On of the most memorable scenes I well recall from this film...seen many years ago, was Alan Mowbray playing the traveling Shakespearean actor Granville Thorndyke. That sensitive, typical John Ford touch lent this film depth and humanity...missing in many Westerns and in some critically essential. Due to that single scene I never forgot the film nor Alan Mowbray.
shareYou're so right! I tuned into TCM tonight just as Thorndyke's (Mowbray's) soliloquy began. I wasn't expecting it; the camera really gives him his due. As Holliday comes quietly to Thorndyke's defense just before leaving the room with tubercular spasms and Earp takes it all silently in, the spareness and fullness of character -- all the characters, major and minor -- fill the screen. And this is before Clementine herself appears.
I'm not a huge John Ford fan, but this movie is my favorite of his. More than his others, even the blazingly beautiful Monument Valley color epics, "My Darling" shows what a great storyteller Ford could be even when guns and tempers aren't blazing.
Mowbray is great in this. I have enjoyed many of his films. Two of my favorites are "I Wake Up Screaming" (better than it sounds) and "Terror by Night", the last of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Homes films.