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 the film makes them out to be. Zinnemann treats his hero as a working stiff with a strong sense of honor, and it is society as a whole that is depicted in a very different manner. All the elements of filmmaking are brought to bear by each filmmaker in creating a particular vision of the West and of the society depicted.
Ford treats the town in the film as a marvelous creation of human beings who are carving themselves a place on the frontier. This is a traditionalist view of the Western, with settlers braving the elements and fighting for a better life. They are often thwarted by money-hungry people on the borders of the law, men like the Clantons, who believe they have the right to tell new settlers how and where to live. Arrayed against the latter are the forces of good in the form of the lawmen who tamed the West and protected the settlers. The Earps were real characters in history who served as lawmen in a variety of towns in the Southwest at different times. Wyatt Earp would become the most famous of the group, and he was known as muc...