Widely regarded as John Ford's masterpiece of the western genre, My Darling Clementine is a sublimely beautiful vision of life in the cattle country during a period of growth. Its realistic touches evoke the texture of everyday life in the burgeoning frontier town. In fact, it has been called a western for people who don't like westerns, "in which the plot is merely a pretext to document the period.... Ford's westerns never depended excessively on the machismo match-ups of quick draws, but rather on the normally neglected intervals between gunshots when men received haircuts, courted their sweethearts, and even partook of fragments of frontier culture" (Andrew Sarris). The story is based on the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But with one swift stroke of casting, turning the flamboyant figure of legend, Wyatt Earp, into the gentle and genteel Henry Fonda, Ford cut away from the myth (and possibly from history) to his own poetry of realism. The spreading expanse of Monument Valley further dwarfs any violence, while its steepled peaks elevate the humble townspeople into a larger natural context.