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…. Given almost equal billing with the Earps in this version of old Tombstone are cloudscapes which are as saccharine as postcard art. 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. "Clementine" is in the new tradition of cowboy films: instead of hell-for-leather action there is concentration on civic-mindedness, gags, folk art. This one goes in for slow, heavy, character-defining shots. (pp. 836, 838)

Manny Farber, "Portrait of the Artist," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1946 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 115, No. 22, December 16, 1946, pp. 836, 838.∗