on a more platonic note. This ending was more in keeping with Clementine and Earp’s past respective romances with Dr. John Henry “Doc” Holliday (played by Victor Mature) and Chihuahua (played by Linda Darnell), established earlier in the film.
My Darling Clementine was loosely based on the story of Earp, a lawmaker and marshal who informed a young Ford of his experience at the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, in which he and his brother, Virgil Earp, who was both a U.S. Marshal and the Tombstone city marshal, killed three outlaws.
While Ford was able to get a first-hand account of the Gunfight in the late 1920s during a visit by Earp to a studio lot he frequented, in addition to on-site sketches from the cultural icon, Darryl F. Zanuck, then the head of 20th Century Fox studios, had another vision for the final cut, with another filmmaker, Lloyd Bacon, being brought in to film additional re-shoots.
According to the American Film Institute’s history piece on My Darling Clementine, Zanuck cut 30 minutes from Ford’s version of the film, citing exposition and storytelling clarity. Ford, however, maintained the gunfight portrayed in the film was exactly how Earp described it to him when he worked as a prop boy during the Silent Film era.
It was only in 1995, when the UCLA Film Archives restored and released a 102-minute print of the film that was Zanuck’s initial “preview” version, that this early cut, closer to Ford’s original version, was first shown to the public. Moreover, Ford’s version featured a purposefully awkward handshake, rather than the kiss between Clementine and Earp. Clementine, a fictional character made for the film, was a stand-in for Big Nose Kate, real name Mary Katharine Horony-Cummings, a Hungarian immigrant who was Holliday’s real-life spouse, and Josephine Marcus Earp, Wyatt’s common-law wife.
According to another account by Turner Classic Movies, Zanuck “preferred the handshake by itself,” but felt the need to respond to early test screening responses to the film, to ensure the film’s commercial and critical success. “He felt the need to respond to preview audiences who felt that the scene had been building toward a kiss – and felt cheated when none came,” TCM’s account states, and that Fonda and Downs returned to re-shoot the scene months later to kiss on a soundstage.
